Whitney

Whitney

by Stephane Dunn | special to NewBlackMan

I’m at some once a year fancy gala – the kind of thing that makes you suffer through three inch heels and a bitter February wind to see and be seen. Half into the spinach with arugula and pecans salad with orange sesame dressing, a whisper builds and people begin to forget the discrete lap level text check and they're holding the blackberries and i-phones up close, squinting and reading, texting, and sighing then they look up across the table at a stranger formerly of little interest who looks back asking the same question: Is Whitney really dead? 

And soon, the Facebook posts and twitter feeds confirm it, and I keep eating bread and butter and there are voices in the background. There’s a program and distinguished people are getting awards and people are clapping, but in my head I’m screaming with clenched fists like Florida Evans: Damn, Damn, Damn! Whitney Houston is dead. I want to scream it really and stop the program just for a second, just to confirm, something momentous has happened. The awards and the chatter go on and a movie is running through my head. 1978’s Sparkle, a pretty, sultry brown girl starts to sing her way out of the ghetto with her little sisters. She falls for a user and an abuser and then she’s on drugs and bruised and dead. The remake marks Whitney’s return to the big screen only Whitney doesn’t play Sister but now she’s dead too.

By three am, I’m sitting on the same couch in the same spot where I was sitting on June 25, 2009 when a part of my youth passed away with a headline: Michael Jackson has died. And now, another headline takes another part, my young adult life. I flashback to college, last dance of the school year, end of April, and my heart is breaking. My first adult love is crashing. I don’t want to let go, but it’s over. He asks me to dance. I want to be close to him, but I want to say no. Whitney’s singing: Where do broken hearts go, do they find their way home . . . and I know it’s his goodbye, and we’re not going to make-up ever again.

I see her glimmering like golden brown sand in the sun on album covers and on stage and I like her ‘cause she’s skinny like me and utterly gorgeous and she can saaaaang. She makes me wish I could sing too and I do [in secret] and when I’m struggling with classes and bill paying and just trying to find my way and make it to somewhere, I hum and sometimes wail, badly, alone, in my little efficiency apartment, . . . because the greatest love of all is happening to me, I found the greatest love of all inside of me . . .

I think about me and my sister friends going to check out Waiting to Exhale and wearing out that soundtrack and lip syncing and I think about Whitney, sitting there pregnant and fine in that video singing that Dolly song from earth to heaven and back and wondering, how can the girl sing like that and then I glimpse myself cranking up the radio ‘cause they’re playing Whitney’s song, and I gotta marvel all over again. And I will always love youuuu. I see me cringing every time some wannabe-the-next-Whitney dared take on one of her songs and arguing folk down who don’t know better. Nobody sung that national anthem like Whitney. Nobody. Period. 

It’s after four am, and I keep thinking and remembering and hearing that voice, and how much it hurt over the years to think of her hurting and not singing and people talking about her and judging and her becoming one of those stories of the wayward star gone the way of drama and drugs. I never gave her up. I claimed her survival and her triumph. I’m tearing up. CNN is playing that damned too beautiful song . . . bittersweet memories . . . I can’t stand it – headlines, reflections, tributes, ‘we’ll always have her music’. I don’t want it to be the same old story. It shouldn’t be the same old story.

I want real talk about how folk can be prepared for being inside of fame and how they can be saved before they lose their voices. I want new ways to protect and arm those ambitious geniuses against the snares on the way to fame and fortune. I want her not to be like those other too surreally phenomenal songstresses from Billie to Judy and Amy.

Whitney Houston dead at forty-eight.

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Stephane Dunn, Ph.D., is a writer and Co-Director of the Cinema, Television, and Emerging Media Studies Program at Morehouse College. She specializes in film, popular culture, and literature. She is the author of Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008) and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms., TheRoot, The Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN.com, and Best African American Essays.