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Morgan freeman son5/3/2023 But all a dog does around here is disappear, or end up where I find them out on the road. "If a dog shows up, oh fine, that's fine, he can stay just as long as he wants to. We sit in his living room, beneath a clerestory window, under a ceiling honeycombed with recessed can lights. No coat, no satchel, not even a cell phone: empty-handed, really, which seems to please him. He circles me in the alcove, looking me up and down, checking to see what I've brought with me, what he can hang or closet for me. But there isn't a dog in sight.įreeman does not answer the door, his assistant does, but he's up behind her right away, in a loose cotton sweater, looking thin but just a bit schlumped against what little weight he carries. There is a sign, near one pole barn, that reads: PUPPIES CROSSING. In the low wet spots, cedars fist-grip the ground. On Freeman's property, the road skirts a forest on the left and an untangled spread of fence line, where horses drift dopey in the rising heat. Storefronts, restaurants, gas stations stand empty and peeling. This is mid-spring, farmers are burning off the winter wheat. And it's that kind of drive, along three edges of a parallelogram of highways, from the Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale to Charleston, where Freeman's compound sits. His work takes him elsewhere his body brings him home.ĭriving point-to-point, Mississippi to Mississippi, always feels like a jag across nowhere. This is where he started, and this is where he'll finish up. Question being: Where does the power of his words come from? Wisdom? A trick of resonance? Or a white man's wish? The answer has already been stated by the man himself: Everyone lives somewhere. In some ways, then, the Magical Negro lives. This summer he returns as the soft-spoken, benighted corporate frontman for Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in the third Batman installment. He drove Miss Daisy, saved - and was later saved by - the pasty Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption, played a friendly God for Jim Carrey and Steve Carell and spirit guide to Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List, and won an Academy Award as a battered cornerman for Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby. Freeman affably taught half a generation of white kids on The Electric Company in the seventies. Freeman more so.Īnd in some ways, you can see why. Obama gets the Magical Negro tag from time to time. The Magical Negro is a white man's narrative chestnut, a stereotype, in which a black character - often socially powerless, physically infirm or disabled, overly humble - provides comfort to a white protagonist by helping him discover who he truly is. They call Morgan Freeman the Magical Negro, which is one hateful trope. He never really stops talking, but sometimes his voice just vanishes. And that's probably why I can't hear the next thing he says at all he must be explaining himself when his voice drops out. Morgan Freeman is far too grumpy for truisms. He just doesn't want to utter these fat little muffins of truth. He's saying only what's on his mind - that he's never really left, that he can't do as much as he used to, that it's comforting to have a home that lasts. He can't help it if everything he says sounds like a pregnant pause waiting to happen. This happenstance Zen, a plaintive caesura. So, Morgan Freeman, uttering an unrehearsed breath line of regret and realization. Not to say that he meant for it to be anything very deep. In his voice, in the familiar tone of a thousand voice-overs, it becomes a kind of punctuation. But when Morgan Freeman says it, the words somehow minister. Displaced from this venue, the spread of Morgan Freeman's bucolic estate outside the tiny hamlet of Charleston, Mississippi, the vast tumble of his house with its seven gabled roofs, the words will likely sound arrogant, fatalistic, callow. If you repeat it out loud - you, that is, just say it right here and now before you read forward - it will sound glib. It was there that Morgan Freeman said, "Well, everyone lives somewhere." Not a particularly meaningful line, not by itself. We halved the property on a footpath hypotenuse apparent only to him, gazed at his pond and his band of horses from the white, white rails of the fence line, visited his parents' grave site, peered at the house they once lived in, surveyed the trees he'd planted to soak up the drainage, walked the berm he created from earth he himself moved, regarded his ever-growing inventory of farm equipment (he with some consternation), then ambled back through the uncharged cool of his house out to his patio to settle side by side in lounge chairs on nylon cushions air-dried in the noon heat of a spring day in Mississippi.
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