Life Lessons That Last

My Mom Made Us Watch The Movie “Imitation of Life” So We Could Appreciate Her

This intense, sad movie about mother/daughter relationships had us sobbing with grief

“There’s no need to charm your mother, she thought. Which is both a compliment and a burden.” ― Jane Caro, The Mother

I first saw the 1959 version of the movie Imitation of Life when I was four years old. My mother insisted I watch it with her after she saw it at a movie theater. She took me to the theater so I could see the movie.

Mom held me in her lap while the movie played. Going to the theater is one of my earliest memories of my mother because it was so devastating. I remember her smell as I sat on her lap and the feel of her hair on my shoulder. The movie was my first experience with grief.

At four, I understood little, but I knew the mother in the movie died, and the daughter was brokenhearted. I was just plain broken after seeing the movie. Was my Mom going to die? The grief I felt was as if my mom had died.

Imitation of Life / Film synopsis

Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a white single mother who dreams of being on Broadway, has a chance encounter with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black widow. Annie becomes the caretaker of Lora’s daughter, Suzie (Sandra Dee), while Lora pursues her stage career. Both women deal with the difficulties of motherhood: Lora’s thirst for fame threatens her relationship with Suzie, while Annie’s light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), struggles with her African-American identity.

Release date: April 17, 1959 (USA)

Source imdb.com

When my sister was five, and I was ten, we watched the movie on TV with my Mom. When my third sister turned five, my second sister was ten, and I was fifteen, we watched that movie with my mom yet again. We would watch the movie and discuss it like we were in a college film class.

My mom showed us that movie because she did not feel her children appreciated everything she sacrificed for us. My mother dropped out of high school in her freshman year because I was born; she never went back. She met my stepfather at nineteen and had five more children over ten years. My parents lived a hard life on the South Side of Chicago for many years before my Dad became a policeman.

It took until I saw the movie at 15 for me to understand the other implications inherent in the movie. The movie has two mother /daughter pairs — one Caucasian and the other African American or Colored, as others called Black people back then. Neither set of mother/daughter pairs was getting along very well, but our Mom focused our attention on the Colored pair.

The mother, Annie Johnson, was a dark-skinned woman, plumb and matronly. Her daughter, Sara Jane, was a very light-skinned Colored who could pass for white. Throughout the movie, the daughter cruelly rejects her mother because of the mother's dark skin. The scenes of the rejection are heartbreaking as they occur almost from the time Sara Jane can talk.

Sara Jane wants to be white, with all the privilege and power that comes from having white skin. She passes for white any time she can. Her mother cannot be a part of her life. No way you are white with a Negro mother. If you are white in America, you cannot have a single drop of Negro blood in your heritage.

My mother pointed out each rejection and how she felt about them. There was no way to pause the movie then. This was a time before VCRs and streaming content.

My mom was tough, but she wanted her daughters to appreciate and love her. She lacked the communication skills to tell us what she wanted. She was a visual learner, so she showed us what she wanted.

Annie’s death occurred after a particularly brutal rejection by her daughter. We understood Sara Jane’s grief at the end of the movie. It was sadness colored deeply with regret. Annie died without Sara Jane ever acknowledging her or letting her know she loved her.

After the movie ended, my mom’s female children, after we stopped crying, would hug her and tell her we never wanted her to die and we loved her. There was seldom time for reflection and expressions of love in our challenging, scrabble day-to-day life. The movie made us make time.

This changed once we grew up. When we watched the movie with her as grown women, we would tell my mom the stories we held dear about her and how much we loved her. One of her favorite gifts was a videotape my sister recorded of the movie and the VCR player we gave her one Christmas. Now, we could watch the film as many times as she wanted, stopping at her favorite scenes as required.

The stories we told Mom were the same stories we would tell others after she died. These stories were the markers of our lives with her — everlasting beacons of her love for us.

As a grown woman, when I watched the movie, I realized it was not just about the tensions between mothers and daughters but a headlong dip into race, gender, and class in American society. The movie intertwines the constructs of working women, male/female relationships, boss and employee relationships, interracial friendships, and unrequited love. Whew.

But what I remember, and what brings me to sobs to this day, is the relationship between Sara Jane and Annie. I know that seeing that movie affected the way I treated my mom. My mother ended every interaction with her adult children with “I love you, bye.” My entire family uses this as a goodbye greeting to those we love enough that once I did not say it to one of my brothers, who then hurried to my home to see what was wrong with me. There was nothing wrong. I had been in too much of a hurry and hung up my smartphone before I got the phrase out.

I think of this as my and my granddaughter’s birthday approaches. My mom passed away years ago, but I am looking forward to making my granddaughter watch Imitation of Life (1959) with me. She is eight. My plan is to tell her stories about the times I watched the movie with my sisters and mother.

I am determined to give her a lecture about the importance of loving your mom and showing appreciation. I am lucky. I consider myself a skilled communicator, so I will use the movie and my words to make my point. I expect that my crying will also have an effect on her.

The emotions I feel when I watch this movie remind me of my mother, holding me in her lap at the movie theater and whispering in my ear as the film progresses. I am thankful that she chose this method to make her daughters understand who she was and what she had done, as it can be easily passed on to the next generation. I am thankful I learned what sadness and grief felt like before I experienced it in my real life.

I love to think that my granddaughter will one day show the movie to her daughter and talk about me. In the meantime, if you need a good cry, find this movie in the 1959 version, get some tissues, and enjoy. If you don’t have time for the entire film, watch the funeral scene below for some emotional fireworks.

More About Toni’s Family

Toni Crowe ran away with a pimp when she was 17. She was saved from a life of prostitution by her ability to manage money and run away ASAP. Her book, Never a $7 Whore. was the Winner of the 2019 Readers Favorite Gold Award in Non-Fiction Drama. Available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Get it now.

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