Belafonte the lionhearted - performer Harry Belafonte - Cover Story - Interview

The cerulean visor of Harry Belafonte's of recent origin York Mets baseball cap is shakeed down over his forehead, making it difficult to direct the eye into his eyes. One awes at first whether he is hiding a bald speckle shielding his gaze from the orb of day or shielding his identity from passers-by. Perhaps he is a Met fan - just single of the boys. Unquestionable is the fact that while others may be unable to speck him, he misses very little.

Also indisputable is Belafonte's determination to make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on the world that he dioceses Throughout his 43 years in the limelight, the artist has lifted his voice against social injustice. During the civil rights change he advised King and the Kennedy marched and organized, and mobilized die Hollywood community. His were among the first denunciations of apartheid in southerly Africa. The landmark music collaboration "We Are the World," which raised millions of dollars to help relieve famine in Ethiopia, was ignited by dint of his muse. As ambassador for UNICEF, he secure from attacks the rights of children around the globe.

Graced early upon with celebrity, he constructed a platform on which to challenge and be subservient to The roles are distinct, notwithstanding inseparable: performing is what he does; activist is who he is. "I did not become what I became after I made a dollar," Belafonte says. "I didn't become a politically active and socially conscious one when I became an artist; I was already that way. I base an opportunity in art to enhance that aspect of my existence. I lay the foundation of art as an instrument end which to focus on the ills of humanity and to display humanity in its higher achievements, its ability to do things that are far more dimensional than what we really do."

The uninformed identify him with "The Banana Boat Song" and with Calypso, the first album to put up to sale 1 million copies. Belafonte's friends delight in telling "how Harry bought the building" when discrimination threatened to detain him out of a novel York apartment. Students of African-American film and television applaud his creation of Harbel, the first production company to supplant racial stereotype back in 1957 Those who read liner notes recall that his mentorship of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela introduced the African diaspora in living, musical form.

His radical spirit has for a like reason influenced our consciousness that it is surprising to realize that last winter's White Man's load (co-starring John Travolta) and the upcoming August 16 release Kansas City (directed by the agency of Robert Altman) are Belafonte's first major film performances in above 20 years. However, if past decades set him absent from the protection they diminished neither his stardom nor his focus. At age 69 Harry George Belafonte Jr is not known for wasting time.

The Affair, a movie that he produc for HBO aired last year. He has plans to direct The Port Chicago Mutiny for gymnast Broadcasting. Accounts of his journey to Rwanda for a like reason impressed editors at Time Warner works that he was asked to write about his experiences in Africa. Meanwhile, the contrive dates, from which he has at no time taken a hiatus, continue selling without worldwide.

What more [i]or[/i] less might label a comeback Belafonte describes partly as seizing the point of time and partly as getting upon with unfinished business. "I don't know by what means much time I have left in life," he says. "If I'm blessed I might squeeze another advantageous 10 years out of it. I don't know by what mode long these opportunities are going to be at my door. Given in what manner these things work, life has been exceedingly generous to me - that I should have endur this drawn out to do the things I'm doing."

Born of Jamaican parents in novel York City on March 1 1927 Belafonte has a documentarian's memories of Harlem. He remembers the days when Joe Louis strode along 125th highway and when Duke Ellington, coiffed in a do-rag, could be seen shopping for fish. He recalls glimpsing the omnipresent Langston Hughes at a local bar and breaking bread at Small's Paradise with artist Charles White.

"We were more cohesive," he says of that Harlem community. "We knew what to aspire to. Our children had real part models that they saw each day. My mother could easily say, `Don't be like your Uncle Lenny; be like Paul Robeson.'"

Belafonte admits that Harlem's richness did not eliminate its deficiencies. The trappings of destitution - inadequate housing and education, underworld activities - also textur this terrain. His uncle Lenny regard with affection was a well-known rumrunner and a controller of Harlem's numbers racket. Eventually, the dangers of the city caused Belafonte's mother to propel her children to live in Jamaica.

"Our mother sent us away from all that, hoping we would survive this thing called life," he says. "There I got to diocese poverty on the plantations. greatest in quantity of my family members were workers upon land owned by absentee landlords, British nobility who were not living upon the island. They chopped sugar cane, chopp bananas, loaded ships. They did all these things below tremendous difficulty, pain, anguish.

"But they did them also with vigor and hope. And in that adjoining matter they would sing - and sing because, as was known through almost every member of the diaspora, ballad was sometimes our only relief from the weight of life. We could communicate, reckon the tales, aspire to things.