Pemberton's 'Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?'

Gayle Pemberton opens her essay with the title question “Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?” She describes many life moments and memories with her mother, the stereotyping of black roles in Hollywood, and culminates in a moment of rage when watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the babysitters voice at the other end of the phone line speaks in a “vaudevillian black accent”. Pemberton and her mother found no need to place this ‘familiar’ black image, and it didn’t even have a face, in was invisible, a role that was not to be seen. Pemberton opens telling a story to depict the desire of many in society for others to fit into these roles, appear as a scene that would appear in a movie, they are unconcerned with the actual person. She as a well-educated black woman with a PhD in the 80’s was working as a typist by day and moonlighting as a cater to make ends meet. She is asked to serve at a dinner party for a group of privileged whites, that appear happy to play their role, engaging in “high intellectual discourse” about literature they did not understand or even read, drinking out of the finest Baccarat crystal, and

This left Hitchcock films as some of her mother’s favorites. Pemberton, went to a Hitchcock festival as an adult, this time watching Rear Window, which she had not seen since she was a child with an objective examination, she found a scene that would shift both her and her mother’s perspective of this movie. As Jimmy Stewart’s character, Jefferies, realizes he is in danger, telephones his friend Wendell Corey, who was not at home, but he spoke with the baby-sitter who did not appear on screen, but was portrayed in a voice that would convey imagery of a “familiar black image.” Asking the inspiration for this essay “Do he have your number, Mr.