Damn it.
When I was a little boy, Uhura always struck me as so calm, so perfectly poised, and so completely on top of everything she had to do. Even in those episodes when they tried to make her act scared, that never seemed to fit her character. I never bought it. Now, when she had to play her part in Mirror, Mirror, fending off evil Sulu and tricking him, she did it with such sang froid and such charm -- that was Uhura all over. That was the Uhura I knew.
Yet there was more. Something seemed to emanate from her that I can only call beauty. I don't mean her looks -- though she certainly had the looks, and that silky voice -- but it was something that came from within which told you you were in the presence of someone very special and good. If anyone tries to tell me that this was just acting, I won't believe you. But if it was just acting, Nichelle Nichols was as stunning an actress as I have ever seen.
I didn't know anything about what she meant to others, to men and women of color in my own country and in other places. How could I? I was an eight year old white kid from a middle-class family. I had pretty much everything. Including hope. Maybe it was her cool competence playing itself out against the backdrop of the riotous 1960s in the United States that gave me this hope that we had somehow turned a corner, that what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature had prevailed, that the heart and words of Martin Luther King had rung in a new dream for us all. Lieutenant Uhura, I think, was one of those better angels to me.
I didn't know then, or learn for years afterwards, of the role Martin Luther King had played in keeping Nichelle Nichols from quitting Star Trek. That blew my mind as much he did and as Uhura did. It seemed to reaffirm what they stood for, and what I think I suspected even as a little boy watching Star Trek: that the future I saw every week on the bridge of the Enterprise was the promised land that King told us that we would all one day get to. Because it isn't the promised land unless every last one of us is there.
Lately all that hope seems so far away. I don't know that I believe in a promised land any more. I don't know that I can still sing that anthem of my youth in a land that is forgotten. Every day more of us seem to bear the mark of Cain. Every day more seem proud to wear it. Every day more seem proud to declare that we are not our brother's keeper. But the seed of Cain is monstrous. It can never do more than live in darkness and rail against the light.
When I saw that Nichelle Nichols had died, I wanted to weep, something I never do for people I don't know who have lived long, long lives. I keep choking up as I write this. But is it because there is no hope or because I have lost the courage to dare to hope in the face of darkness?
I don't know. The odds don't seem too good right now. But then I think of Uhura, so cool and brave and smart, and she reminds me of my favorite line by her, delivered as she sends Kirk and others off to rescue Spock from death itself: 'All my hopes.'
All our hopes, Ms. Nichols, all our hopes.
