The character:	Annie Johnson
The actor:	Juanita Moore
The movie:	Imitation of Life (1959)

“Annie” is a common first name, the diminutive of “Ann.” Not so Annie Johnson of Imitation of Life, whose given name must have been “Antigone.” The commitment to principle which leads to immuration befits Annie, who denies herself in front of her daughter and dies soon afterwards. Her principle is loving her daughter. It is a principle which shivers her fully, and when her daughter comes back to weep over her coffin, crying that she is her mother’s murderer, she’s not far wrong. Annie’s denial of herself is a yearslong process, one that must have begun the first time that Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) realized, as a little girl, that there was no benefit in being Black and immense benefit in being white.

While I was making this list, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include Annie or not. After all, when the rubber meets the road, she chooses indignity. She diminishes herself into dust when she tells one of Sarah Jane’s white coworkers that she used to Sarah Jane’s nanny, not that she is, and will always be, Sarah Jane’s mother. Most every parent will tell you that they are willing to do what it takes, no matter how painful, to ensure a child’s future. They will take that third job. They will go with only a couple hours of sleep day in and day out. They will take the financial risk of moving to a different district so the kid might go to a better school. But what a step it would be to say, because of the racism of a wicked society, because of the conniving of a daughter whose cunning and hubris are interweaved, that the child you have given your whole life to is not your child at all. In some sense, I think it’s fair to say that Annie caves to Sarah Jane and systemic racism in one swoop. Yet I cannot help but hear Nora’s rejoinder to Torvald in the last scene of A Doll House. Torvald can imagine himself working to the bone for Nora, enduring privations and depression, but he says that no man could sacrifice honor for love. Nora, prefiguring Annie, says that thousands of women already have.

I suppose there’s a shorter answer to the question of Annie’s heroism, and it’s that no villain’s funeral is blessed with Mahalia Jackson. Douglas Sirk has some responsibilities to his movie, and he has to show the full church decorated to the gills with flowers and ribbons to honor Annie. He has to show Lana Turner and Sandra Dee and John Gavin and a number of other people whose names are in the credits. At the same time, come on, Doug, the number of actors whose faces could tell feeling the way Jackson’s could are vanishingly few. Annie’s saintly life was one that ended in terrible sorrow. For as much as the lyrics of “Trouble of the World” tell an ultimately optimistic tale, Jackson’s face, and the mesmerizing power of her voice, say otherwise.