The 1968 American series Julia, about a single mother raising her son, was one of the first TV series with a black woman in the lead. The mum’s babysitter was played by Alison Mills. One day, aged 17, she asked the producer if she could stop wearing the hideous wig that covered her hair. The producer replied that her real hair looked like rats had been sucking on it.
Mills had been a working actor since she was 12, but was now fast approaching the realisation that she no longer believed in Hollywood. “My beauty,” she wrote a few years after Julia in her only novel, Francisco, “existed before the white man commercialised it or bought it, and it will exist long after the black man has woken up out this western nightmare.” First published in 1974, when it was hailed by the likes of Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, and now reissued with an introduction by writer and academic Saidiya Hartman, Francisco is the autobiographical story of a runaway 70s Hollywood starlet on the road in the San Francisco Bay area – a runaway from Hollywood and from white America.
