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For The Secret Life of Bees, director Gina Prince-Bythewood had to help her cast understand the realities of life in the American South some 45 years ago. The film is set at a time when African-Americans were considered to be second-class citizens, and those who tried to register to vote were often beaten or worse.
For Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson, who plays Dakota Fanning's housekeeper in the movie, Prince-Bythewood came up with a unique way to illustrate history. She told Hudson, 27, and Fanning to meet her at a certain location, but she didn't tell them why.
"I was already afraid to go anywhere in the South because I'd done so much research," says the ebullient Hudson, laughing in spite of herself. "Everywhere I looked in North Carolina, I'm like, 'What happened here? Did somebody get hosed down, beaten, lynched?' I didn't want to go anywhere. I was terrified. So we went to meet Gina, and she gave us a grocery list and $20 and told us to go into a store and purchase a few items. Then, just before we went in, she looked over at me and said, 'Jennifer, whatever you do, don't hit anyone.' And I'm thinking, 'Why would I hit anyone?' "
Hudson and Fanning divided up the list and went shopping. Hudson noticed that the store clerk was polite to Fanning but extremely rude to her. She was then asked if she had taken something, and was asked to turn out her pockets. Later, when she and Fanning were looking over the ice cream selections together, another clerk spoke to Fanning as if Hudson weren't present.
"The clerk leans over and says to Dakota, 'You know she can't be in here, right?' and I'm saying to myself, 'I know I did not hear that right. I did not just hear that,' " says Hudson, laughing at the memory of her own frustration. Finally, when she sat down at the lunch counter, a white man eating there leaned over and said to the clerk, "Excuse me. Could you get this n----- out of here?"
Says the actress, "All I could hear in my head was Gina saying, 'Jennifer, whatever you do, don't hit anybody.' These were all actors, hired for an exercise to see how we'd react to the behaviour of the time. I didn't know they were actors until they told me. I was still in shock. Whether it was real or fake or staged or whatever, it blew my mind."