The Waterbearers

This excerpt from the Waterbearers by Sasha Bonét tells part of the story of artist and filmmaker Camille Billops. Told as a series of “tributaries”, the Waterbearers is a transformative work of American storytelling that reimagines not just how we think of Black women, but how we think of ourselves—as individuals, parents, communities, and a country. Published September 2025 by Penguin Random House.

Tributary #88

I

In 1961 at six o’clock on a spring morning in Los Angeles a group of Black women convene at the middle-class home of the family matriarch. There was probably tea and hushed whispers so as to not wake the child who rested in the next room. With all of their morning responsibilities abandoned and hair still tied back in rollers beneath silk scarves, they’ve gathered to convince one member of their tribe not to give her four-year-old child up for adoption. As they heard a car door shut in the driveway, one of the women peeped through the closed curtains to confirm the arrival of the member in question. Twenty-seven-year-old single mother Camille Billops entered, stoic and searching for her daughter, Christa Victoria. If, in fact, she housed any shame or doubt inside of her, there was no evidence of this on Camille’s being. The women—her mother, her mother’s sisters, and a few cousins—all made dibs on the child, as if she were up for auction. The strongest offers were that of Camille’s sister Billie and her mother, Alma, who had raised the child up until this point while Camille studied art and childhood education for physically handicapped children at Los Angeles State College at night and worked at the local bank during the day. Alma, too old and too tired, and Billie, married to a man whom Camille was suspicious of being unpredictable and unfit. “I’m going to take her. She’s mine,” Camille said, “and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.” Known for her smart mouth and uncompromising nature, Camille woke Christa up and walked her to the black Volkswagen Beetle and drove directly to the Children’s Home Society of California. She let go of Christa’s hand and told her to go to the bathroom; when Christa returned, searching for her mother, she looked out of the window, grasping her small teddy bear, and watched the black Bug drive away.

Camille had met Christa’s father, Stanford, through a mutual friend and their brief yet intense courtship ended abruptly. Stanford, a tall striking lieutenant in the US Air Force was stationed in California. A few months into their relationship Camille was pregnant, despite her realization at the age of ten that she didn’t want to be a mother, but abortions weren’t legal in California until 1969. If they were going to do this, they had to do it traditionally, and Stanford consented. Five hundred shotgun-wedding invitations went out and before the guests received them by mail, he was gone. Camille called around searching for him and the Air Force informed her of his military discharge. When Christa was born on December 12, 1956, Camille received a postcard, “Wishing you well, Love Stanford,” with no return address. He continued these cruel communications for years until he mistakenly wrote his return address; he was living in New York City on Pitt Street. With three-year-old Christa on her hip, Camille booked a flight across the country and sat on the stoop waiting for him to arrive home. Stanford pulled up in a Cadillac convertible, wearing sunglasses and a slight smile. He greeted them like old friends. Invited them in for beverages and shortly after showed them to the door, wishing them both all the best. Camille never saw him again. Christa reunited with this stranger three decades later and asked him if he was her father, and he replied, “I suppose so,” to which she said, “I’m glad we got that squared away.”

II

Was it in this moment that Camille decided to abandon motherhood? Or was it many moments that led to her dropping Christa off and speeding away? Christa, along with Camille’s family, believe it was an affair she was having with a White man named James Hatch. Her stepsister Josie was his student at UCLA in the theater department in 1959, and she introduced Camille and Jim. Knowing that Camille was single, she said, “He’s ready.” Camille was teaching then in the public school system and making ceramics at home. She asked Hatch to come over and take a look at her pots and he asked her to audition for a play he cowrote with UCLA colleague C. Bernard Jackson inspired by the Greensboro, North Carolina, student sit-ins, Fly Blackbird. She was never quite as good at acting as she had hoped and was selected for the chorus, but she was onstage at the Metropolitan Theater in LA. Jim was the first person to tell Camille she was a good artist. “I will always love him for that,” she says. His support provided her with permission to be whoever she pleased in any given moment, even if that meant not being pretty, what her family said a woman must be at all costs. This introduced Camille to a new way of being. A world of artists and activists, organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, who began protesting school segregation and Black oppression. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Camille was the mistress of a White man who believed in her, and despite Los Angeles being on the precipice of the Watts Uprising, she was not deterred by the vile language and glares thrown at them by strangers. Camille began slowly shedding the cultural influences of middle-class Black America. Her parents had come to California during the Great Migration, like many Southern Blacks who moved west in search of opportunity and the possibility of providing their family with security from the violence inflicted on Black bodies. In LA they worked in service to White folks, therefore it wasn’t necessarily work that they couldn’t attain in the South, it was their dignity. Her father, Luscious, from Texas, was a cook and her mother, Alma, from South Carolina, was a domestic and seamstress. However, escaping the South in physicality doesn’t remove the emotional traumas of being Black in America; their White ideals were held firmly intact and their Southern traditions folded neatly within. Whiteness was still seen as superior in eloquence and refinement and the Billopses would emulate this in their home, for appearances’ sake, but when the burlap curtains closed at night, Luscious drank like a fish until he passed out and his wife carried him to bed each night. Alma bestowed these beliefs of Black female servitude on her two daughters, and they consented, but the youngest child will always rebel, and for Camille, Jim was the catalyst. She had been taught that motherhood and womanhood were inextricable. If you were not a mother, then what would you be? Mother is to be a woman’s highest title, and anything that takes precedence, even your own dream, is deemed selfish. Images of Camille with baby Christa show a polished and respectable young lady with permed hair and slicked-down edges. But in the images with Jim, you can see the physical transformation. She cuts off her permed roller set curls and has a small perfectly picked Afro. The hairs along her top lip thicken and grow wildly, untamed. Camille preferred to be called artist, not mama. She had never allowed Christa to call her Mama, she was to call her Bootsie, like all of her closest friends and family. Jim also suspected that Camille was giving up Christa for him and offered just enough discouragement to absolve himself of responsibility, “Don’t give Christa up for me.” When Jim was offered a Fulbright appointment to teach at the High Institute of Cinema in Cairo, Egypt, the center of the 1960s Pan-African movement that brought over many young American artists and activists like Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, he asked Camille to come visit before his wife and kids arrived, and without hesitation she went. But before departing Cairo, she told him she would not return unless he left his wife and children. “He met me at the airport and his wife left,” she says, “we chose each other and entered into another life. That’s when the world opened.”

In Cairo, Camille began experimenting with sculpture and her first solo exhibition at Gallerie Akhenaton was a small collection of ceramic pots and sculptures of those close to her, like Jim, who would serve as her constant muse, benefactor, and advocate. Their intimacy and artistry were to always exist intertwined given the racially charged political unrest that they protested in their life and through their creations. They dared to love each other in a time when interracial relationships were still considered criminal in the United States. Their first collaboration was a book of poetry called Poems for Niggers and Crackers, published in Cairo in 1965, with poems written by Jim and American poet Ibrahim Ibn Ismail; Camille created the illustrations. Driven by all that she had sacrificed, Camille explored any medium she could get her hands on, photography, painting, printmaking, and eventually film, which would be her most critically acclaimed work. She spent many years creating and showing work in Egypt, Germany, and China before returning to her homeland after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, to find her own countrymen not so welcoming to Black women artists. They settled into New York City’s East Village where the Armenian American English professor and author Leo Hamalian helped Jim secure a teaching position in theater at City College while Camille taught ceramics there. As with all great artists, there comes a time when you must turn inward and begin dissecting yourself, to become the subject of your own examination. This led Camille into filmmaking.

III

Camille tells me: “I was with all of the various Nigga bitches. Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett. They had Black night at museums like the Whitney where they would let us in the building but not show our work. We were fighting so hard to get into the Brooklyn Museum and they wouldn’t let us in. So we said, well fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I said, you know what, I’m making my own way. So we bought this big-ass loft a long time ago when it was cheap. I told Jim, why don’t we buy a loft, and we did it. Jim had most of the money. I had a little something to contribute. I told him I wanted my name on it, and he said okay, so we got married. We are all we have. I would have never ended up being a working artist if it weren’t for him. His favorite words were ‘Why not?’ and ‘Yes you can.’ We created a library space, a studio in the back, an archive, and the dining area is where we host salons for our publication Artist and Influence. Every Black artist of our time has sat right here in this living room, and we recorded it all—bell hooks, Julie Dash, Amiri Baraka, all the Niggas. We invited everybody here: friends, students, and White gallerists and curators. We sold art right off our walls. I stopped begging a long time ago when I discovered I could sell art without having to kiss booty. These alternatives made it possible. Bob Blackburn was very helpful, he taught me printmaking. There were many artists that I met at the print shop while I was working, like Romi [Romare Bearden]. This is what you do when people don’t let you into their playground. We did it out of defiance. I always did whatever I wanted to do.

“In the early ’80s Christa found me. It was a great shock to me. She sent a letter and a cassette tape with a song, asking me if I would see her. She was twenty-something. I was scared because I had already learned how to live with my guilt about giving her up. I wasn’t trying to come out from beneath the water. I was never a very good mother. I did what was best for both of us. I was twenty-three and I hardly saw her when she was little, she was always with my sister Billie or my mama. Mothers are supposed to protect, and the only way I could do that was by giving her up. I didn’t see this as feminist then, I just knew I wanted to reverse it, I wanted to be free of motherhood. I agreed to meet with her. Jim really liked her, and they got on. Naturally, she was an artist like me, it’s in her blood. When I started making films, she helped us. You can hear her voice singing on the opening scene of Suzanne, Suzanne about my niece’s drug addiction and her abusive father. People wasn’t talking about domestic violence back then. Our films had a tendency toward dirty laundry, they say it like it is, not like it’s supposed to be. It was hard enough being Black so everyone wanted to appear perfect, keep up appearances, you know. My sister wanted to take Christa but I didn’t trust my brother-in-law, Suzanne’s father. Her adopted mother, Margaret, was fabulous, a jazz singer. She was the little ship that helped me sail the dangerous night. Then we made the film Finding Christa. Christa stayed here with us for a while when we were making the film and then she moved to New York to study, so I could help her become a singer. We were always fighting because she wanted me to feel guilty. She kept asking me why I gave her away. It was always verbally violent, and guilt-ridden. I was all kinds of bitches to her. She wasn’t easy. I tried to explain to her that I didn’t want to be a mother. But it was complicated. Jim says we were too much alike. She’s a Sagittarius and I’m a Leo, too much fire. She was a star in Finding Christa. People say I show no remorse in the film, they say I’m cold, but if I had to do it again I would. I know I made the right decision, wouldn’t change a thing. Well, the only thing I would do differently would be to give her up earlier. But it was hard. Her father disappearing on me was a gift, otherwise if he had stayed, I would have just endured, that’s what Black women did in my family, endured. Christa was a very good actress, and this was a part of our competitiveness. She took up space in a way that was threatening to me. This caused a big friction when she was staying with us. Adoptees have what they call ‘the great wound,’ and it would always come back to, ‘Why did you throw me away?’ She would come and stay here and see everything that we have built and turn to me and ask, ‘Why wasn’t I here? Why wasn’t I a part of this?’ Jim welcomed her with open arms. But I didn’t like her taking up so much space here. I would correct her and let her know, ‘This ain’t your place. You don’t own this.’ She was even beginning to claim the film, saying it was her film. I said, ‘Now wait a minute, you didn’t shoot that film. I shot that film. I cut that film.’ She wanted to be a filmmaker but want and spit are two different things. Yeah, so I suppose there was some essence of competitiveness. She was difficult, I was difficult. We had an argument and then she walked out one day. Then one day she returned. It didn’t last. It became argumentative again. Then she left again in 2013. We didn’t talk again. I let it go. She had become ill and had to have an operation. Then she needed another one and she said she wouldn’t have it. She killed herself by not taking that operation. I wasn’t invited to the funeral. When she died somebody called to tell me. Who was it that called me? I don’t remember. It was early in the morning. Like a blast from the furnace. You have to stand very still and face it. Then I had to bury it. Jim and I both. And that was it. It has to have a place. I’ve accepted the guilt. I will carry it with me forever. Sometimes I feel her when I am working.”

IV

Before Christa’s death she shared a letter on her Facebook page in 2014 titled “Given up Twice—Is It All Worth It?” In the letter she speaks about calling her stepfather, Jim, on Father’s Day 2013 and Camille also picking up a receiver in a different room and abruptly hanging up when Christa announced herself. Half an hour after the call Christa receives an email from Jim stating that she should never call or visit their home again. Christa suspects that this email was written by Camille, as it contains a “callous” brashness that isn’t indicative of Jim’s character toward her. The email stated that both Jim and Camille were “cutting all communications” with her, including “telephone, letters, on the internet and personal appearances on the tai chi court,” as she was causing too many disruptions in their lives. The email was signed by Jim and sent from his account, but the statement “four-year-old child continues to protest her mother’s decision for giving her up” were words that she had heard endlessly from her biological mother. Christa never spoke to Camille again, but after seeing a therapist, she concluded that Camille was uncomfortable with Christa’s intimate relationship with Jim. Thirty-two years after reuniting, Christa was dismissed. This three-thousand-word letter is filled with discreet anger, confusion, hurt that reads like a muffled scream into the abyss of social media. She signed the letter, “Christa Victoria (my name since birth).”

In the film Finding Christa, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, making Camille the first Black woman producer/director to be awarded this prize, Christa says that she felt like an octopus, wanting to extend all parts of herself around the woman who birthed her, but Camille felt like a cactus, sharp and defensive. Christa also states that meeting her birth mother and biological family saved her life, but one may consider their final split to be the event that led to her demise. Camille challenged assumptions about what a Black middle-class woman had to be and chose her artistry above all else; despite her family’s beliefs that she chose Jim, she was choosing herself. To assume that Camille prioritized her relationship with her life partner seems misplaced and in contradiction to her radical act, which was to choose herself even when everything around her said that her purpose was to serve, soothe, and comfort, a rejection to the concept of Mammy.

Camille’s genius lay in her ability to imagine Black futures in a country that did not value Black life and the expression of that life through art. Before Roe v. Wade, before the Loving v. Virginia ruling, she made decisions that seemed improbable.

The future that Camille envisioned was one that benefited the well-being and advancement of not just one individual being that she birthed but an entire generation of artists and scholars who were nourished by her contributions as an artist and archivist. Christa, unfortunately, was a casualty in Camille’s ambitious defiance.

Camille Billops and Christa Victoria