SPIKED : In ‘Jungle Fever,’ Filmmaker Spike Lee Returns to Combustible Conflicts of Race, Class and Sex

IT IS THE VOICE THAT IS SURPRISING--soft, slurry, a half-asleep whisper.

“Black people kissing on screen? I never saw that growing up.” He says this as he stares out of the editing booth at a print of his new film, “Jungle Fever.” Running over and over, the images of a black man and a white woman are reflected in his glasses. “Uh, uh,” he says with almost purposeful distraction, an imperceptible turn of his head. “I’m attentive.”

It is a performance, a mastery of the deadpan as integral to the Spike Lee persona as the wire-rims, baseball cap and sneakers. Behind the glasses, his eyes are enormous, impassive. His body is a spindly afterthought ending in the soft padding of his Nikes. And here, in a sound studio in Manhattan’s storied Brill Building, the stillness surrounds him, as though the air has been sucked from the room, as if the country’s preeminent black film auteur has had to create a void and then refill it.

“The intermingling of the races? That’s always going to be a part of my work,” he says. “That has happened since the slaves were brought here--stolen from Africa--when Massa started sneaking in the slave quarters at night. That’s the dynamics of color and race.”

Lee silently watches a few more frames. “There’s one thing that black men have,” he lets out, “that really threatens white males.” Suddenly, he throws his head back and laughs, a short, raucous burst.

ASK ANYONE WHO KNOWS HIM, AND each will tell you that Spike Lee is a troublemaker. His films--”She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Mo’ Better Blues” and now, “Jungle Fever,” the much anticipated look at interracial romance that opens this week--have been sharp, repeated blows to the Hollywood axiom that black doesn’t sell, not in white America.

In fact, each of the director’s works--black cultural themes married to a cinematic style drawn from Martin Scorsese, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa and the French New Wave filmmakers--has made money. And each has generated equal currency from the media, which address Lee’s films as annual missives from the front lines of cultural politics. “Do the Right Thing,” a filmic examination of racism in New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that seemed to advocate violence, generated segments on several evening newscasts. For every reviewer like Vincent Canby of the New York Times, who hailed Lee’s works as “social phenomena” from “a major American filmmaker in dazzling command of his craft,” there was another who considered Lee simply “an annual media sensation,” as Time magazine’s Richard Schickel has written.

Whether the critics like him or not, Lee is the most influential black director working in Hollywood today, and he makes his movies, low-budget by studio standards, on his terms. His films have expanded the boundaries of the country’s popular culture, altered Hollywood’s perception of crossover audiences and opened the door for a new generation of black-American male directors: Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans and Bill Duke among them. Why is he so successful? Because “he is really talented, a good filmmaker,” says Tom Pollock, chairman of the MCA Motion Picture Group, where Lee has made his last three films under an unusual arrangement that grants him total artistic control. “He is a serious filmmaker--no different from where Scorsese was after five films.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Afro-American studies at Harvard University as of July 1, calls Lee “one of the most important figures in African-American culture. He is doing what nobody has done in film--depicting what W. E. B. Dubois called ‘the life behind the veil,’ what black people do when white people aren’t around.”

Lee himself suggests that his success is “a combination of everything--part talent, part luck, part timing. I’m not the first talented black filmmaker to appear on the face of the Earth. If I had come along 20 years ago, the conditions wouldn’t have been conducive to this kind of success.”

This year about 20 feature films will be made and released by black Americans--more movies by African Americans than in the entire previous decade. At 34, Lee has become something of the group’s eminence grise ; he’s the first to have employed what some call “a post-integration sensibility”--one who is not making films to simply uplift the race. “Dozens of black Americans have directed films before,” says Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, “but the subtext of those movies was always how blacks related to whites. Spike broke through that. He defines blacks in relation to other blacks. That is brand-new.”

Even his detractors agree that Lee, a graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse College and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is the first director to have packaged in a commercial manner parochial racial themes and issues dealing with economic, gender and class distinctions. He explores that segment of life between the Cosby Show and the crack houses.

“She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee’s first feature film, shot for $175,000 in 16 millimeter, explored sexuality from the perspective of a liberated black-American woman. “School Daze” probed such seldom-discussed intra -racial issues as the clash between light-skinned and dark-skinned black Americans. “Mo’ Better Blues,” starring Oscar-winner Denzel Washington, chronicled the lives of middle-class jazz musicians.

Now, “Jungle Fever,” featuring Wesley Snipes, Anthony Quinn and Annabella Sciorra, explores interracial romantic relationships. Some critics are already speculating that the film, dedicated to Yusuf Hawkins, the black youth murdered by a gang of whites in New York in 1989, could prove as controversial as “Do the Right Thing.” And Lee is already in pre-production on his most ambitious film to date--the “Malcolm X” project--with a budget that may reach $30 million.

There are suggestions, however, that Lee’s standing within the film industry and the black community is due less to his movie-making talents than to his shrewd business instincts and acute political sensibilities. More than any other African- American director, Lee has captured with his films the country’s resurging interest in racial issues; he once called himself as “a black nationalist with a movie camera.”

Lee has positioned his career at the crossroads of art and publicity; his off-screen activities have earned him almost as much notoriety as his films. He has publicly criticized Michael Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg and Quincy Jones as sellout crossover artists. (Eddie Murphy, he suggested, “should use his clout rather than focus on who gets the best table at Spago.”) He has spoken out against a handful of Hollywood directors, including Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood, for making films about black Americans. He called Edward I. Koch, then mayor of New York City, a racist. When “Do the Right Thing” lost at Cannes, Lee accused the festival jury of racism. “Jungle Fever” also came up short at Cannes.

Lee has made commercials for Levi Strauss, Diet Coke and Nike; some black leaders have criticized Nike for exploiting inner city youths who can ill afford $150 shoes. He was embroiled in a public feud with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which objected to his films’ treatment of Jews. And Lee openly campaigned for his “Malcolm X” film by insisting that only a black director could handle the job.

Lee has buttressed his pronouncements with growing financial clout. In addition to his film company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Lee owns Spike’s Joint, a lucrative retail and mail-order business that merchandises books, tapes, jewelry, T-shirts and other apparel. Earlier this year, he started his own record label. “If you don’t own stuff, you have no power,” Lee says. “For me that’s the whole issue. When black people start thinking more like entrepreneurs instead of ‘Please, Mr. White Man, can you do so and so for me?’ we will call the shots.”

Still there are doubters who maintain that the racial and economic situations of his films are exploitative--particularly of African-American women, that the films’ political positions are undercut by a fatal, commercial-driven ambiguity. Lee has been called a huckster by some critics and artists, black and white, who attribute his success to his low-budget “boutique” standing in Hollywood circles and the indulgence of a predominantly white media. Others have labeled Lee simply a charlatan, the “Al Sharpton of filmmaking,” in the words of Time’s Schickel. “His films are not technically well-made, and the radical premises of films such as ‘Do the Right Thing’ and even ‘Mo’ Better Blues’ are vitiated by their ambivalent endings aimed at a white, middle-class audience,” Schickel says.

The African-American critical community also is divided over Lee’s work. Critic Stanley Crouch in New York City’s Village Voice describes Lee as a “fascist” and “propagandist” without “the courage and will to give racial confrontation true dramatic complexity.” Amiri Baraka, the left-leaning playwright and poet, dismisses Lee as a “caricaturist” whose films embody “reactionary positions on most issues.” Several black feminist critics, including Albiola Sinclair of New York’s Amsterdam News, have charged Lee with perpetuating the kind of sexism found in the black exploitation films of the ‘60s.

“He is dealing with more significant issues than other black filmmakers,” says Jacquie Jones, editor of the Black Film Review. “But the way he has been packaged, as a phenomenon, is discouraging real critical discussion of his films.”

“One cannot deny that Spike has made a fantastic breakthrough in an all-white enclave,” adds Jack Kroll, Newsweek’s senior critic. “But there is a part of him that is an opportunist, that prevents you from taking him seriously as a true social critic. This other figure that he cuts, this black Jack Nicholson--these are not the harmless peccadilloes of an engaging fellow.” Thus, the most powerful African American in Hollywood--perhaps inevitably--may be the most resented.

Indeed, interviews with colleagues, employees and friends reveal a man who himself generates charges of exploitation in his relationships. They say his shrewdness in dealing with those more powerful than himself has not translated into a trickle-down system for the benefit of his peers. They suggest that Lee has become an arrogant, self-interested multimillionaire who underpays artists and employees. For all his public support of a new black economic solidarity, they say, the director has simply co-opted traditional studio-boss attitudes. “Spike’s single-mindedness is his best and his worst quality,” says Nelson George, a screenwriter, music critic and one of Lee’s original backers. “He tunnel-visions people out when he doesn’t need them, and he has not been as visionary as he could be in helping other people’s careers.”

“Spike is out for Spike,” says an actor who has worked with Lee and requested anonymity. “He talks about black people staying together, but he puts people down in the press--Eddie, Whoopi, Quincy--and it’s a documented fact that he doesn’t pay people well. But he’s Spike Lee, and you’d be a fool not to work with him.” Lee is unfazed by such criticism. “I have no conflicts at all about my success--none,” he says. “Black people should be the recipients of the money that is being generated by black culture. In the past we were getting flimflammed. Having talent is not enough. You have to have some business know-how.”

In conversation, Lee is by turns guarded (“I hope each one of my films is a learning process”), combative (“Who buys my T-shirts? Who buys all those Bart Simpson T-shirts and Batman stuff?”) and playful (“Married? I’m married to cinema.”). Mostly he is elusive--a complex, driven man who reveals little of himself. Friends say that for all his posturing, Lee is notoriously shy--a work-obsessed artist who lives alone in his Fort Greene brownstone, just blocks from his office and the Brooklyn house where he grew up. He punctuates his short-take answers with long, silent stares--what some call “Spike’s game face”--a man who watches everything, misses nothing.

“It’s always been my contention,” he says, “that if something is a good piece of work, it transcends all cultural boundaries. That’s why I’ve never had a negative connotation of the word black. It never kept white Americans from loving and stealing our music, dance or other art forms. Why should that apply to our films? There was always this maxim in Hollywood that black is death at the box office. I never believed that.”

TOWARD THE CONCLUSION OF “JUNGLE FEver,” there is a key scene between the protagonists--Flipper Purify, a married black architect from Harlem (played by Snipes) and Angie Tucci, his Italian-American secretary and lover from Bensonhurst (played by Sciorra). Their brief but tension-fraught relationship is ending because of economic and cultural differences and the reaction of their respective families.

“What about kids?” Angie asks.

“No. No. No babies. No mixed-race babies,” says Purify, shaking his head. “Mixed-race babies come out nothing but a bunch of mixed nuts.”

That scene, which ends with Angie accusing Purify of exhibiting the same kind of racism espoused by their parents, encapsulates one of the film’s major themes: that even in the post-civil-rights era, economic and educational advances cannot erase centuries of cultural differences and racial injustices.

“I can see it now,” Lee chuckles. “ ‘Spike Lee says no to interracial relationships.’ But this film is about boundaries, real and self-imposed boundaries, and what happens when you cross them. A lot of these relationships aren’t based on love but on sexual myths--that the white woman is the epitome of beauty, and that black males are sexual supermen. . . . We subtitled this film, ‘The Fear of the Big Black Dick.’ One of the things we tried to raise in the film is whether someone is necessarily a racist if they are opposed to interracial marriages. . . . I don’t think that utopia is going to be a mishmash of all races and cultures and ethnic groups.”

Although the film has a more realistic look and feel than his earlier work, the thrust is the same: that racism cuts across economic, ethnic and cultural boundaries. As Lee says, “We try and spread the blame around.” And, for the first time in his work, it addresses head-on the drug epidemic in the inner city.

Lee says the idea for “Jungle Fever” came to him two years ago, during the shooting of “Mo’ Better Blues,” when Yusuf Hawkins, a black Brooklyn resident, was beaten to death by white youths in the Italian community of Bensonhurst. “I don’t see how anyone can live in New York City and not look at this film and think of Yusuf,” says Lee, who, as usual, produced, wrote and directed. “They killed him when they thought he was coming to see Gina Feliciano, when they thought he was her boyfriend. That was a lynching.”

Although he has edited the film to eliminate a Hawkins-like foray on the part of Snipes into Bensonhurst because “the plausibility was at stake,” Lee wants his film to raise questions about community and cultural identity, questions that are of paramount personal interest to the director himself.

Lee, a third-generation member of his family to attend prestigious, all-black Morehouse College in Atlanta, is considered something of a cultural separatist. He insists that his college background is inherent to his success. “It’s no coincidence,” he says, “that almost every great African American is a product of black institutions.” With the notable exception of his lawyer, Arthur Klein, he employs mostly African Americans on his crews and in his business ventures, and he is opposed to interracial relationships. “I’m not attracted to white women on that level,” he says “ . . . but I understand there are black men who are.” Indeed, Lee’s father, Bill, a widely known jazz musician, married a white woman, Susan Kaplan, following the death of his first wife, Lee’s mother. That remarriage, friends say, remains a painful subject for the director today.

Lee himself is cryptic about his personal life. It’s been a couple of years since he ended a long-time relationship with Cheryl Burr, a dancer he met while studying at New York University; he had given her a small part in “She’s Gotta Have It.” More recently, Lee has been linked with model Veronica Webb, who has a small part in “Jungle Fever.”

Critics are already differing on the premise of “Jungle Fever,” which was screened at Cannes last month. Harvard’s Gates applauds the film as a cinematic retort to such earlier movies as D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” “Shaft,” “100 Rifles” and “A Patch of Blue,” all films in which miscegenation was portrayed as either lurid, titillating or disingenuously chaste. “Spike makes very erotic films,” Gates says. “He’s using a level of sexuality that just is not found in other black-American films.”

On the other hand, Michele Wallace, a critic and professor of literature at City College of New York, objects to the economic premise of “Jungle Fever.” “Why has Spike chosen a Buppie architect and a lower-middle-class woman? The reality is that people of different races but similar economic classes, such as the white co-ed from Radcliffe and the black architect, for instance, are winding up together in real life, and those relationships often work.”

The critics agree, however, that “Jungle Fever” is most effective when it addresses the seldom explored issue of intra -racial sexuality.

“Black men who are married or involved with white women leaves a very bad taste in everyone’s mouth,” Wallace says. “It is a reality, but it is not discussed anywhere.” One of the movie’s most powerful scenes includes a frank discussion among several black women who are all “looking for a strong black man to date. . . .”

Lee had originally scripted that scene; however, after two days of rehearsals most of the actresses were ad-libbing their lines. “I think black women will like that scene very much,” says Lee, who, as he does in his other films, plays a small but pivotal role. “Racism has taught black people to hate themselves. And if you hate yourself, then why would you want somebody--one who has made you hate yourself--as your mate? Black people have been pounded by the media with the image of white women as the epitome of beauty. That has an effect on your subconscious. It makes black women (surgically alter) their noses and lips, wear weaves and blue contact lenses in order to look like whites, and it makes black men think that light-skinned women are more beautiful than dark-skinned women.”

Lee attributes his awareness of these issues to his own family upbringing. “In the ‘30s and the ‘40s my grandmother was coloring birthday cards, Christmas cards, my mother’s dolls with brown Magic Marker,” he says. “It was a conscious effort on my grandmother’s part . . . (she) did not want her children and grandchildren growing up thinking black was ugly.”

SHELTON JACKSON LEE WAS BORN IN ATLANTA, THE OLDEST OF five children of William and Jacquelyn Lee. The nickname “Spike” was his mother’s doing, “because she said I was a tough baby,” Lee says. By all accounts, the tough baby grew into a shy child, “an exceptionally quiet little boy who liked reading and sports,” recalls his maternal grandmother, Zimmie Shelton.

The family soon migrated to Chicago and then to New York because of those cities’ more active jazz scenes. Spike spent his summers in the South, dividing his time between grandparents--the Sheltons of Atlanta and the Lees of Snow Hill, Ala., where his paternal great-grandfather, William James Edwards, a disciple of Booker T. Washington, had founded the famous Snow Hill Institute, a private school modeled after Tuskegee Institute. In Brooklyn, Lee attended St. Ann’s, a parochial school where his mother taught, and later John Dewey High School. Indeed, Jacquelyn Lee was a key source of support for the family during a period when Bill Lee’s playing career was suffering; a purist, he refused to switch from acoustic to electronic instruments. “One of the reasons I became a filmmaker was because I was brought up in a very artistic household,” says Spike, who has employed his father as a musician, his sister Joie and brother Cinque as actors, and his brother David as a stills photographer on most of his films. (Another brother, Chris, runs Lee’s mail-order business.) “My father was a great jazz musician, and my mother taught art. Filmmaking can comprise a lot of those arts.”

By the time he enrolled at Morehouse, Lee was considered a loner and a leader who took his cues from his close-knit family rather than his peers. He had only a handful of close friends, including Monty Ross, who would later become his co-producer. He spent weekends at the home of his grandmother, who paid Lee’s tuition. “He was always very secretive and not particularly popular,” Zimmie Shelton recalls. “Spike was short, he didn’t have a car, and he ate every meal at my house. But he wanted to be a winner, and he would work himself to a frazzle.”

“Spike comes from a really strong family,” says Branford Marsalis, a prominent jazz saxophonist and one of Lee’s closest friends. “He never hung out with the crowd. He had his sights set on bigger things.”

Lee wrote for the student newspaper and was a disc jockey for a local jazz radio station. He also was captain of an intramural softball team and served as the director of the college’s annual homecoming pageant.

During Lee’s sophomore year, two seminal events occurred. His mother died of cancer, and he bought his first movie camera. Friends say that Lee never mentioned his mother’s death until months later. “He internalizes a lot of things--that’s why he’s so driven,” says one former college friend. As for the camera, Lee says, “I can’t remember why I decided to buy that Super-8. My mother had taken me to lots of films when I was growing up, but it’s not like a lot of filmmakers: You know, ‘My parents took me to see “Bambi” when I was 4 years old and I wanted to be a filmmaker ever since.’ It was more of an acquired taste for me.”

That summer Lee, with help from his brother Chris, shot one of his first films, “The Last Hustle in Brooklyn,” which intercut footage of the looting that occurred during New York’s 1977 blackout with shots of disco dancers. “He was not particularly a standout guy, although he did wear an earring that read ‘No. 1’ in his left earlobe,” says Herbert Eichelberger, coordinator of radio, film and television at Clark-Atlanta University, where Lee took film classes. “He was the kind of guy who paid a lot of attention to craft, who said he’d be real quiet if he could just go on editing his film in the back of class.”

When Lee arrived at NYU’s film school, he had already acquired a more politicized view of his craft. And by the time he left, his film, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop,” had won the NYU student academy award for 1983. “I don’t know if I can say there is a black aesthetic in filmmaking yet,” Lee says. “It has to be developed over time, and we’re still in our infancy. There is definitely a black aesthetic in music, art and dance. . . . For me, black culture is a lot more interesting. I know whites think that, too, because they try and steal everything they can and make money off it, and then have the audacity to call it their own. . . . A lot of white culture is dying out. Otherwise, why do they keep regurgitating the same stories again and again? ‘Cause that dish is dead, it’s tired.”

LEE’S SUCCESS WITH “She’s Gotta Have It”--an award at Cannes, critical praise and distribution by Island Pictures that eventually returned $8 million--paved the way for his future relationships in Hollywood. It established something of a different standard for Lee as an employer. Several actors and crew members who worked on “She’s Gotta Have It” say the director, who plays fair with investors, is notoriously tightfisted with his employees, that some of the contracts written for actors and crew were for amounts far below what Lee originally promised, and that he consistently pays artists less than he is able, even by low-budget standards.

“A lot of people want to work with Spike now, but the question is will he pay them?” says Nelson George. “He is in a position to use his clout and influence to help a lot of people without a huge investment of his time, but he doesn’t. He is not interested in helping others get to their next level of professional accomplishment.”

Other colleagues suggest that the contract disputes on “She’s Gotta Have It” are typical of the way Lee operates, particularly with women. Reviewers have criticized Lee for a lack of dimension in his female characters, and several have faulted his film’s sexual politics as exploitative of women. Some co-workers suggest that the cinematic attitude has its roots in Lee’s approach toward women off-screen.

“He is very sexist. He doesn’t relate to women very well--that shows up in his movies and in the office,” says one former business associate who asked not to be named. “A lot of women come through there, and they all wind up leaving.”

Lee disputes the criticism. “I pay people by the job,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with women. I have said that every director has his weakness, and mine is writing roles for women, which I am working on.”

After “She’s Gotta Have It,” he went on to make “School Daze,” a $6-million musical, financed by Columbia during the David Puttnam era after Island Pictures backed out. A falling-out with Columbia’s next president, Dawn Steel, over marketing, found Lee shopping “Do the Right Thing” to Paramount. When that studio got cold feet about the film’s ending--which featured a riot and the use of pro-violence quotes from Malcolm X--Lee moved the film to Universal, where it became his most successful movie to date, grossing $28 million. Both “Mo’ Better Blues” and “Jungle Fever” were made at Universal. “It is a good relationship,” says Sean Daniels, former president of production at Universal and now an independent producer. “Are there disagreements? Of course. But good work emerges, and Spike does have final cut.”

Lee’s next project, “Malcolm X,” is clearly his riskiest venture. It is one of the oldest projects in Warner Bros.’ stable, one that has seen several scripts, including drafts by David Mamet, Charles Fuller and James Baldwin with Arnold Perl, as well as several potential directors. Already, the project has put Lee at loggerheads with Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which ousted Malcolm. Lee also is taking on the Teamsters union, refusing to use them on the film unless they alter their minority-hiring practices.

“It’s going to be an epic,” says Lee, who is reworking the Baldwin/ Perl script for what he says will be a three-hour film. “We want to create the great life that Malcolm lived--he was constantly transforming himself--and tell the whole truth about who killed him.” The film also will let Lee further explore the issue of violence as a means of social reform.

“The thing I could never get with (Martin Luther) King was the complete nonviolence philosophy. I feel that today, even more now. Let’s not use the word violence . Let’s use the words self-defense or self-protection . It only becomes a problem when black people talk about it. The United States can bomb the hell out of a little country--that’s what this country is based upon: the right to protect yourself. It only becomes an issue when black people seek that right that everyone else takes for granted.”

SITTING IN A BRILL Building sound-editing room, Lee is putting the final touches on “Jungle Fever” before he heads off for Cannes. He is overseeing his crew’s editing work and making phone calls for “Malcolm X.” He seems focused for the long haul, a single-minded entrepreneur who still rides the subway and dresses in his low-rent “b-boy” wardrobe but who pursues an ambitious financial, ideological and artistic vision that entails more than filmmaking.

Lee currently is renovating one of the five Brooklyn buildings he owns to create screening, editing and recording facilities for his film and record divisions. Like many other directors, he has a lucrative side career shooting commercials, as well as music videos for such artists as Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Anita Baker. He plans to teach at Harvard next fall. Although he eschews an overtly ostentatious private life, he does prize his N.Y. Knicks season tickets and owns vacation property on exclusive Martha’s Vineyard.

Surrounding Lee, however, is a Greek chorus of colleagues who say success has changed him. The “great entrepreneur” has become “a little Hitler,” with a “with-me-or-against-me” attitude, says one former colleague. Lee has become, his critics says, an opinionated, driven man who rails at those who reject his positions on everything from money and smoking (he’s against it) to interracial relationships.

“Spike is a troublemaker,” says Nelson George. “He likes controversy. People think he’s a real visionary, but that’s just his personality. He likes to pick at people.”

Lee’s current friends, former colleagues who have quarreled with him, even many who no longer work with or even speak to him, agree that his obsession with his career has less to do with money or fame than a desire for respect. “Everybody says Spike is a separatist,” says Branford Marsalis. “But I don’t think so. It’s just that Spike would rather be apart from you if you don’t treat him the way he thinks he should be treated.”

Lee pauses in a rare moment of reflection at the end of a long afternoon. “People are co-opted who want to be co-opted,” he says. “People who have power never give it up voluntarily. You never stop working toward that goal. Some say this country will never stop being racist. Well, that doesn’t mean you throw up your hands. You acquire your own power, taking away other people’s power over you. That’s just taking back what should have been yours anyway.”