The last time I saw Malcolm-Jamal Warner was on a bittersweet night in Atlanta. This was after one of his gigs at Buteco, the east side Brazilian joint that Warner took over on the first Thursday of every month. He would magically transform it into the kind of classic Black TV hotspot that he himself might have walked on to back in the day. (Think of Natalie’s, the New York Undercover hangout.) Warner’s Buteco Nights had become a rallying cry among my guy friends to break away from family routines and kick back and catch up for a few hours in a house full of fellow creatives. All the while, Warner would reinterpret funk and R&B jams on the electric bass with his band, Biological Misfits. When two friends announced they were leaving Atlanta for good, this balmy night in April became a final hurrah. I didn’t yet know just how final.
Just when the night seemed as if it couldn’t be stretched any longer, I caught Warner as he and the band were packing up at closing time. I asked about his daughter (whom I fondly remember being carried out of Buteco after a recent gig ran past her bedtime), and suddenly – as ever with Warner, always so thoughtful and intentional in his interactions – we were going deep. We joked about being older dads and the adventures and adversities that come with raising Black children in this American day and age. He was so insanely proud of the job his wife and daughter were doing in homeschool, studying ancient Egypt and other Black history. He was especially excited about an upcoming family trip to Costa Rica, because it meant he could bring the classroom to the beach. After 20 or so minutes of catching up, we bro-hugged and parted ways. I had no reason to expect I’d never see him again.
I was scrolling through Twitter on Monday when I saw Warner’s name trending, and I’ve been numb ever since learning that he died in a drowning accident on that very family trip to Costa Rica, while swimming with his daughter. Like the sudden deaths of Chadwick Boseman and Kobe Bryant, Warner’s passing is a profound shock that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Here was a guy who became a household name as a teenager and somehow wasn’t turned into another tragic child star, who tarried in the industry over five decades making TV, movies, music and poetry without generating negative headlines or rumors – who, on the last night I saw him, looked for all the world like a man who had it all figured out and was at peace with the final answers. For it all to end now, as he was exactly where he wanted to be in life, just feels unspeakably cruel.
Warner’s is no ordinary celebrity tragedy. It’s the beginning of the end of an era, of a time when TV stars were still so near and dear to us. For those of us who grew up watching the Cosby Show, my original Thursday night routine, he was more than a fictive relative. As Theo Huxtable, the respectful (if mischievous) teen who overcame dyslexia on the way to an NYU psychology major and job helping kids like himself at the community center, he showcased a range of Black masculinity that was alien at the time and still a strange sight on screen today. Just the sight of his name flashing in the opening credits was like seeing a Black fist come through the screen. How could Gil Scott-Heron say the revolution would not be televised when our man was right here, in dreads and kente patterns, repping Malcolm X and Mumia Abu-Jamal in prime time? Not just on the Cosby Show, mind you, but on The Resident and 9-1-1, too.
Warner’s loss has hit like a death in the family and, make no mistake, his family was immense. The welter of tributes – from Beyoncé (who remembered Warner on the front page of her official website) to Kate Hudson (who recalled her time working with Warner on Fool’s Gold) to Tyrese Gibson (who paid tribute to Warner in a Facebook poem) – speak not only to his long and varied career in the industry (an NPR Tiny Desk, directing credits on music videos for Whitney Houston and New Edition) but to his monumental kindness, fundamental decency and unwavering professionalism.
That sense of character, a fixture on and off screen, really shined through when Bill Cosby was subsumed by sexual assault allegations during the #MeToo era. While other industry peers rushed to distance themselves from Cosby, Warner found a way to walk a line between denouncing Cosby’s conduct and reasserting his gratitude to his mentor and TV dad without anyone really questioning his loyalty. Reacting to Warner’s death earlier this week Cosby’s spokesperson, Andrew Wyatt, likened the bombshell news to the 1997 murder of Cosby’s flesh-and-blood son, Ennis – a close friend of Warner’s, as it happened. “When we talk about why the good people are taken away from us,” Warner reflected in a recent podcast interview with the media personality Melyssa Ford, “I go: ‘Maybe they’re being rewarded or something.’”
More than his body work – which, again, is simply staggering – Malcolm should be remembered for actually living up to the Cosby Show’s lofty ideals. His Thursday Buteco nights were pretty special too, a natural landing spot for other Black Hollywood icons who happened to be passing through town. But the real privilege wasn’t watching Danny Glover or another star drop by to pay respect. It was sharing in some good, clean fun with a room full of people – a not insignificant number of them Black men who took to their responsibilities as fathers, spouses and good citizens in large part because of the dude on the bass, jammin’ on the one.
That’s the Warner I’ll remember: the sage who elevated people as he brought them together with his bright smile, deep voice and bottomless warmth. I’ll mourn him terribly, though not even half as much as his family members, friends, former castmates and bandmates who knew him far better. Suffice to say: Thursday Buteco nights won’t be the same with him gone, but there’s some comfort in thinking of his absence as its own reward when you know that’s what it may have meant to him.
