[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]
[NOTE: I
tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in yesterday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completely
be able to for the rest of the week. If you haven’t seen Sinners yet,
please do so and then come back to read this series!]
On two
literary predecessors to our favorite character (and one of the most fascinating
story elements) in the film.
In the
pivotal Chapter X of the Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass writes about an influential
encounter with a fellow enslaved man named Sandy Jenkins. The teenaged Douglass
has gotten on the wrong side of a particularly violent enslaver and infamous “slave-breaker”
named Covey, and has temporarily run away from the plantation rather than
risk a horrific whipping. Sandy, clearly a hoodoo practitioner although Douglass
does not use the word nor define Sandy as spiritual in any overarching way,
gives Douglass “a certain root” which will protect him from whippings of
any kind. Although Douglass doubts its powers, he follows Sandy’s advice and is
never again whipped by Covey, although his own violent resistance to the man
must be accounted as part of the shift as well. That ambiguity leads Douglass to
write that “I was half inclined to think the root to be something more
than I at first had taken it to be,” and in any case he seemingly keeps it with
him, perhaps recognizing that whatever his own beliefs, slavery is a world in
which broader and more powerful forces than any individual are in play.
Half a
century after Douglass published his narrative, the African American author
Charles Chesnutt developed that last idea much more fully in his wonderful
short story cycle The Conjure
Woman (1899). I said a lot about what makes that book so complex and
powerful in
this post on its first story, “The Goophered Grapevine” (originally published
in
The Atlantic in 1887). As I discussed in that post, for Chesnutt
conjure (a parallel term/concept to hoodoo) is largely symbolic, on two
interconnected levels: for the enslaved people in the stories recounted by the
storyteller character Uncle Julius, people for whom conjure reflects both the horrific
and the potentially resistant and even liberatory realities of their lives and
world; and for Julius himself, who weaves his conjure tales in order to achieve
goals in his own present, post-Civil War life. Which is to say, Chesnutt uses
the genre of the conjure tale much like he does the genre of plantation
fiction—capitalizing on audience expectations, those of Julius’s white
audience inside the stories and Chesnutt’s (largely) white readers for them, to
offer a powerful counter-narrative to dominant American perceptions of slavery,
race, history, and more.
Toward the
end of yesterday’s post, I mentioned that Wonmi Mosaku’s Annie was my wife’s
and my favorite character in Sinners. There are lots of layers that make
the character and performance so great, including an incredibly beautiful final
scene that I will most definitely not spoil here. But a big part of it is that
Annie is a hoodoo practitioner, an element of both her identity and the world
that her husband Smoke (one of the two Michael B. Jordan twins) initially dismisses
(emphasizing instead money and power as the world’s fundamental forces) but that
eventually becomes crucial for everyone’s survival once the vampires start
doing their thing. Annie’s knowledge of “haints” and how to fight them
certainly fits with the symbolic and social sides of hoodoo/conjure that we see
in Chesnutt’s stories, just as we can read Coogler’s vampires metaphorically to
be sure. But at the same time, these layers to Annie’s character are presented
matter-of-factly and accepted as such by those around her, reminding us that,
like Sandy Jenkins, hoodoo practitioners remained an important part of Black
Southern communities for centuries. I was so impressed and moved to see this
conjure woman in Coogler’s historical film.
Next
SinnersStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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