Free State of Jones

Whenever a new movie comes out that addresses the period of slavery in the United States, viewers must confront that sordid history anew. In 2013, we saw 12 Years a Slave, and a month ago, we saw a remake of the miniseries Roots. Now comes Free State of Jones, another of the many films that are “based on a true story.”

 

 

In this new film, like many others, we get a mix of history and adaptation for dramatic purposes. The story of Newton Knight is certainly compelling. A native of Mississippi, he deserted the Confederate army with others from Jones County and led a guerrilla war against the Confederates with an army of up to 500 people that included runaway slaves.

Director and co-writer Gary Ross, who also made Seabiscuit and Hunger Games, tells the story with an eye on the motivations for Knight’s actions. He’s fortunate to have an actor as excellent as Matthew McConaughey to fill that role. His look and speech fit perfectly.

A medical orderly in the Confederate army, Knight leaves to bury a kinsman, a boy from his home county who was conscripted into the army by force, then killed on the battlefield. Back in Jones County, he learns that local Confederate soldiers are taking people’s food as a tax, leaving them without enough to survive the winter.

When he helps a family stand up to some soldiers, driving them away with guns, he becomes a fugitive and is hunted as a deserter. He hides in a nearby swamp with several runaway slaves.

The Newton Knight of the movie is a natural leader who gives speeches that draw on Scripture and class struggle. One motivation for him and others to desert the army is the “Twenty Negro Law,” which excuses one white man from the war for every 20 black slaves he owns. Knight says, “This isn’t our war.”

Ross keeps us informed of the time frame for different parts of the story by showing the dates. He also moves forward at different points to 1948 to show Knight’s great-grandson Davis Knight on trial for miscegenation, illegal according to Mississippi law. This is confusing at first but becomes pertinent as we learn more of Newton Knight’s story.

While it is a fascinating film, Free State of Jones raises several questions. One is how we view films like this that portray the evils of racism. Knight comes across early as a kind of white savior, though black slaves are given important dialogue and screen time. He also is a bit too good. A film (even at 2 ¼ hours) can’t cover the complexity of such an individual. But the real Knight had his share of flaws.

While the Knight of the movie has a son by Rachel, a slave played beautifully by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the real Knight had three families with three different women and fathered dozens of mixed-race children. He was a man of strong principles and quick to have a knife at the throat of anyone who rubbed him the wrong way, according to The Smithsonian.

A related question regards our response to such films. We easily decry the evil of “those people,” whose racism is so blatant and so violent. But this doesn’t necessarily challenge our more subtle or hidden racism today. This is not a criticism of the film, which is telling a story from the past. But it is a caution about how we view it.

Then there’s the depiction of religion in the film. Knight was a Primitive Baptist who often quoted Scripture. And references to Scripture and to God occur in the film. But you won’t find references to Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence. As McConaughey said in an interview with The Daily Beast, Knight “was not a ‘turn the other cheek’ New Testament guy.” Redemptive violence is clearly presented here, though ultimately it didn’t work. Laws changed, and people changed, though the film only implies that; we don’t see it.

Free State of Jones is rated R for brutal battle scenes and disturbing graphic images.

A neglected period of history

Last Sunday, Sept. 13, Jeanne and I walked from our home in North Newton, Kan., over to the Bethel College campus to attend a showing of the documentary Slavery by Another Name, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and had its national broadcast on PBS on Feb. 3, 2012. KIPCOR (Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution) sponsored the showing and the discussion that followed.

 

 

Slavery by Another Name is a powerful film, based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon. It challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

The film uses archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments to tell forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of this neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants. It also features interviews with Blackmon and leading scholars of the period.

The film recounts how, since slavery was unconstitutional, local authorities in the American South arrested African Americans, often on trumped-up charges, and sent them to prison farms, where they served years in hard labor, to the profit of local businessmen. And when courageous people brought this practice of penury to the attention of the U.S. government, President Teddy Roosevelt looked the other way, not wanting to displease his wealthy supporters. After all, this penal servitude, unpaid labor, was good for business.

Only during World War II, when someone pointed out to President Franklin Roosevelt that this practice would provide the Japanese with propaganda, did the government act to end it. Still, its practice continued for some time.

Slavery by Another Name is hard to watch and elicits strong emotions. In a discussion after the film, Galyn Vesey, Ph.D., director of the Research on Black Wichita Project, asked people about their feelings, their thoughts and their own experiences.

In the audience were many people from Wichita, Kan., most of them African Americans, and what they had to say was as moving as the film. A pastor said that our nation is cursed because of its racism, which he defined as prejudice plus power. A woman pleaded for some kind of change in a society where her son is arrested by police and held in jail when he did nothing illegal. One man told of his experience as a veteran who was arrested at a gas station while simply sitting in the car while his friend pumped gas.

An eloquent man who said he will turn 83 in December recounted how talented blacks are leaving Kansas because jobs are closed to them. He said he has three daughters, all of whom have doctorates, as does he. Two are architects. One of them works at a firm in Atlanta that designed buildings for the 1996 Olympics and the Atlanta airport. Yet when Wichita decided to do a major expansion of its airport, she couldn’t even get an interview.

A white woman in the audience asked what many felt, What do we do? What will help?

A good question. One thing we can do is relearn our nation’s history, like this period that is ignored by most textbooks.

Humility and the lessons of history

It’s rare for a religious discussion to remain in our mediaculture for long, but that’s been the case for President Obama’s comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5. Obama gave a speech in which he compared Islamic violence with historic Christian violence. Political opponents expressed outrage. Jim Gilmore, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the remarks “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime.” 

In the speech, Obama said that “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” He then brought his historical analogy closer to home: “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
From what I’ve seen, historians who’ve responded to the claims don’t take issue with his statements. Others, though, don’t like him criticizing Christianity or America. 

This raises a question: Is it valuable to practice self-reflection (and self-criticism) as Christians?
A second question is, Is it fair to even call what was done in the Crusades, the Inquisition and in the American South Christian? Most Muslims would deny that what ISIS is doing reflects Islam.
In a Feb. 10 article at Slate.com, Jamelle Bouie explores the facts behind Obama’s statement about Jim Crow. He makes two basic points: (1) it was worse than we may have thought, and (2) it was a religious ritual.
“In a recent report,” Bouie writes, “the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is “at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.”
He goes on to offer descriptions of a few of these “lynchings” (the word doesn’t capture the brutality of the torture and butchery), which are too horrible to quote here.
Bouie then notes that these lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or “celebratory acts of racial control and domination.” They were rituals. He quotes historian Amy Louise Wood, who writes in her book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940: “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort.”
Another historian, Donald G. Mathews, writes in the Journal of Southern Religion: “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” 

But why bring this up? What purpose does it serve?
Perhaps it’s a lesson in humility and a warning against self-righteousness. Jesus certainly had plenty to say about the perils of self-righteousness (see Matthew 23).
What ISIS has done is horrible—and comparable to what those “Christian” lynch mobs did. But let’s not judge all Muslims by that group. We don’t want all Christians judged by what other so-called Christians have done.
And let’s do some self-analysis as well. Are we not all prone to acts of domination or violence? Can we learn from our past in order to not practice such violence?
Maybe we need to practice confession and repentance on occasion.

A story about classism and racism

Amid the superhero movies or raunchy comedies, the Cineplex occasionally sneaks in a quiet, “inspired by a true story” film. Such is Belle, which is based on the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mabatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral.

 

As I’ve written before here, many of these “true” stories stretch the truth quite a bit. Such is the case here. The film is actually inspired by a 1779 painting of Belle beside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. It was commissioned by William Murray, who was at the time Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

But I don’t mind so much. Belle tells an engaging story and conveys information about a key moment in England’s history and in the history of the movement to abolish slavery.

After Belle’s mother dies, her father brings her to England to be cared for by his uncle (Tom Wilkinson), Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, at his estate. Despite the social mores of the time, they raise Dido as an aristocrat alongside her cousin Elizabeth.

When the girls reach the age to “come out,” the family looks for a good match for Elizabeth. Dido, however, has received a large inheritance from her father and doesn’t need to marry wealth. But Mansfield doesn’t want her to marry beneath her either.

As with almost any British show you can name, we’re dealing with classism. We’ve seen this before—the desire of a young woman to marry for love rather than money. Read Jane Austen for a wonderful examination of this issue. Added to the mix here is racism.

Also new here is the introduction of a famous slavery case, Gregson v. Gilbert, that is key in the annals of the abolitionist movement. Mansfield is to rule on the case, which has to do with a ship that jettisoned its “cargo” of slaves and wants payment from its insurance company for it losses.

Belle meets a young lawyer, John Davinier (Sam Reid), who wants Mansfield to rule against the ship’s owners. This case, often referred to as the Zong massacre, was also the basis of an episode of Garrow’s Law, an old BBC show, where I first heard about it.

There’s not much suspense about the outcome—both of the case and of Belle’s relationship with Davinier. And while the historical elements are interesting, I feel some caution about films like these.

Belle deals with the racism that existed then, and we view it with a self-righteous disdain for their backward ways. But it doesn’t confront us with our own racist structures today. I realize that’s not the film’s purpose, but I raise the caution for those of us who view it.

The film includes a cast of excellent English actors, including Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Matthew Goode and Penelope Wilton (of Downton Abbey).

Rated PG, Belle is a refreshing way to encounter some English history, think about racism and enjoy a good story.

An excellent and necessary film

Films are judged by many measures. Three I often use are (1) a film’s excellence, which includes the various aspects of a film’s creation: its direction, writing, acting, cinematography; (2) its importance, which includes what it teaches about life and our world, new insights into humanity and challenges to us about how we respond to people; and (3) its emotional impact.

Many films fit one of these categories; only a few each year seem to fit all three. 12 Years a Slave is one of these rare films. It is outstanding in all aspects of its creation; it is an important, I venture to say necessary, film for people, especially Americans, to see; and it leaves viewers with strong feelings of sadness and anger.

Now let me offer a caveat to the second point. This is a difficult film to watch. The violence and dehumanization it depicts are horrendous. And the film’s director, Steve McQueen, doesn’t let us turn away quickly. The camera lingers on many scenes holding us there so that we cannot look away.

12 Years a Slave is adaptation of the 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. He worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his release.

Writer John Ridley makes excellent use of detail throughout the film and creates a variety of characters so that neither slaves nor slaveholders are seen as a type but as individuals. Slaveholders vary, for example, from owner William Ford (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who is relatively kind and saves Northrup’s life, to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), an extremely racist and abusive planter who believes his right to abuse his slaves is enumerated in the Bible. The slaves as well have particular stories, from Eliza (Adepero Oduye), who weeps endlessly for her children, who were sold to a different owner, to Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who picks the most cotton of any worker by a wide margin and is frequently raped by Epps, yet remains strong and resilient.

The performances in this film are consistently good, but several stand out. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northrup. He shows the shock of being treated as a slave when he is in reality a free man, and he portrays vividly the agony of his suffering at the hands of the slavemasters and overseers. His changing posture becomes part of his portrayal of the change slavery creates in a person. Fassbender and Nyong’o’s performances also stand out in their power to make us see them as real, complicated human beings.

McQueen, who is British, paces the film well and inserts occasional scenes from nature that juxtapose their beauty with the horror the slaves are enduring. And the music by Hans Zimmer is appropriately understated. Here, too, the juxtaposition between Northrup’s fiddle playing (he is a trained musician) and its setting in a plantation where he is a slave, adds to the emotional impact of the film. And when a group of slaves sing a spiritual at the funeral of an old slave, it is a powerful moment that speaks to the persistent faith and hope that helped them endure such injustice.

12 Years a Slave is both excellent and important. Though difficult to watch, it keeps before us the necessary truth that our country held people in legal servitude for many years, and that servitude represented a great evil. We dare not forget that.

This gets my vote, thus far, as the best film of 2013.

Racism in hiding

Mennonite Church USA, like other Christian denominations, is committed to becoming an anti­racist church. One of the things that makes that difficult is that racism, like many systems and like the “powers” described in the New Testament, is pernicious and likes to remain hidden from our awareness. Part of becoming antiracist is keeping our awareness of racism alive.

The opposite of that awareness is denial, and such denial runs rampant in our society. We like to pretend we aren’t as racist as we may be. A recent article in The Atlantic (September) helps call us to task.

In “Fear of a Black President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the magazine, writes that as our first black president, Barack Obama has avoided mention of race almost entirely. He goes on: “In having to be ‘twice as good’ and ‘half as black,’ Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.”

The fact that Americans elected a black president is often cited as evidence that we have moved beyond race as a factor in our politics. But that notion is shown to be false.

This does not mean that opposing policies of the Obama administration signifies racism. Racism is a much subtler system.

Coates points to an irony of the United States: “For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.”

Coates shows this irony in the events around the death of Trayvon Martin last February. As soon as Obama addressed the parents and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the case moved from a kind of national mourning to what Coates calls “racialized political fodder,” and he gives numerous examples.

Historically, Coates writes, African Americans have been limited to protest and agitation in addressing the disconnect between democracy and white supremacy. Now, when Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of what happened” in the Martin case, he was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. “The power was black,” Coates writes, “and, in certain quarters, was received as such.”

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred,” Coates writes. “It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” He notes several studies that have shown the role of race in voting patterns and in opposition to and support for health-care reform. After Obama’s election, the rhetoric of fear became much more prevalent. Signs at Tea Party rallies read, “Obama plans white slavery,” and one congressman complained that Obama “favors the black person.”

The double standard of having to be twice as good “haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.” Coates points out that in the first two years as president, “Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.”

The myth of “twice as good,” writes Coates, “holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.”

Coates makes clear he does not agree with all of Obama’s views. He particularly abhors his embrace of a secretive drone policy. His point is about the pernicious presence of racism in our politics. “Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story,” he writes. “It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”

The problem goes beyond politics and affects—infects—every area of society. Love, not fear, should guide us.