A few insights on ‘Sinners’, my adopted hometown of Clarksdale, MS and redemptive suffering
By Bernard Demczuk, Ph.D.
JA Guest Writer
Part 2 of a 4-part series
The Film: The first Bluesman we meet playing at the depot is “Delta Slim” (Delroy Lindo). He is actually Sonny Boy Williamson, AKA, Rice Miller (Delta Slim says his name in the film), who everyone in town knows is the best harmonica player in the Delta. (Harmonicas in Mississippi were called “Mississippi saxophones” because people in Mississippi were too poor to buy a saxophone. The harmonic will do just fine, thank you very much).
Sonny Boy’s home is in the small town of Glendora near Clarksdale that we visit during my Emmett Till tour. When there, visit ETHIC, the Emmett Till museum run by the town’s mayor Johnny B. Thomas. This is the town where Emmett was thrown off the bridge in Glendora. Emmett was thrown into the Black Bayou, not the Tallahatchie River. Bayous are different from rivers – they are smaller, organic waterways essential to hold back flooding and popular for catfish, shrimp, crawfish, frogs, snakes, spirits, turtles, alligators and irrigation. Bayous are part of swamp life, cajun and hoodoo culture. The word “bayou” derives from the Choctaw word “bayuk” meaning slow flowing stream.
Furthermore, Delta Slim rejects the offer from Smoke to play at his juke joint that evening because he has a long-standing commitment to play at Messengers juke joint. Messengers has been in Clarksdale since 1907, the oldest juke joint in America, and still going strong today. Messengers is on 4th Street (MLK).
The Black business section in town is the corner of Issaquena & 4th St. (today, MLK Ave.) where Black, Chinese, Lebanese, Jewish and Mexican businesses were prominent. There was a Mexican “Hot Tamales” store there back in the 1930s, and you see it on the big screen. The intersection was called then and even today, The New World District because the immigrants who came into Clarksdale in the 19teens-60s started their “new world.” That section of town is in the Clarksdale Black Heritage Trail map: (www.ClarksdaleAfricanA mericanHeritageMap).
Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Thomas Yao Pang), the Chinese couple in the film playing a prominent role in Clarksdale, MS in the 30’s is quite accurate. Immigrants, especially Jewish, Chinese, Mexicans and Lebanese, found a commercially viable location in Clarksdale during the heyday of King Cotton and the frequent running of the ICRR. During this time, Clarksdale was known as the “Gold Buckle” of the Delta’s Cotton Belt. Immigrant merchants did very well in the Gold Buckle. Cotton was high and profitable, AKA, “white gold.”
The concepts of conjuring, the crossroads, the Blue note, bayous, hoodoo, root doctors and African spirituality – I will return to later. You will have plenty of time in the film to figure out those Mississippi Delta tropes tie together. Annie is the conjurer in the film and warns everyone of evil-spirits who came from Africa and live in the Delta today, and of course, hang-out at the crossroads.
Robert Johnson lives! Meaning – do not leave at the end of the film. The end of the film is not the end. Robert Johnson/Sammie (we visit his grave site near Greenwood on my tour) comes back (played by Buddy Guy) in Chicago. Spirits always come back – they never die.
They hang around. They stay. To live again. They are the ancestors.
The power of African spiritual conjuring is brilliantly captured in a dance scene in Smoke & Stack’s juke joint as African Laos spirits not only created The Blues, but are the originators of jazz, swing, R&B, R&R (created quite literally in The Riverside Hotel in 1952 with Rocket 88), soul, funk and hip-hop. Hence, in the Delta, you can take the African out of Africa, but you cannot take the Africa out of the African. Spirits live!
Dancing Griots: Griots are the oral historians of African peoples. They are responsible for preserving, interpreting, sharing and transmitting a people’s history and culture from generation to generation. They do so by performance art through story-telling, dance, drama, music, fashion and language. Griots are highly revered in African culture.
In the dance scene, African ancestral griot-spirits have entered the souls of musicians and dancers as story-tellers of a great people’s wisdom brought forth (conjuring) through music, dance, joy, food, community, pride and spiritual connection to Mother Africa. The dancing griots are out in force proclaiming that we have been here for millennia, are still here and not going anywhere. Dance is liberation, community and strength. It can also be intimidating to the on-looker unfamiliar with the culture from whence the dance comes, hence, dance has power over the uninitiated.
The Lindy Hop in the film (the Black original dance colonized by Whites – enter the vampires later in the film – with the Swing and Jitter Bug) is signifying to the viewer that the rest of the dance scenes, including twerking, have deep roots in West and Central Africa peoples of Fon, Yoruba, Ki-Kongo, Fulani and Massai. Griots come in many forms: story-tellers, musicians, dancers, dramatists, fashionistas, chefs and acrobatics. They are the soul of a people. The dance scene in Sinners does not disappoint. Watch ‘em in NFL end-zones on Sunday afternoons.
Not surprising, in Clarksdale today, Griot Arts, Inc. is a youth workforce development non-profit “nurturing creativity, empowering individuals, fostering community” and building youth work-skills while running the Meraki Coffee Shop across the street from the Sunflower River in downtown Clarksdale. “Meraki” is a Greek word meaning “to throw your whole body, mind and soul” into your work and creativity, sort of like grandma saying she puts her “foot in the greens” she’s making in that “magical black pot”. You don’t want to stand too close to the black pot or you might get burned. The dance scene in Sinners demonstrates the best of African griots and meraki – found in Clarksdale today and at its annual Juke Joint Festival every April.
Black Cotton: I’ll leave the Delta’s and Clarksdale’s cotton fields – Black Cotton – to you watching the film. The film shows what “high cotton” looks like – tall, beautiful, gentle, plentiful, prolific – deceptive in its appearance, mean in its production. “Black cotton” is the Delta. It’s value was conjured and produced on the backs of and in the souls of Black people who turned the sweet soft-white-fiber from prickly razor-sharp casings into glittering gold for a few, yet misery for many.
Muddy Waters (real name McKinley Morganfield) lived just outside of Clarksdale on the Stovall Cotton Plantation. In 1943, Muddy caught the ICRR to “Sweet-home Chicago” and the rest is history, as they say. Muddy Waters historic home from the Stovall was moved into the Delta Blues Museum in the former ICRR depot in Clarksdale. It’s there today. No coincidences here. Patterns continue.
