So this is also, of course, the story of Mississippi and the larger American South that birthed the blues. It’s no accident that Coogler captures the rolling fields of cotton in wide, painterly IMAX lenses. This is the coveted cash crop that so many Black Americans’ ancestors were torn from their homeland to pick, toil, and die over. It is also the same crop that similarly enslaves in all but name the neighbors of Stack, Smoke, and Sammie throughout Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Sammie’s father, a preacher at the nearby plantation, laments his son’s secular, heathen music. However, he himself like his father before him is trapped on the same plantation that perhaps two generations prior was tended by literally enslaved people. After the Civil War and emancipation, though, white Southern fears of William Tecumseh Sherman’s promises of 40 acres for every freed Black man proved unfounded. President Andrew Johnson returned most plantation land to its previous white owners, and to make up for the loss of Black slaves, the remnants of the planter class trapped newly freedmen into Faustian sharecropping bargains. Black farmers were “paid” with a share of crop they could sell, but it would never be enough to make up for the land and tools rented and leased to them. They would be caught in a cycle of debt and poverty that would become generational.
Sharecropping was still the law of the land in the Jim Crow South of 1932 when Sinners is set, and many Black men who believed they could beat the rigged game were terrorized or worse by the Klan and its institutionalized ilk. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) tells the story in the film of a bandmate who dreamed of using a tiny fortune they made to open his own store. He was lynched before he reached a train out of town. And a few years earlier, and a few states over from where Sinners is set, white neighbors grew so indignant of an emerging Black upper-middle class in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in 1921 they murdered nearly a thousand of them, including by dropping bombs from the sky in World War I era airplanes.
Remmick seems to offer a theoretically less cruel sense of conquest, even if it’s by drinking actual life blood. But it’s really not that different than the white record producers of Carter family who might pay Lesley Riddle for writing a song, but never gave him copyright credit. They never let him truly own his own music. Certainly Elvis Presley got a lot richer singing “Hound Dog” than Big Mama Thornton.
Sinners contextualizes how much of this was Smoke and Stack’s past while relying on the audience to fill in the gaps we know from their future. The vampire getting Black converts to insist on the need of politeness and community might even be viewed as a cynical wariness to those who yearn for a “post-racial” America when 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Southern states are still attempting to whitewash the horrors of slavery out of our history books and classrooms. Encourage future generations to go back to the plantation.
Hence why the real catharsis of Sinners is not Smoke staking the fanciful monster that claims to date back to the days of St. Patrick. It’s Smoke slaying a much more tangible creature by emptying a tommy gun clip into the local grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He doesn’t really defeat the system, of course. In fact, Smoke dies from a bullet wound he picks up during his fire fight with the lynch mob. The American system is rigged, and the dream of his and Stack’s juke joint could never be long-lasting. But for a brief and beautiful moment, it’s real. And in the here and now, that white old bastard is still worm meat.
