Top Ten Things You Missed in Sinners

There are too many posts calling Hoodoo witchcraft and fetishizing Hailee Steinfeld’s character. I had to say something

10. Smoke Loves Annie

I’ve seen tons of takes about Stack and his relationship with Mary. If you look at many of the Sinners posters they depict this love affair. But why is no one talking about Michael B. Jordan’s other love interest in the film portrayed by Wumni Mosaku? It unnerves me that many of the tweets I first saw of Mosaku assumed that Annie was not his love interest but his mother. His mother?! Do y’all do what Smoke did to Annie with y’all mothers?! We know colorism exists when people think about couples or who they would like in a partner (As the NFL and NBA drafts remind us every year). But the way so many have ignored the love Annie and Smoke shared, making it platonic instead of romantic, needs to be addressed. Thick Black women who aren’t a size two deserve to be loved and appreciated just like any other.

9. Mound Bayou, Mississippi

Briefly mentioned by Smoke when talking to Sammie after the now famous I Lied To You scene in the Juke Joint. In the film, Smoke is encouraging Sammie to move to the town instead of pursuing a musical career amongst those in his community who more closely aligned with the twins in nefarious business practices. There were many towns made by free Blacks following the years of slavery. Mound Bayou was one of those towns. Founded in 1887, the town was soon known in the Mississippi Delta to be the home of prominent Black people in the upper echelons of society. It is the oldest Black municipality in the United States. Doctors, lawyers, a zoo, a hospital and tons of Black owned businesses. In 1910 it was estimated that 90% of the 8,000 residents owned their own homes and had bank accounts. Residents like the activist Fannie Lou Hamer lived there for most of her life.

8. The wooden coins & the sharecroppers

This was one of the moments in the movie that broke my heart. Because I remember stories from elders who had moved up north during the Great Migration. And the reason a lot of them made the trek was because of sharecropping. You take a person that is a newly freed slave under the thirteenth amendment. Unlike their slaveowners they did not receive reparations, insurance payouts, or monetary compensation to help the loss of income that came from the emancipation of slavery in 1865. Many of these newly freed people had no choice but to go back to the plantations where they had come from and ask for work. These plantation owners created a new system which we now know as sharecropping.

A person would be leased out a plot of land that they were allowed to live on and cultivate crops from. However anything and everything else they needed would come at a cost. Need a house? Need water? Well sharecroppers would have to pay for those things. And since they usually had no savings of any kind the amount owed would come out of their profits they’d receive after the harvest. Need clothes? Need groceries? Need soap? Oftentimes these plantation owners had land so wide and so vast there were no stores near that they did not own. Sharecroppers were forced to shop at segregated and racist stores that would charge them more for supplies. Or allow them to be taken on a exoberant collateral fee that would be owed at harvest time.

Sharecroppers began to catch on to these new systems and they would push themselves to work above and beyond them. In the movie you’ll hear the character Cornbread talk about his quota. His daily quota is probably the amount of cotton he needs to pick in order to not fall into debt or the goal his plantation owner wants him to reach so their sharecropping lease will be renewed. If a sharecropper just happened to be lucky enough to not be in debt and go above their quota, they received those wooden coins in the form of payment. See, these plantation owners did NOT want to give the sharecroppers real money. Money that might give them an ability to finance a life off of the plantations and out of their control. Also, many times these plantation owners would be in debt themselves, especially during years of drought or during the Great Depression. By giving sharecroppers wooden coins they were limited to only shop at stores that accepted this form of currency. Sort of like an I-Owe-You that could only be circulated locally. Stores that were often owned by the same plantation owners keeping these sharecroppers in a never-ending cycle of entrapment.

With most of the Black community in Sinners using these forms of currency it trapped not only them but all minority businesses in their area where Black people were their biggest clientele. Yes that includes Smoke and Stack as well. If the juke joint had continued the twins probably would’ve been forced to come up with a monetary agreement with the plantation owners to pay them in order to exchange the wooden coins into American dollars.

7. The Choctaw

I want to say more, but I feel like them getting the fuck out of dodge said enough.

6. The Chinese Segreagated Grocery Stores

I didn’t notice this while watching the film. I listened to a recent podcast episode of The Read and heard the host Crissle mention it. There were two separate Chinese owned grocery stores by the Chow family because one was for minorities and the other was for whites. When Chinese people were brought the United States to replace the free labor force that was lost with the thirteenth amendment, Chinese people soon realized that the deal they were dealt wasn’t it. Unlike Black Americans, many Chinese immigrants weren’t held under an involuntary bond of slavery but a servitude contract. Once that contract expired or they just flat our quit, they realized they were in a unique scenario. Because many laws around the United States did not yet recognize any Asian ethnicity or race. Legally they weren’t as low as Black people. So they could work and go to some places that Black people weren’t allowed to go to. This is why many Chinese immigrants created a niche for themselves and made businesses that would serve whites and minorities. Which is why the Chow’s store was split into two.

After Crissle said it I just chuckled at the hypocrisy of it all. You have the same food served by the same people. While watching I remember thinking it was weird that Smoke didn’t just walk to Grace and ask her to make the sign. Now I realize it’s because he was not allowed across the street as a Black man or allowed to enter the segregated store.

5. Where is the baby?!

So many people missed this I’m actually shocked. When Remmick is seen in the home of Bert and Joan Hogwood he is sitting in a back room with a rocking chair. If viewers pay close attention they will notice this is a baby’s room complete with a crib filled with blankets and toys. But where is the baby? There are no mentions of the baby and no cries heard. I think its a safe bet to say that unlike Louis in Interview With the Vampire, Remmick did in fact eat the baby.

4. Jayme Lawson

Lawd, whatever Sammie did to her in that storage room…lol! All jokes aside, why isn’t Black twitter blowing up talking about her performance in Sinners? Not just the acting, but the performance full of electrified energy that came at the turning point of the film? And that voice! I’m so jealous of women that have that deep resonating lower register when they sing. Her sensual sliding scale during the song Pale, Pale Moon was magic. It’s almost like her beautiful voice was the gateway for the larger-than-life events that took place throughout the rest of the film. Sammie may have been the griot but Pearline was definitely the key.

3. The fashion tells the story

The talent of Ruth Carter has no bounds. If you’re not familiar with her work please look it up. You will see that her Academy Award winning work has traveled thru decades and been worn by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars in movies and tv shows like Black Panther or Being Mary Jane. One of the things I love about Carter is that she often gives hints of the future story or the outcome of the character in their clothing. Or indicates what the character may have done in the past before the time in the movie takes place.

Take the twins Smoke and Stack. In the opening scene you see both of them standing side by side leaning against a car. One has a red hat and one has a blue hat. But it’s a little more if you pay closer attention. Stack is wearing an Italian suit that’s very flashy and goes with his extroverted personality. Smoke is wearing a suit more associated with Irish tailoring. In the story, the twins discuss how they worked the Italian mafia and the Irish gangs. Their suits probably reflect which culture they worked with before stealing alcohol and traveling south.

With Smoke’s suit it’s a larger purpose for picking the color blue. That shade of blue is known in the South as Haint Blue. It’s a very popular color you will see on the exterior design of Black households, usually associated with Gullah-Geechee culture or Hoodoo culture. The color is thought to resemble water. And in Black spiritualities such as Hoodoo spirits cannot cross open water on their own, so the color Haint Blue is used as a decoy to ward them away. With Smoke’s close relationship with Annie, a practicing Hoodoo, we can assume Smoke is given the color Haint Blue to outwardly show the protection Annie gives him throughout the movie with her mojo bag and her prayers. Which is why in Smoke’s final scene where he kills the klan members set to scheme and kill him, he is no longer wearing blue and has taken the mojo bag off.

It’s rumored that designing and styling for Sinners was a bit easy for Carter. Because she’d already been commissioned to work for the now defunct Blade movie. The might anticipated Blade movie was supposed to be set in the 1920s. When that fell through, Coogler’s wife and producer for Sinners Zinzi Evans Coogler, called Carter to come and work for the Sinners movie which was set in the year 1932.

2. Delta Slim & the chain gang

Growing up there were times I thought my elders were exaggerating about the south. They told me about the chain gangs, the segregation, and the many attacks on their lives. Maybe just childhood innocence in my mind trying to protect me from the reality of what was. Now after living here for a few years I know their stories were real. I’ve run across a number of prison chain gangs in a scene that could’ve been replayed 100 years ago. Men working in the sweltering sun with no water in the heat of a thousand suns. Cutting grass, planting crops, digging trenches, doing construction work, etc. And according to the thirteenth amendment this type of involuntary servitude is still legal.

Delta Slim asking Stack to slow down the car so that he could shout words of encouragement to the chain gang working by the side of the road was not only heartbreaking, but just a stark take at how much reality has not changed for many who are imprisoned in the American South.

1. Buddy Guy

Umm…hello? HELLO?! Do ya’ll not realize who this is? I know some of us haven’t been exposed to the Blues, so allow me to put ya’ll on game. Buddy Guy is one of the most influential musicians in Blues music. He put a staple on what we now call Chicago Blues; a mix of Delta Blues with vocals and electric guitars you would find in rock music. Delta Blues is what Delta Slim and Sammie played in the film. People like Buddy Guy took that when they ventured up north during the Great Migration and created a whole new sound that was completely their own. With seven Grammys and more than 6 decades of hits under his belt, it’s not an understatement to say that he is the biggest star in the film (If you don’t count Michael B. Jordan’s abs). When asked why he decided to portray the older version of Sammie, Guy mentioned past conversations he'd had with Blues legends that have passed on. People like Muddy Waters and BB King. guy said that they would tell him that if he outlived them, he should work to make sure that Blues wasn’t forgotten. His participation in Sinners is an homage to them.

There’s so much more I could write about. So many more details in the movie that I hope we all will watch again and again. Coogler and the Proximity Media crew, y’all did it again.