Seeing My Family History Through the Eyes of Sinners
Keep moving, but never forget to carry your elders and ancestors with you.
I had to go see Sinners because the internet wouldn’t shut up about it. It had only been out for a day, but my timeline was flooded with rave reviews and out of context spoilers. I hate spoilers (there are spoilers for the movie below btw). If you want me to watch something, you should say “you should go watch that. I thought it was good.” Don’t tell me about that one funny scene, don’t give me a dissertation on your favorite character, don’t tell me there’s a twist. I need to go in knowing next to nothing, and every moment I spent with my iPhone merely unlocked left me exposed. The closest, earliest showing was a £17 IMAX ticket. I bought it.
I had no clue what the film was, or that Ryan Coogler even had a film coming out. The first and last spoiler that I saw was that it was a vampire film. But Coogler does such an amazing job of dropping the audience into the setting, into the characters’ here and now, that you forget everything you know. It’s just you, Sammy, Smoke, Stack, and that ominous guitar.
I’ve never been a huge fan of vampire movies. Twilight never compelled me. I’ve never seen any Dracula films. Interview with the Vampire, True Blood, or Vampire Diaries never seemed enticing. I’ve been running a horror movie marathon every October for the past five years and Blade is the only vampire movie out of the 70 films I’ve watched.1 Watching Sinners, I started to realize why.
First of all, I do not like watching foreign objects piercing skin. Drug use in movies makes me nauseous. I swallowed upchuck more than once during a recent viewing of The Brutalist. Secondly, when it’s acted well, there’s something so visceral about watching someone suck the life out of someone else, and vampires often bite without consent. It saddens me deeply to the point of disgust.
In Sinners, that’s partially the point. Coogler tells a story about how whiteness penetrates and corrupts. How its power entices and traps you in your own body. For non-White people, whiteness must be studied carefully and internalized for survival. For White people, it must be protected and reinforced, because it can be given and taken away.
In the world’s history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, whiteness itself is a disease, but without its power, a person’s extinction draws nearer. This is the motivation behind the Irish immigrant character Remmick, who embodies the villain. He is Sammy’s foil and serves as a reminder: Black people, our souls, our culture, are their own superpower. It’s a renewable resource, replenished over and over by every generation, paying homage to the ancestors, pulling them forward with us, never letting them go while we forge our way forward. Remmick wants this for himself, he wants to revive his own people, their power, their beauty, but— and I think I’m the first person to ever say this— THE MASTER’S TOOLS WILL NEVER DISMANTLE THE MASTER’S HOUSE.
The story hit something deep within me. An emotion that I don’t think I’ve ever felt before rang out in me. The only way I can describe it is a feeling of deeper understanding.
My viewing of Sinners ended around 7pm. I went to the gym and then home for dinner and bed at 10pm. I was excited to get under the duvet early. At midnight I was still tossing and turning, my jaw clenched tight thinking about the movie. Every inch of the IMAX screen translating into a feeling that sent waves from my mind to every inch of my body. I couldn’t sleep. I called my Grammy.
I had a million questions for her. I had spent most of the movie thinking about her. I was thinking about her mother Alice and her older sister Ruth. Alice moved from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Chicago when Ruth was four years old. When Ruth was eight, Grammy was born and two kids followed after her. When Grammy was little, Ruth started finding success as a singer and went by her stage name, Dinah Washington. She won the 1959 Rhythm and Blues Grammy2 for What a Diff'rence a Day Makes. She was referred to as The Queen of the Blues.
Dinah passed not long after my dad was born, so I’ve never felt like I had a strong relation to her. But Grammy keeps her memory alive, she tells stories about gifts her sister used to give her, the places she used to travel to, and meeting Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughan. The stories are short and sweet.
I stayed up for a few hours talking to Grammy about her mother and her sister. I didn’t have a choice; my body wouldn’t let me sleep until I could connect the dots between the movie I just saw and my family’s history. This was deeper than the vampires.
The only time I felt like Dinah’s legacy was tangible for me was when I met B.B. King, a family acquaintance. I was five years old, my family made a big deal about it but I straight up sorry to this this man’ed him and stuck my hand out for him to shake it so we could move on.
I really wanted to know more about her mother Alice. The core of that unidentifiable feeling I had in the cinema came from something Grammy told me two Easters ago when I was visiting her in Chicago: because of the Jim Crow laws, the threat of being lynched, and the normalized degrading treatment she would receive, my great grandmother hated White people. She was always diligent, listening for any cues of racism, and quick to correct them if they addressed her incorrectly. “I am not Alice to you. You will refer to me as Mrs. Jones. Do you understand?” Grammy imitated one time, recalling an interaction between her mother and her tenants. Grammy told me that her mother left the south because she couldn’t put up with the racism. The phrase “Alabama 100 years ago” sends a chill through my body as a Black woman. I can’t imagine living through it.
My Great Granny moved up north because the south was too small, and too small minded. She was growing, she was surviving. She found a life for herself and her children; a Grammy award winning singer, two school teachers (one of them taught Michelle Robinson in the fourth grade), and a California judge. My grandfather’s mother moved up from Mississippi and grew her family too. My grandfather was one of eight children. In his 20’s, he had nascent career as a talent manager, and managed Chaka Khan early on in her career. But Grammy was growing her family, so she asked him to find something local. He went back to school to become a teacher.
My own father moved to California, where he met my mom, a Los Angeles native whose own family moved up from Dallas, Texas right before she was born. I moved from a small LA County suburb to the United Kingdom, settling in Edinburgh. I sat in the cinema in Scotland, tracing my family’s history of moving and music.
People in general have a history of moving, but certain groups, including Black people have moved—migrated for survival. Smoke and Stack moved to Chicago after the War and fell in with The Chicago Outfit. After stealing from Italian and Irish gangsters, adding fuel to the fire of an inevitable gang war, they make their way back home, attempting to build something of their own.
When I asked Grammy what she thought about that, she said that she never thought the twins’ intentions were pure. “Yes, but they wanted to build something of their own.” I rebutted. But her point was that Smoke and Stack’s endeavors were doomed from the start. They took what they learned from Chicago which, despite it being a hub for diverse migration, still had its own racism. Irish and Italian immigrants fought for their whiteness in a Chicago that was segregating just as much as it was diversifying.
I spent a summer in Chicago in 2019 riding around the city with my cousin and her friends. She knew all the hot spots and showed me good art, music, and food. But what I couldn’t shake was the feeling I would get when we rolled into certain neighborhoods. One part of the city would fade into the other, and before I knew it, we were the only Black people in that space. I started to feel uncomfortable in my own skin, always looking over my shoulder, and sometimes finding White people who were looking back, intently. That summer I realized Chicago was still segregated. Not only is it still segregated, but its residents are aware of it and some, including my grandmother, are fine with it.
In California, I grew up with everyone mixing in with each other, on top of each other. Asian, Black, Latine, White. We all live in proximity to each other, but it isn’t some utopia; interracial tensions are still there3. But it’s different. The same way racism in Chicago is different to racism in Alabama.
Coogler taps into something commonly discussed in the Black community, often without nuance. How do we fight whiteness, build something of our own, move past survival and into comfort and joy when the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is everywhere, even inside of us? Smoke and Stack wrestle with the question throughout the film. They realize and beef up their reputations as ruthless gangsters, returning with the same mentality of whiteness that was impressed on them up north. Sammy escapes, migrating to the very place his cousins were exiled from, finding his own success as a musician; maybe he even ran into Dinah. In my family, the answer seems to be to keep moving. Only return home to visit, don’t stay long, but never forget to carry your elders and ancestors with you.
Here’s a BBC Four documentary about Dinah. Grammy is in it too! Also her younger sister, my Grantie, calls Dinah evil on multiple occasions. lmaaaooo not the family beef is public!!
The only vampire media I really enjoy is Buffy!
Yeah, the award sorry I know this is confusing lol
My family lived through the 1992 LA Riots