Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 11

July 25, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Cultural Representations

[On July 26,1775, the Second Continental Congress establishedthe United States postal system. So this week for the 250thanniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories ofthe USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

Ontakeaways from four prominent cultural representations of the USPS (in additionto the obvious best one, the Snail in the Frog &Toad story "The Letter,” although he is more of a commissioned mailcarrier than a federal employee).

1)     “Please Mr. Postman” (1961):First of all, I’m obviously talking about The Marvelettes’s original; nooffense to The Carpenters, whose 1975 version is finetoo, but it would be mail fraud (and at least a little bit racist) not to go tothe source. Second, I really like how this song captures (as does the Frog& Toad story, come to think of it) one of the best parts of the USPS, apleasure that kids today might not know: the anxious excitement of waiting foran expected but uncertain (at least in timing, but possibly at all, as seems tobe the case with this song’s situation) mail delivery. I also like that the lastverse concludes with “deliver the letter, the sooner, the better,” a quotewhich also appears in…

2)     DearMr. Henshaw (1984): … Beverly Cleary’s Newbery Medal-winning YA novel.If anyone ever tries to argue that epistolarynovels are either a) from the distant literary past or b) generally notsuccessful, please point them to Henshaw, which uses letters as well asany literary text I’ve ever read. While in some definite ways Cleary’s youthfulprotagonist Leigh Botts is writing to and for himself (the famous author Mr.Henshaw to whom he is writing doesn’t write back more than a couple times, andthe structure evolves into a diary as the book goes along), Dear Mr. Henshawnonetheless reflects how the mail can connect us to other people and worlds inways that can be very helpful, if not indeed necessary, for navigating our own livesand stories.

3)     Newman from Seinfeld(1989-1998): As that particular hyperlinked clip illustrates succinctly, WayneKnight’s mailman neighbor and nemesis of Jerry Seinfeld’s character on theiconic sitcom was generally portrayed as an over-the-top villain, one for whom themail was (when it was mentioned at all) largely a mechanism for his sinisterplots. But I really enjoyed this moment, when Newmanwas given a bit more complex humanity through his righteous rant about why somany postal workers “go postal.” I have to think the writer of that particular speecheither had worked as a mail carrier (or other postal employee) or was close tosomeone who had, and in any case I love that the “showabout nothing” featured a moment that was so much about something real and important.

4)     Dear God (1996): Fulldisclosure: I haven’t seen this film, and based on the reviews I don’t imagineI ever will (my favorite line, from James Berardinelli:“At least after seeing this movie, I understand where the title came from—startingabout thirty minutes into this interminable, unfunny feature, I began lookingat my watch and thinking, ‘Dear God, is this ever going to end?’”). But I dobelieve its premise—Greg Kinnear’s convicted con artist Tom Turner works at thepost office’s dead letter office for his court-ordered community service and beginsresponding to letters sent to God—opens up two other layers of the USPS: thevery idea of “deadletters,” and specifically of what happens to all the mail sent to God andSanta and so on; and the question of whether and how the postal service canbecome part of our identities and communities far beyond mail delivery. More onthat in my special weekend post!

That tributepost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 24, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Mailed Threats

[On July 26,1775, the Second Continental Congress establishedthe United States postal system. So this week for the 250thanniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories ofthe USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On onemoment when the mail was falsely perceived as threatening, other moments whenit genuinely was, and how we can put them in conversation.

I highlightedthe pernicious and profoundly un-American Espionage and Sedition Acts as partof thisJuly 2020 post, but didn’t specifically address there a main way that thosetotalitarian acts were enforced: through monitoring and censorship of the mail.In Chapter Five of mybook Of Thee I Sing I write about one such example from 1917: “The PostmasterGeneral refused to mail copies of The Jeffersonian, a newsletter publishedby the Southern populist and anti-war activist TomWatson; when Watson fought back in court a federal judge called thepublication and its pacifist sentiments ‘poison.’” Even if we agree with that assessmentof Watson’s particular political perspective and points—and obviously I verymuch do not agree—this action of the USPS would in any case, at least to mymind, represent a striking and significant overreach, the use of perceived,ideological “threats” to abdicate its core responsibility to deliver American mail.

I used scarequotes around “threats” deliberately there, not only because I don’t believe TheJeffersonian comprised a threat of any kind, but also and especially becausewe do have definitive, recent historical examples of the mail posing a threatto Americans: “Unabomber”Ted Kaczynski’s multi-decade domestic terrorist attacks largely conducted throughthe use of mailbombs; and the four anthrax-lacedletters that were sent (apparentlyby government scientist and embittered anthrax vaccine developer Dr. BruceIvins, although Ivins took his own life in 2008 before the investigation couldfully conclude) to journalists and government officials in October 2001. In theconcluding couplet of the beautiful song “You’re Missing” from hispost-9/11 album The Rising (2002) Bruce Springsteen expresses themindset of collective anxiety created by such threatening acts of postalterrorism quite succinctly and powerfully: “God’s drifting in heaven, devil’sin the mailbox/I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.”

The moststraightforward, and certainly the most accurate, way to put those twoparagraphs in conversation is to note that the existence of mail bombs and anthrax-lacedletters makes clear just how non-threatening a newsletter is in comparison (even,again, if said newsletter contained ideas that I disagreed with). Unless amailing’s content is far more blatantly and unquestionably illegal—child pornography,for example—it simply should not be the case that the USPS refuses to mailsomething on ideological grounds. But I would take the contrast a significantstep further—one of the best things about the USPS (as I’ll discuss more in myweekend tribute post) is the ways it can connect Americans across this incrediblylarge and disparate nation of ours; and yet of course, as with anything Americanincluding (if not especially) our best things, that element can also connect andall too often has been connected to our worst characteristics and impulses, ofwhich domestic terrorism is frustratingly exemplary. The best and worst of America,in our mail.

LastUSPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 23, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Stamps

[On July 26,1775, the Second Continental Congress establishedthe United States postal system. So this week for the 250thanniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories ofthe USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On sixtelling stamps that help trace the history of this essential postal element.

1)     Franklinand Washington (1847): Nearly 75 years after the founding of the USPS, thesystem began using federally-issuedpostage stamps (privately-produced stamps had been available for some time). Ashighlighted by Monday’s post, Ben Franklin makes a lot of sense for one ofthose first federal stamps; and George Washington, well, is George Washington.In any case, those were the first two, and we’ve been stuck with stamps eversince.

2)     Queen Isabella(1893): You could win a lot of trivia contests by betting your friends thatthey can’t guess the first woman to appear on a USPS stamp—and you could give themquite a few guesses at that. (One of their guesses might be Martha Washington,and she was indeed the first American woman to appear, in 1902.)Part of the iconic 1892-93 Columbian anniversary celebrations that also gave ustheChicago Exposition and the Pledgeof Allegiance, the Isabella stamp is quite the surprising pioneer.

3)     BookerT. Washington (1940): Washington was the first African American to dinepublicly at the White House, and it only took four more decades (that’s sarcasm,to be clear) for him to become the first African American to appear on a USPSstamp. (Indeed, only one other African American, George Washington Carver, gota stamp of his own foranother 25+ years.) With the nation just emerging from the GreatDepression, Washington is a particularly telling choice, one focused oneconomic and educational emphases rather than (for example) civil rights.

4)     Liberty Bell(2007): I could keep going with otherfirst figures, but I do think that the “Forever” stamp represented a particularlyimportantinnovation, if not indeed the most significant USPS change since the firststamps 160 years prior. And clearly many other folks agree, as the initial LibertyBell “Forever” stamp debuted on April 12, 2007 and by July of that year theUSPS had sold 1.2 billion (that’s not a typo, billion with a “b”) of them.

5)     Repealof the Stamp Act (2016): This one is a suggestion from my wife, and reallyjust a damn funny (in the ironic, wry smile way) fact: that for the 250thanniversary of the repealof the Stamp Act, the USPS issued, you guessed it, a stamp. What else do Ineed to say?

NextUSPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 22, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: The Pony Express

[On July 26,1775, the Second Continental Congress establishedthe United States postal system. So this week for the 250thanniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories ofthe USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On threefigures who helped shape the short-lived but enduringly iconic Westernmail route.

1)     AlexanderMajors: The Pony Express was founded by a trio ofMissouri businessmen, co-owners of a freight and drayage company: WilliamRussell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell. But it was Majors who broughthis distinct identity and perspective most fully to the enterprise: he wasdeeply religious, and required every Pony Express rider to carry a special-editionBible and signan oath “before the Great and Living God” that they would “under no circumstances,use profane language, … drink no intoxicating liquors,” and so on. Given the stereotypesof the Wild West and its occupants, images to which I would argue our cultural collectivememories of the Pony Express have oftenbeen connected, this founding fact reminds us that histories are alwaysdistinct from the mythos.

2)     JohnsonWilliam “Billy” Richardson: The identity of the first Pony Express rider isdisputed by historians, with Johnny Fry the othermost likely candidate. By even if he wasn’t the definitive “first,” BillyRichardson was unquestionably one of the handful of riders who inaugurated theWestbound route (from Missouri to California) in April1860, after a formal ceremony in St. Joseph, Missouri which featuredspeeches by Russell and Majors along with St. Joseph Mayor M. Jeff Thompson. Moreover,Richardson rode for the Express for its entire 18 months of operation, andthen, coincidentally but symbolically, passed away from pneumonia just a fewmonths after the Express went out of business in late 1861. He was buried atFort Laramie, a Pony Express station in Wyoming, one more telling connectionbetween this foundationalrider and the route’s iconography.

3)     WilliamF. Cody: That hyperlinked Wyoming History article traces two equally trueyet also directly contradictory facts: William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody iswithout question the most famous Pony Express rider; and yet Cody never rodefor the Pony Express. As with so much of Cody’smythos, and of course the Wild West mythos overall, this particular mythwas very much self-constructed, with Cody frequently telling and retelling thestory of an iconic Pony Express ride he undertook at the tender age of 14. Andthat story became an enduring one in the legacies of both Cody and the PonyExpress, as illustrated by author Elmer Sherwood’s1940 children’s biography BuffaloBill and the Pony Express. Perhaps including Cody in this post willmean that the fictitious association continues, but I don’t think we canAmericanStudy the Pony Express without including such defining and enduringmyths.

NextUSPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 21, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Ben Franklin

[On July 26,1775, the Second Continental Congress establishedthe United States postal system. So this week for the 250thanniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories ofthe USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On innovationsfrom three stages in the career of the firstPostmaster General of the US.

1)     Postmasterof Philadelphia: In 1737, when Franklin was only 30 years old, he wasappointed postmaster of his adopted home city of Philadelphia. In his Autobiographyhe freely admitted that he took the job largely to support his ownnewspaper, the Gazette, writing, “tho’ the salary was small, itfacilitated the correspondence that improv’d my newspaper, increased the numberdemanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so that it came toafford me a considerable income.” But even if Franklin was mercenary about thisnew role, he was too much of an inventor not to innovate in it as well,and his most lasting such innovation was printing in the newspaper lists ofpeople who had letters waiting for them at the post office, a practice thatmany other papers would take up for decades to come.

2)     Joint Postmaster General for the Crown: Aftera decade and a half in this role, Franklin was apparently ready to move up, andwhen Postmaster General for the Crown ElliottBenger became ill in 1753, Franklin lobbied for the role. Eventually he andVirginia’s WilliamHunter were chosen as JointPostmasters for the Crown, a role that Franklin would hold for the next twodecades. He would bring a number of his Philly innovations to that nationalrole, including the aforementioned printed newspaper lists (which he instructedpostmasters around the country to do); but would also add new ones, such asimplementing nighttime service that led to far faster mail delivery. Ever thesuccessful businessman, Franklin had the British Crown Post registeringits first profit by 1760.  

3)     Postmaster General of the US: In 1774, the Britishgovernment dismissed Franklin from his role for being too sympathetic to the colonies;but as they so often did, things worked out fine for Ben, as just a year afterwardhe was partof the Second Continental Congress and, on July 26th, 1775, was appointedby that body to be the first Postmaster General of the newly created UnitedStates Postal Service. In that role, overseeingall post offices “from Falmouth in New England to Savannah in Georgia,” Franklintruly nationalized the postal service for the first time, building on theseprior experiences with both a city’s and a royal postal system but helpingcreate the federally organized institution that has endured to this day (andhopefully will continue, on which see the weekend post).

NextUSPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 19-20, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Other Scholars on the Film

[A couplemonths back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either ofus has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. This weekI’ve AmericanStudied different contexts for this phenomenal work, leading up tothis weekend post sharing great pieces from fellow SinnersStudiers!]

As you wouldexpect, there have been tons of thoughtful and important responses to Sinners,from FilmStudiers and AmericanStudiers alike. Here, in no particular order, area handful of them—please share more in comments!

One of my twofavorite current reviewers, OutlawVern

Blueskythoughts from my other favorite reviewer, VaughnJoy

RichardNewby for The Hollywood Reporter (as also shared by Vaughn)

KahlilGreene for his History Can’t Hide newsletter

Andfinally, make sure to check out Jemar Tisby and Keisha N. Blain’s vital Sinners syllabus for the AAIHS’s BlackPerspectives blog

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other Sinners responses, including your own, that you’dadd?

July 18, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Interracial Romance

[A couplemonths back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either ofus has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hopeyou’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do soright now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired bydifferent layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: Itried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’llcompletely be able to for the rest of the week (and in fact will be spoiling agood bit in today’s post). If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do soand then come back to read this series!]

On anotherimportant layer to the film’s mid-credits scene, and why I love it so much.

First thingsfirst: the most beautiful romance in Sinners, and the one that produced theother closest nominee (alongside the mid-credits scene, as I discussed yesterdayand to which I’ll return in a moment) for my favorite scene in the film (onelocated right at the conclusion, and one that I’m not going to spoil), is betweenWonmi Mosaku’s Annie and Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke (one of the two twins Jordanplays). Maybe I’m biased because both that romance and that stunning climacticscene also connect incredibly movingly and importantly to their shared experienceof parenting, at its most tragic but also and especially at its most enduringand defining. But in any case, Annie and Smoke are one of the most moving and inspiringcouples I’ve seen on screen in years, and I didn’t want to share a post aboutromance in Sinners without paying tribute to them (and once more to Mosaku’scaptivating performance, as I did in Tuesday’s post as well).

But Sinnersfeatures other romances too—indeed, the subject of every post in this week’sseries could be connected to a couple—and one that grows in depth andsignificance across the course of the film is that between Michael B. Jordan’sStack (the other twin) and Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary. What seems at the start ofthe film to be just a pair of resentful exes (if exes with a very complicated personaland familial history, as Mary’s mother had basically raised the twins aftertheir own parents passed), and then evolves into a lustful and ultimately destructivereunion, becomes (again, SPOILERS aplenty here) in the mid-credits scene aliterally eternal romance, with both Stack and Mary now vampires who aretogether in the 1990s (and dressed appropriately, in a very funny visual gag)and seemingly will be able to stay together for all time (unless someone stakesthem or they get caught out in the sun, anyway). I wrote in Monday’s post abouthow Coogler complicates his vampire villains, and this final depiction ofvampires in the film does so even more fully, as I would argue we have to beexcited that this couple have been able to get and stay together, and that’sthanks to head vamp Remmick.  

But theirshared vampirism is not the aspect of Stack and Mary’s identities that makes melove this scene and romance so much. The pair are an interracial couple, andnot just in the obvious sense—Mary (apparentlylike Steinfeld herself) is herself 1/8th African American (an identitycategory known for a long time in American history and culture as an “octoroon”),making this pair even more fully multiracial and cross-cultural than they mightappear. I don’t imagine that Coogler was thinking specifically of WilliamFaulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! when he wrote that aspect of thecharacter, but that’s one of our most prominent culturaldepictions of this identity category, and moreover I would put Sinnersalongside Absalom on the short list of cultural works that deal most powerfullywith intersecting themes of race, region, history, art, memory, and more. Andof course multiracial identities and interracial romances aren’t just the stuffof American literature and film and culture—they are at the heart of our collectivehistories, including if not especially ourlegal and political ones. Just one more way in which the stunning Sinnersis a must-watch for all AmericanStudiers.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 17, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: The Blues

[A couplemonths back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either ofus has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hopeyou’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do soright now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired bydifferent layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: Itried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’llcompletely be able to for the rest of the week (and in fact will be spoiling agood bit in today’s post). If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do soand then come back to read this series!]

On two stunningscenes that embody the best of a foundational musical genre.

In lieu ofa full first paragraph of my own, I want to share three prior posts where I’vefeatured student work on the Blues and American literature and culture. Mostespecially that includes FSU English Studies alum SandraHamilton’s great Guest Post on the Blues. But I’ve also highlighted excellentstudent papers inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” in twodifferent semester reflection posts, hereand here.Hope you’ll check out those posts featuring our awesome FSU students, and thencome on back for two layers to how Sinners BluesStudies.

Welcomeback! By far the most famous scene in Sinners—and justifiably so, as it’sone of the most stunning cinematic sequences I’ve ever seen—is the central moment (that’sonly a snippet of it, but it’ll give you a sense) when main character Sammie(talented young musician and songwriter Miles Caton, making hisfilm debut) performs his original Blues song “I Lied to You,” and the jukejoint transforms to become a home to musical performances from past and future,many different cultures, countless communities. It’s a performance and sequenceso red-hot that it literally burns down the juke joint (well, I guess it metaphoricallydoes as the building remains standing after, but audiences watch it burn down atthe scene’s climax), but it’s also something much more powerful still: the mostevocative depiction I’ve ever encountered of the ways that music connects us,across space and time, across culture and community, across identities andstories, across all that can divide us. As I briefly mentioned in Monday’spost, the film’s vampires seem to want something similar with their music; butthe truth is, their performances don’t come close to capturing these goals incomparison with Sammie’s.

And thenthere’s the film’s hugely important mid-credits scene (significant SPOILERS inwhat follows—if you haven’t seen the film, stop reading, go see it, and stayfor the credits!). In it the film jumps ahead 60 years to show us an elderlySammie (now played by Blueslegend Buddy Guy), who has survived, successfully pursued his dreams of musicalstardom, and apparently opened his own Blues joint, named after a significantlove interest from the film and in which we see him reconnecting with multiplelayers of his past. I think this was my favorite scene in the film (acompetitive list to be sure), and the main reason is that it embodies somethingvery specific about both the Blues and African American art: the way that theyso often express hope not in spite of, but directly through, our hardest andmost painful histories and stories, personal and collective alike. I wasreminded in that moment of my favorite sequence of lines from Hughes’s “The WearyBlues”: “Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool/He played that sad raggy tune likea musical fool./Sweet Blues!/Coming from a black man’s soul.” Sinners isabout many things, as I hope this whole series illustrates, but at its heart itseeks to embody (and does quite beautifully) something very similar to whatHughes expresses there.

LastSinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 16, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: The Mississippi Chinese

[A couplemonths back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either ofus has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hopeyou’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do soright now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired bydifferent layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: Itried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completelybe able to for the rest of the week. If you haven’t seen Sinners yet,please do so and then come back to read this series!]

On a 1970sbook and 2010s article that help contextualize one of the film’s most uniquefamilies.

In 1971,the late, great historian and educator JamesLoewen (whom I was profoundly proud to call a mentor andfriend after I landed him for the 2011 NEASA Conference keynote lecture) publishedhis first book, TheMississippi Chinese: Between Black and White. A revision of his HarvardSociology doctoral dissertation, if one no doubt significantly expanded after Loewen began teachingat Mississippi’s historically black Tougaloo College, The MississippiChinese utilizes both extensive interviews with current members of thissizeable but often overlooked Mississippi community and historicaldocumentation of that community’s post-Civil War origins and growth over thesubsequent century. Although the exclusion of the community’s children from segregatedwhite schools was deemed Constitutional by the Supreme Court in Gong Lum v. Rice(1927), Loewen makes a compelling case that this community were and are, histitle suggests, complicatedly located between the state and region’s two most prominentracialized categories.

Loewen’sbook focuses on the Mississippi Chinese’s historical and sociologicalrealities, while the award-winning 2012 PhilologicalQuarterly article “The Foreignerin Yoknapatawpha: Rethinking Race in the Global South,” authored by my collegefriend and blog GuestPoster Heidi Kim, is most interested in representations of this community,especially in the fictions of Mississippi’s favorite literary son William Faulkner.As Heidi describes her argument in that above hyperlinked summary, she both notes“Faulkner’s extension of racial hysteria over miscegenation to include” theMississippi Chinese but also, and importantly, finds in his works “thepossibility of eventual social intermixture and inclusion in his AmericanSouth.” Which makes her argument at least roughly parallel to Loewen’s (if ofcourse informed by four decades’ worth of further research into this communityand its contexts) in seeing this community as part of its larger Mississippisetting and society, yet also reflecting, in cultural works as well as in historicaland sociological realities, the possibility of something distinct within thatworld.  

It's avery nerdy thing to say, I realize, but nothing made me more excited whilewatching Sinners (a competitive category I assure you) than realizingthat Coogler had includedthe Mississippi Chinese among his central characters, with the family ofGrace Chow (Li Jun Li), her husband Bo (Yao), and their teenage daughter Lisa(Helena Hu). As that hyperlinked Variety article highlights, Coogler hasfamilial connections to this community through his multiracial wifeZinzi Evans, reminding us that, whatever the Supreme Court and other racistentities might argue, all of these American communities are deeply intertwined inour history and present alike. But in his representation of these MississippiChinese characters, and especially in a long establishing shot early in thefilm that takes audiences between the family’s two parallel grocery storeslocated on the Black and white sides of Clarksdale’s main street, Coogler alsoreveals his awareness of the community’s in-between status—and creates anothercultural work that, like Faulkner’s, illustrates while also ultimatelycomplicating that vision of the unique community known as the MississippiChinese.  

NextSinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 15, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Hoodoo

[A couplemonths back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either ofus has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hopeyou’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do soright now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired bydifferent layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: Itried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in yesterday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completelybe able to for the rest of the week. If you haven’t seen Sinners yet,please do so and then come back to read this series!]

On twoliterary predecessors to our favorite character (and one of the most fascinatingstory elements) in the film.

In thepivotal Chapter X of the Narrative of the Lifeof Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass writes about an influentialencounter with a fellow enslaved man named Sandy Jenkins. The teenaged Douglasshas gotten on the wrong side of a particularly violent enslaver and infamous “slaver-breaker”named Covey, and has temporarily run away from the plantation rather thanrisk a horrific whipping. Sandy, clearly a hoodoo practitioner although Douglassdoes not use the word nor define Sandy as spiritual in any overarching way,gives Douglass “a certain root” which will protect him from whippings ofany kind. Although Douglass doubts its powers, he follows Sandy’s advice and isnever again whipped by Covey, although his own violent resistance to the manmust be accounted as part of the shift as well. That ambiguity leads Douglass towrite that “I was half inclined to think the root to be something morethan I at first had taken it to be,” and in any case he seemingly keeps it withhim, perhaps recognizing that whatever his own beliefs, slavery is a world inwhich broader and more powerful forces than any individual are in play.

Half acentury after Douglass published his narrative, the African American authorCharles Chesnutt developed that last idea much more fully in his wonderfulshort story cycle The ConjureWoman (1899). I said a lot about what makes that book so complex andpowerful inthis post on its first story, “The Goophered Grapevine” (originally publishedinThe Atlantic in 1887). As I discussed in that post, for Chesnuttconjure (a parallel term/concept to hoodoo) is largely symbolic, on twointerconnected levels: for the enslaved people in the stories recounted by thestoryteller character Uncle Julius, people for whom conjure reflects both the horrificand the potentially resistant and even liberatory realities of their lives andworld; and for Julius himself, who weaves his conjure tales in order to achievegoals in his own present, post-Civil War life. Which is to say, Chesnutt usesthe genre of the conjure tale much like he does the genre of plantationfiction—capitalizing on audience expectations, those of Julius’s whiteaudience inside the stories and Chesnutt’s (largely) white readers for them, tooffer a powerful counter-narrative to dominant American perceptions of slavery,race, history, and more.

Toward theend of yesterday’s post, I mentioned that Wonmi Mosaku’s Annie was my wife’sand my favorite character in Sinners. There are lots of layers that makethe character and performance so great, including an incredibly beautiful finalscene that I will most definitely not spoil here. But a big part of it is thatAnnie is a hoodoo practitioner, an element of both her identity and the worldthat her husband Smoke (one of the two Michael B. Jordan twins) initially dismisses(emphasizing instead money and power as the world’s fundamental forces) but thateventually becomes crucial for everyone’s survival once the vampires startdoing their thing. Annie’s knowledge of “haints” and how to fight themcertainly fits with the symbolic and social sides of hoodoo/conjure that we seein Chesnutt’s stories, just as we can read Coogler’s vampires metaphorically tobe sure. But at the same time, these layers to Annie’s character are presentedmatter-of-factly and accepted as such by those around her, reminding us that,like Sandy Jenkins, hoodoo practitioners remained an important part of BlackSouthern communities for centuries. I was so impressed and moved to see thisconjure woman in Coogler’s historical film.

NextSinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?