Classic 'Daughters of the Dust' Remains a Timeless Tribute to the Past

Daughters of the Dust restored film poster.

Julie Dash's phenomenal Daughters of the Dust embraces the countless ways migration-- this magical realism film's essential theme-- has impacted the Black experience in America. This powerful, riveting narrative poetically touches on how ancient traditions of the Gullah passed down generation to generation and became lost in its fragile handling, evaporated in the midst of displacement, stolen, fresh saltwater Africans desperately grasping onto their history whilst building a new legacy.

Three women: Trula (Trula Hoosier, top left), Eula (Alva Rogers, center), and Yellow Mary (top right). 

Off the coast of South Carolina, on Ibo Island, the Peazant family is led by matriarch Nana, an elder tied to ritualistic healing methods that involve utilizing the earth and carrying spirits of the ancestors. The other women find her practices backward and downright laughable, seeming already influenced by mainland thoughts, one metaphorical migration that of a Westernized mindset. Things are about to change, however, because most of the Peazants plan to move to the safe haven of North-- where historically slaves believed a promised land from the violent South. The water is how they and their ancestors arrived and thus, how they shall leave on a boat by their choice. So the going away celebration goes underway. Men dressed in their best jackets and pants while women don elegant white Victorian lace except Nana who is not going with them. 

Viola is outraged at the talk of no heaven from Nana.

Approaching via boat themselves are Viola and Yellow Mary. They bring sophisticated worldliness and culture, delivering two different forms of education. Whereas the schooled Viola comes introducing Christianity and photography by the way of the enthusiastic Mr. Snead, the well traveled Yellow Mary has a companion named Trula and a series of harsh stories, including a family who tried to keep her like property. Viola lives in a bubble and Yellow Mary paints a grim reality. Yet few women are happy about Yellow Mary's return. She is quickly ostracized, mainly by Haager, a proud, sanctimonious woman married into the family. 

The Peazant girls have dreamy perceptions of what the North would be like.

Several stories are interwoven together during this last family gathering. Eula and are expecting a child (the Unborn Child), but Eli has trouble adjusting after Eula's horrific rape. The newlyweds are still in the love phase. Iona and St. Lucien Lastchild's forbidden romance is tested. Viola's Western religion versus Nana's "hoodoo" causes a huge fuss. Through it all, the narrating Unborn Child travels on the island, her euberic spirit interacting with several characters, Nana most importantly, before reaching her parents.

Many poignant scenes feature women in the cusp of each other's company, offering strength, wisdom, and pure joy.

This family tied by blood and honor on this sacred land are moving forward to the larger landscape, to merge in and blend with American society, reluctantly leaving Nana and the old time rituals behind. The visual language is just as relative as the letters being read, broken memories of spoken are taught, and wispy book pages filled with symbolic text are turned by fingers and magic wind. Indigo also has a journey, from the forever stained hands of dyers to the inked icons and the Unborn Child's ribbon, there is a history in this precious color. 

Black girls are reading, daydreaming, existing. 

This film is one of the first to truly capture the validity of Black women's voices and their bodies. They are presented in a humanizing, nuanced light, multifaceted, loving, nurturing, cynical. Their agency and purpose grants them more freedom and dialogue than the supporting men. Between fixing each other's hair, shucking corn and prepping okra, and having conversation, these sweet women are responsible for the heart and integrity of the family, keep it alive. Some stellar scenes include Yellow Mary, Trula, and Eula bonding beautifully, everyone kneeling down to kiss Nana's "hand" that contains her mother's hair, and Eula defiantly calling out the hypocrisy and standing up for Yellow Mary. It is such a shame that these talented actresses (Cora Lee Day, Barbara O, Alva Rogers) didn't pick up accolades for their tremendous efforts.

Still, Daughters of the Dust is a treat. After all, food activist/writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor makes a lovely cameo and she is the subject of one of Dash's future projects. 

Nana (Cora Lee Day) and Yellow Mary (Barbara O) share a tender moment.

Memorable, fully fleshed out characters, Arthur Jafa's gorgeous cinematography, creative hairstyles that depict the incredible versatility of Black women's hair, and the harrowing music that haunts the eardrums tie together Daughters of the Dust's impressive longevity. This award winning film is a pivotal piece of art that gives Black women pedestals to bravely share their candid stories of pain, sorrow, love, anger, and longing with each other. As Dash allows them to reflect on the new world up North, religion/spirituality, womanism, and heritage, there is a real, undeniable attention to dignity and grace in every scene. The thorough research, the genuine authenticity are reasons enough that this film is worth watching again and again.

Black Women Filmmakers of the 1970's And Where They Are Now

Barbara O (who played the wonderful Yellow Mary in Daughters of the Dust) is the title woman living simply above mountaintops.

Lightbox Film Center shared six pieces from four black women writer/directors. Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Alile Sharon Larkin, Fronza Woods, and the late Jacqueline Shearer (Eyes on the Prize) were granted rare showing, some 16mm films seen for the first time in years. These profoundly significant works made it important to know who these four women pioneers were, why they mattered, and where they are now. Unfortunately, they have paltry IMDb biographies. The information is further scarce on Woods and Shearer. No good quality photographs of them exist on the internet.

The black nun writes profusely.

Diary of an African Nun, a black and white picture, eloquently rendered a great Alice Walker short story. Pious Ugandan nun is indebted to her white sisters, the ones who inspired quiet marital bliss. She is comforted by cold showers, picturesque window views, and writing daily prose. The narrative, however, grows darker as she reveals pangs of being an "exotic stranger," a fascinating relic to travelers who question her nunnery decision. Among dangling rosary beads and hinged cross, she writes and speaks with soft tenderness, a vision of black woman innocence draped in demure black and white cloth. Suddenly, an escape from a Gothic religious horror, the camera pans creepily onto that hanging cross, zooming onto white savior version of Jesus, the tormented angles of his body, the sorrowful downcast eyes, the nails in his feet. As the black nun narrates, the music is stilted, passionate as the fire of her voice, articulating her agency, the push and pull of freedom and caged bird.

Linda Martina Young embodies Nina Simone's Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches in Dash's Four Women (1977).

Four Women uses hauntingly raw albeit controversial Nina Simone ballad. Linda Martina Young, a light skinned dancer, plays all four characters. While Saffronia is yellow and Sweet Thing is tan, Aunt Sarah and Peaches are black and brown respectively. The solitary dancer moved to piano keys trembling underneath inherited pain following struggles of black women archetypes/colorism. In each segment, she changes clothes, hats, and hairstyles, signifying time periods. As sophisticated the choreography and luscious the cinematography, it couldn't escape problematic flaws of using this one sole body to portray what Nina specifically conveys.

While What Happened, Nina Simone?, directed by Liz Garbous, a white woman was heavily praised, Cynthia Mort's Nina was a fabricated, grossly ingenuous mess featuring Zoe Saldana in black face. Everyone wrote about the disgrace including Nina's daughter Simone and MacArthur Fellow Ta-Neshi Coates. Now Adepero Oduye (inspired by Coates' essay) and Gabourey Sidibe have joined in the fray. In her second directed short, To Be Free, Oduye plays Nina. Sidibe's version of Four Women, called The Tale of Four, stars Ledisi as Aunt Sara, Meagan Kimberly Smith as Saffronia, Dana Gourrier as Sweet Thing, and Aisha Hinds as Peaches. Playwright Christina Ham takes the song to heightened degrees. She plays Peaches, who meets the other three at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Moreover, though Dash's Four Woman presents a stunning visual, but it falls flat in terms of the meaning behind this powerful song.

Out of the four black women filmmakers, New York City born Julie Dash has the most concrete biography. She is present in social media, including an active Twitter account. With Daughters of the Dust, released in 1991, Dash is the first African American woman to have a film released in the United States- a little late than never. A member of the L.A. Rebellion, during her years at UCLA, she joined other filmmakers such as Haile Gerima, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Barbara McCullough for the right to show and make black centric films. She directed music videos for Tracy Chapman, Tony! Toni! Tone!, and Adriana Evans. She has been nominated for many awards including the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directional Achievement for Primetime Movies Made for Television-- another black woman first. Her films have won NAACP and Black Reel Awards. Daughters of the Dust has been restored, remastered, and rereleased, earning a well-earned place in the Library of Congress.

Still keeping busy, Dash is currently working on Traveling Notes for a Geechee Girl and directed Queen Sugar's ninth episode of season two (coming up in October).

Despite what IMDb and Google would have a researcher believe, Angela Burnett, who played intelligent Ruby in Alile Sharon Larkin's Your Children Come Back to You (1979), is niece of renowned L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Charles Burnett and costume designer Gaye Shannon-Burnett- not their daughter.

Your Children Come Back to You strongly nailed everything that is still wrong with American society. The little girl protagonist embodied overused adjective "woke." In a poverty stricken ghetto rife with trash and struggle, lives a single pregnant mom raising this feisty precocious child. She is frank, way above her years. Her wild imagination places Africa with positive symbolism, implanted by her father who left his young family for Africa. A wealthy married sister is obsessed with adopting her brother's niece, believing that welfare is an improper place to raise a child.

"Are you adopted, Auntie?"

The little girl recites an allegorically layered story to her spoiled, disillusioned aunt, that specifically addresses this question asked three times. It goes (paraphrasing): once upon a time there was a Mother (Africa) whose children were stolen from her (ala slavery). She wept and wept, grieving each loss. The thieves instilled their way of thinking (colonialism) into the children. Whilst forcing them to work hard, they gave them new names, new religions, new languages. Eventually, however, some of the children (adults) come back to her (Africa), one by one, remembering the gift of life (ancestral heritage) that she gave them.

The outraged aunt immediately wanted her niece away from this school too, glaringly revealing her self-hatred, ignorance. Now in America, it is easy to manipulate children, to persuade them into buying fictional accounts-- "Christopher Columbus was great," "treasure our founding fathers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson," and so forth. Conditioned individuals, like the aunt, believe everything they were ever told and strive to live as closely to white people as possible. With fancy house containing polished silver and glass, the little girl knew that her aunt allowed herself to be adapted, to allow being rich in materialism to outweigh hereditary affluence.   

Your Children Come Back to You is an exceptional piece that sound be shown widely. It has a terrific message, asking the audience, who do you want to be-- the aunt, the mother, or the child?

In addition to winning film awards from the Black American Cinema Society, Black Filmmaker Foundation, and runner up prize from FILMEX, Chicago hailed Alile Sharon Larkin is an author, artist, and award winning educator, having taught early education to college. Dreadlocks and the Three Bears Productions, her production company, "creates Afrocentric and global multimedia and arts experiences for children and families." She continued making more shorts including The Kitchen, A Different Image, and a children's animated film, Dreadlocks and the Three Bears.

A still from Fannie's Film (1979).

In Killing Time, a satirical soliloquy, a brown actress contemplates suicide. When the film opens, she appears already gone, lying on her bed, eyes closed, body still, phone off the hook. A second flashes, she is up like a charged battery, sweeping through a chain of motion, trying on different clothes, flopping back and forth on wanna be deathbed. She plans this death like a stage set, wanting it to be theatrically creative. Her hilarious inner monologue is sarcastic deadpan, a drone pitch of someone defeated, purposeless. There is no explanation to her misery. Suicide is a strange road to take humor on, but between burning undergarments in the oven, deciding an exacto blade is too messy, and ripping crisp white pants ruins a jump off the fire escape, Woods does so with morbidly fascinating delivery.

Frannie's Film, lighthearted and sweet, centers on a charming elder cleaning woman who absolutely loves her role at an all white gym. Fannie is not the average well-to-do black custodian. She talks about her upbringing with glee as the camera focuses in and out on her wiping down a mirror, giving her visibility and invisibility at once. In the same breath, she can be candid about simplicity of marriage. Her independence is a source of pleasure, where she has everything she needs, and is fulfilled, rustic voice singing "Amazing Grace."

Fronza Woods, according to Women Make Movies, is "a Detroiter turned Manhattanite." In addition to her only two short films (a huge, crushing loss), she worked as an assistant sound engineer on The Brother From Another Planet (which stars Emmy winner Joe Morton) and taught as an Associate Professor of Film at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

She lives in France and has co-translated several books on aesthetics with Simon Pleasance.

This tiny cap of Jackie Shearer's A Minor Altercation (1977) seems to be only proof the short film existed.

Brilliant A Minor Altercation is the longest at half an hour long. In a girl's bathroom at a Boston high school, a white girl, angry that she didn't get into a computer class, instigates a melee with a black student, who the counselor coerced into taking the class. They are both suspended for fighting. Furthermore, the larger complex issue is how both families discuss the matter in their respective homes. The women operate on soothing levels, wanting their daughters to stay at the school, but the fathers want opposite, the angry white father going as far as using the "n" word to state a racist point.

Both mothers decide to head up to the school, three days before they're supposed to, in order to discuss the matter-- primarily a concern of the guidance counselor. Of course the guidance counselor is not present. The early arriving black mother is faced with atrocious disrespect whereas the later white mother is cooed and prodded, even allowed to go into the principal's office first.

A Minor Altercation  is another that should be shown in classrooms. The discussion about how families discuss race/racial problems operates on different wavelengths.

Boston native Jackie Shearer was a graduate of Brandeis University. She also founded a documentary company and worked for her hometown radio and TV stations. As a documentarian, Shearer wrote and directed episodes of Eyes on the Prize and produced/directed American Experience's episode, Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry.

On IMDb, rests this sole personal statement in her barren biography:

Much to my own relief, I found that there was nothing for me to be ashamed of in the story of Blacks and their participation in the Civil War. Black soldiers hadn't been the unwitting dupes I had once imagined them to be. It was these men who were the bedrock of abolitionism, not well-intentioned, benevolent whites as history has claimed.

Shearer sadly passed away at the age of 46 of colon cancer four days before her birthday.