Summary
As Eli walks away, Nana calls to him, saying, "We carry these memories inside of we...We don't know where the recollections come from. Sometimes we dream them, but we carry these memories inside of we." Eli remains upset, crying about the fact that Africans have been so debased in America, whereas in their home countries they were kings and queens and built great cities. "I'm trying to give you something to take North with you, along with all your dreams!" Nana yells at him. She advises him to call on his ancestors for guidance through his difficult time, and we see images of the children dancing on the beach as Nana gives him her advice.
Nana tells Eli that she wants him to keep the family together in the north; "That's the challenge facing all you free Negroes," she says. We then see Eli working as a smith at home. Inside, Eula is in a nightgown, when suddenly Eli begins breaking things with a large bat, breaking some bottles that are hanging from a tree.
We see a child running on a beach, while Nana watches. The wind is picking up and we see Eula pulling a piece of paper down from the wall, when Eli enters the house and looks at her. He asks her who impregnated her, and she says, "Nothing good can come from knowing!" He holds her for a moment, then storms out of the house and runs into a field, where a large group of horses runs by. He sees a child run through a nearby clearing.
The child goes and touches the hem of Haagar's dress, then runs away. Haagar yells at the sky about how glad she is to be leaving the island. We then see Iona and her sister going to look at the water, where they see the boat carrying Viola and Yellow Mary. Meanwhile, an older woman, a grandmother, puts pieces of okra on the temples of some children to look like horns. They are making gumbo, and they are excited about it.
Nana sits in a chair weaving a basket and contemplating getting older and closer to death. She contemplates the fact that it was a horrible time to be alive, in the wake of slavery, how slave's hands got dyed from the indigo dye used on the plantation, and their spirits "numb from the sting of fever from the rice fields."
The Unborn Child narrates, "It was an age of beginnings, a time of promises. The newspaper said it was a time for everyone, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless."
Eula sits with a group of mothers on the beach, when suddenly Viola arrives on the beach, welcomed by a throng of people. Out of a clearing comes Iona, her sister Yellow Mary, and Trula. Yellow Mary is the subject of some gossip and derision for being in a same-sex relationship and as they watch her, one of the elders says, "Yellow Mary gone off and got ruined."
Seeing Iona with Yellow Mary, Haagar calls her over and tells her to warn Nana about Yellow Mary's return. "It'll most likely kill her to see this heifer done returned," she says, disdainfully. Iona tries to resist her mother's derision, but Haagar walks away quickly. Mary hugs Eula and introduces her to Trula, as the rest of the islanders look on skeptically.
Mary goes over to Haagar, who is being rude to Trula, then hands Haagar a box of store-bought biscuits. "They say a woman who knows how to cook is very pretty," Haagar says to Mary, referring to the biscuits, but Mary just laughs. As Mary and Trula walk towards the water, the women gossip about the fact that Mary has come back for something.
Eli throws rocks into the ocean, while some women collect crabs to eat on the beach. Another woman plucks a chicken, while another shucks corn, and they talk. Later, Viola reads a Christian text to a group of children, and tells them that she was a sinner when she left the island, and that Christianity brought her a new life.
Mary visits Nana and tells her she wanted to surprise her. Examining her granddaughter, Nana notices a charm necklace that Mary tells her is for bringing good luck on long journeys.
Snead sets up his camera to take pictures of the islanders and talks to some of the men of the island.
Mary and Trula sit in a tree smoking marijuana and laughing hysterically. Nearby Eula stands and tells them that she's never gone fishing because there's a place there where a girl got drowned by her owner. Eula asks Mary how to say "water" in Spanish, before telling her she was visited by her mother the previous night. "I need to see my mama, I need to talk to her," Eula says, telling Mary that she put a letter to her mother under the bed with a glass of water. Mary laughs at her and calls her a "backwater Geechee girl."
When Mary disparages the island, Eula resists her, but Mary insists that "the only way for things to change is to keep moving." Mary then tells Eula that she wants to find a good man that she can "depend on...just to know that I could if I had to."
Analysis
The pain that Eli is experiencing, that he describes to Nana, is not only personal but historical. The fact that his wife was raped and is bearing a child that is not his is not simply a random incident, but a reflection of the ways that African Americans' lives are degraded and damaged in white America. Crying at Nana, he reminds her that in Africa, their people were kings and queens and built great cities, but in America they must suffer atrocities. Thus, the feeling of hurt and helplessness that Eli feels is not simply as a result of the event of rape, but also a result of a much broader historical wound that the rape reflects, the disenfranchisement suffered by Africans in colonial and postcolonial America.
The generational division that comes up between Nana and Eli is in their differing attitudes towards this historical pain. While Nana accepts their struggle as part of a greater history, and expresses the necessity of learning from the past and identifying as a keeper of history, Eli wants only to move forward, as the past for him only reminds him of his own subjugation. Nana uses spiritualism and a sense of the metaphysical to connect to something beyond the pain of the earthly, but Eli insists that this kind of spiritual life does not affect the violence done to him on earth, and so he has no choice but to seek out other ways of life.
The visual imagery and cinematography in the film, which was shot by Arthur Jafa, is evocative and at times dreamlike, which aids the narrative and adds a luster to the storytelling. At times, the images themselves seem to build a bridge between the realist world of Eli Peazant and the more spiritual metaphysical world so encouraged by Nana. As Nana and Eli quarrel, we see images of Gullah children dancing on the beach, all wearing clean white clothes and connecting with one another through laughter and song. The photography becomes slow motion as Nana advises Eli to listen to his ancestors and try to learn something through building a connection with his familial history. We see the children as if in an ecstatic ritual on the beach, and the viewer is transported into a more spiritual, dreamlike domain, in which reality and clear answers give way to a vaguer sense of history and memory.
The figure of the Unborn Child further illuminates the film's blurring of the past, present, and future. Just as Nana believes that the past and the future are connected, that time is circular and that things repeat themselves, the Unborn Child seems to confirm this notion. Just her role as a person who is yet to be born gives her a strange perspective on the goings on. She is present to the action of the film, but her status as an "unborn child" gives her a kind of omniscience, a special knowledge that serves to bolster Nana's perspective of time and ancestry. The Unborn Child is at once an entity that has yet to come into being and a wise figure who already knows everything there is to know.
A person with a strong connection to the island, but who also disrupts its social order in major ways, is Yellow Mary. While Yellow Mary's arrival from the city with a female lover causes a stir among the women of the island, prompting them to disparage her as a hussy and a heifer, Mary shares a special bond with the elder, Nana, who holds her face tenderly. Mary disparages the island as desolate, trapped in "the muddy waters of history," and yet she has an affection towards it as well that allows her to connect with certain people there. While she is a subversive figure because of her curiosity, sophistication, and queerness, she also fits into the fabric of the community in unexpected ways.
