Summary
Some men talk about the upcoming election, as Snead sets up his camera. Snead laughs at the customs of the islanders, and Viola laughs along saying, "They spoil their children with dreams, wishes, magic. But then, they're the most important members of the family: the children and the old souls."
Mary and Eula walk along the beach laughing and talking, when suddenly Haagar calls to them to gather up the kids. Eula tries to get Mary to come with her, but Mary doesn't want to. Haagar speaks to Yellow Mary, saying that there are rumors she's a rich woman. Mary walks past her silently.
We see the children of the island running through the forest, Eula following. As Eula walks, the Unborn Child narrates, "My Ma said she could feel me by her side. I remember the call of my great-great-grandmother. I remember the journey home. I remember the long walk to the graveyard, to the house that I would be born in, to the picnic site. I remember, and I recall." We see a man riding a bicycle on the beach.
Viola tells Snead that even though it's been 50 years since slavery, Gullah people still give their children slave names. "Sometimes, these islanders name their babies the day of the week or the season in which they were born," she tells him, listing names and nicknames. Eula looks at some ornaments hanging from a tree, and Eli visits a grave.
We see Eula in a trance-like state in the graveyard, and the spirit of her unborn child runs towards her and into her body. We see a man riding a bicycle on the beach, with a little boy riding on the handlebars. A man, Daddy Mac Peazant, the patriarch, gives a speech to the whole community honoring the elders and talking about the imminent crossing to the mainland. He goes on to say, "We are also here today to honor the old souls, many, who from the very, very beginning of our creation guided our journey from one world to another."
As the speech continues, Nana speaks in voiceover about the days before freedom. She talks about how in the old days, no one kept good records of births and deaths. We see images of slaves dancing on the plantation, as Nana explains that when slaves were sold, they might get torn away from their family members, and if they weren't careful, they might mate with that family member if reunited later in life. "So it was important...to keep the family ties, just like the African Griot, who would hold these records in his head, the old souls in each family could recollect all the births, deaths, marriage, and sale."
The scene shifts back to the meeting of the island community. A young boy brings Daddy Mac a turtle with a symbol painted on its shell.
Eula stands on the shore clutching her pregnant belly. Alone in the forest, she narrates a story her grandmother told her about slavery and the arrival at Ibo's Landing, and looking at an African statue floating in the nearby water. As she talks, Eli comes up alongside her on the shore, then wades into the water towards the statue. Eula's story is about how the slaves walked on water when they first arrived in America. As she tells it, Eli touches the statue, and sprinkles water on it. Just as in Eula's story of people miraculously walking on water, Eli appears to be kneeling right on the surface now, before pushing the statue away.
Eli approaches Eula and hugs her, pressing his face against her pregnant belly. The scene shifts back to the community meeting, where Daddy Mac celebrates Eula and Eli's unborn child, "the first child gonna be born up north." The islanders eat dinner together on the beach.
After the dinner, Mary and Eula sit under the umbrella they found on the beach and Mary tells Eula a story. The story is about when she saw an expensive case in a store, one she couldn't afford. "But in my mind, I put all those bad memories in that case, and I locked them there, so that I could take them out and look at them when I'd feel like it, and so I could study them when I want to, and figure it out, you know? But I didn't want them inside me."
Bilal Muhammed walks past a group of Christian men. They invite him to join them in worship, but when he walks past, they denigrate him as a "saltwater Negro" and continue on their way.
Mary tells Eula she's heading to Nova Scotia in Canada when she leaves Ibo's Landing. We see a montage of the Christian men baptizing each other in the water, then the islanders passing around a wooden bassinet, Viola's old bassinet, which she gives to Eli for his unborn child. We then see Trula walking along the water, as Mary plays with some of the young girls, who get up to feel Eula's baby in her stomach.
Snead takes a photo of some of the children under the abandoned umbrella. Some elders lie on the beach, running sand through their hands. When Snead takes a group's photo next to some wetlands, a woman warns him that there are alligators in the waters, and he gets frightened, making some of the children laugh. Bilal leads some young boys in a Muslim prayer.
When Haagar goes to talk to Nana, Nana scolds her for making fun of her superstitions. Elsewhere, Snead asks Viola to take him to Bilal, but she tells him that Bilal is backwards in his thinking, that he believes in magic. Haagar taunts Nana, telling her, "Where we're going...there'll be no need for an old woman's magic."
Snead takes the islanders' photograph.
Analysis
The connection between the living and the dead is an important theme in the film, and part of this is the notion that the children and the "old souls" are the most important members of the Gullah community. When Snead laughs about the customs of the "saltwater Negroes," Viola agrees that their superstitious and spiritual customs "spoil the children," but she also notes that children and "the old souls," referring to the elderly and those who have passed, are the most valuable members of the community. Even Viola, the Christian Peazant, the one who has left the island in search of different beliefs, sees the value of the Gullah belief system, and the ways that it honors its children and elders.
Birth and death are presented as parallel experiences by the Unborn Child. She narrates all of the things she remembers about her entrance into the world, conflating images of birth with images of death. "I remember the journey home," she narrates, referring to her journey in the womb towards birth. Then, in the next sentence she says, "I remember the long walk to the graveyard." The Unborn Child's imminent birth is aligned with Nana Peazant's imminent decline, and both are presented as journeys of sorts. In this way, the film aligns the viewer with Gullah spiritualism, and provides a window into the beliefs that fortified a culture on its way out.
Director Julie Dash blends traditional island imagery with images of the changing modern civilization and industrialization to put the dueling histories of the Gullah people and American society in relief. Islanders wear lace dresses while walking along the shore, or sitting in trees. A man rides a bicycle on the beach. Snead wears urban clothing while taking a photograph of the islanders on the beach. These juxtapositions, between the traditional and the modern, are visual shorthands for the thematic crux of the film. In looking at these images, the viewer considers, how does a culture maintain its history in the face of changing times?
In this part of the film, we see the spiritual and magical elements of the narrative introduced into the physical world. At one point, when Eula goes in search of the children in the forest, she enters a kind of trance, her body moving back and forth in a dance-like way. All of a sudden, an apparition of a child appears, and runs towards her, absorbed into her stomach. In this moment, the viewer sees the magical beliefs of the islanders made manifest; Eula's unborn child makes a physical journey into her stomach, a journey which, as we learn in the Unborn Child's voiceover, she remembers.
In Daughters of the Dust, many interpersonal problems remain unresolved, but the characters' willingness to love one another in spite of their conflicts is its own kind of resolution. Eula and Eli argue about Eula's rape, and each of them worries that their marriage is unsalvageable. Yet as time passes, they accept one another, and share a meaningful embrace at the water's edge, no talking required. While Viola looks down on her Gullah relatives, condescending to their magical thinking and antiquated, non-Christian beliefs, she gives Eula and Eli her old bassinet, and retains a certain reverence for her family's customs. Part of the beauty of the community is its members' abilities to stomach and move through their conflicts and disagreements in order to feel a collective connectivity.
