I have some reservations about going to see Harriet.
Mind you, I love her story. I have danced more than one ballet about her, the first of which involved me chained at the ankles and wrists struggling to cross the stage in a dancebelt during the auction. I cried every time. But even at 17, I could see the value in the extremeness of this measure to help contextualize Tubman’s story, to give it a world.
The big criticism I’ve heard of the movie is that it sanitizes slavery, Windexes the horror of it by neglecting to represent the day-to-day brutality of it plainly. Perhaps the effort—and I’m making assumptions toward the benefit of the doubt here—was to create a movie that people outside of the Amen corner might be able to stomach a bit better so that the history of a miraculous black paragon might have more reach. Of course, this is a noble cause.
That said, we are also in the era of revisionist history. Only a handful of years ago, the state of Texas was in the process of proactively removing slavery from history texts,
re-imagining it as some kind of indentured servitude with good experiences for some of the plantation employees. The next year, 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture, canceling any notions that the institutionalized violation of human rights with chattel slavery might be removed from America’s historical legacy.
Nice try though, Texas.
But even as recently as last year, students in a Texas high school were given an assignment to identify pros and cons of being a slave, this based on a text that contextualizes slavery as complicated and nuanced, and—get ready for it—balanced. In 2015, a McGraw-Hill textbook noted that millions of “workers” were brought over to man plantations. Despite that it sat next to a map showing immigration trends in America, it was dismissed as a copy editing error.
Maybe Texas, which contains 1/10th of the nations high school students, is motivated by politics. Maybe this is just good old fashioned white guilt assuagement. Either way, I bristle at the idea of any presentation of slavery that lacks the (violent) authenticity it deserves. Because thoughts that human value increases in proportion to ones genetic proximity to whiteness are pervasive even outside of a state trying to legislate them. And with unpunished cop shootings of unarmed black folks happening neck and neck with black voter suppression efforts, it is clear that America is still struggling to see black folks as human. I’m as uninterested in a return to covert racism and tidy respectability politics as I am in the progression of loud white supremacy agendas.
Every reminder helps.
In fact, I think in AHS Coven, Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) had it right with racist Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates): watch ALL of Roots in one sitting, until you get this.
So I’m worried that I will be angry if Harriet does the opposite, if it stays on trend with Nutribullet approaches to storytelling. I’m worried I will throw my popcorn at the screen and yell at undeserving youngsters in the theater that it was much worse than this, my assumptions about them more copious than ones I’m daring to make by writing this pre-viewing blog.
I have no answers here, and I doubt seeing Harriet, which I plan to at some point, will provide any. But the question is clear for me if I’m right about the premise: Does the danger of diminishing the ugliness of our history, American history, in an effort to bring people to it outweigh or balance the benefit of these stories being told?
I’m open to answers…
FOLLOW-UP - Harriet Part 2
I finally saw Harriet.
My cousin Rosalyn, a career violinist who moonlights as a published author and is also a baby boomer, warned me that it’s a great movie for young people unfamiliar with the life and legacy of Harriet Tubman.
She is right. For that reason, Harriet is a great candidate for required viewing in junior high schools all across America.
However, if you happen to have grown up as a black Generation X’er whose family heads made sure you understood Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker, George Washington Carver and Frederick Douglass in the other 11 months as well, Harriet comes across as a mild, made-for-TV movie. It is cursory at best. It sets us up to understand, for example, how she succeeded at freeing slaves solo before her inauguration as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, but gives us not even a montage on how sophisticated this pipeline was, and how drastically it helped her.
Several friends argued my last blog, insisting that we did not need to see violence at the level of 12 Years a Slave to understand the world of chattel slavery in America. They are not wrong. But there is some ideal space between that depiction and Harriet and we’ve seen it most recently with Underground, the WGN series produced by John Legend and canceled after two seasons. Mostly fictive but extremely realistic, the narrative gives us a palatable and responsible look at the stakes - for all parties involved - of escaping slavery.
What isn’t lost on me is that the public framing of Harriet as a superhero movie of sorts implies a de facto villain – slaveowners, Southern economic prosperity, white Dixie xenophobic hatred. I hardly disagree with casting the slot with any of the above, but what raises the eyebrow is that this “superhero” context, even in 2020 hashtag culture ready with optimized Google search, did not seem to take us as far as the discussion of the villain involved and the implications today. We stopped at Erivo’s performance, the Oscars, her history-making double nomination in both actor and songwriter categories. Is it that yeah, yeah, everyone already understands slavery is evil and the perpetrators were villainous? Or is it that the movie wasn’t substantive enough to warrant the bigger conversations, that it was too light to deserve all the arguments over family pot roast and passed potatoes?
If the latter is true, it is also where my general issue with Harriet still sits. After all, Lupita was hardly the only conversation had behind 12 Years a Slave.