Thank you, Sally Field

It began with a lie -- a greed-inspired lie spoken more than 400 years ago and nurtured to thrive like kudzu. As a result of this intentional falsehood, my ancestors experienced ineffable horrors as their humanity was brutally denied for the creation of the wealth of others. That is a lot to process. It beckons to be repeated.  Because of a lie, the humanity of my African ancestors was brutally denied for the creation of the the wealth of others. 

In the corrupt creation of this capital, laws, policies, and practices were designed intentionally to protect the expanding lies and the wealth by further denying that people were people.  It was an extreme case of profits over humanity. Four centuries later, the results of this contrived reality continue to bear fruit as evidenced in a seemingly endless list of contemporary disparities. 

The arts possess a unique capacity to speak to reality and thereby shape our consciousness in unexpected ways. The commonplace becomes striking as it touches our shared humanity. Unfortunately, as a part of the lie, artistic depictions of chattel slavery have historically been sanitized of reality's raw gore. Nothing must be done to elevate the enslaved to the status of having been created in the image of God. That would threaten to dismantle the facade of lies, and disrupt accepted ways of being. 

The 1984 film Places of the Heart features Sally Field as Edna Spalding, the widow of a banker who is struggling to hold onto her home and farm in Texas during the Great Depression. The character Moze, as portrayed by Danny Glover, agrees to teach her all she would need to know to grow, harvest and sell cotton. Driven to keep her farm, she relinquished her privilege and worked the land alongside him. This in itself was a break from traditional narratives and accepted ways of being. 

Cotton was the primary crop cultivated first by enslaved Africans and then by their descendants who often were trapped in poverty by the system of sharecropping. Picking cotton in the heat of the day and ginning it at night were painful tasks. At one point in the film, the camera zooms in for a closer look at Edna working in the field. Then, the camera focuses on her fingers as they continue to pick cotton. The viewer sees Field's swollen, raw, and bloody fingers. 

Knowing how sensitive our finger tips are, I had a visceral reaction. Never before had I seen such an image in a film portraying the picking of cotton by people of African descent. To have done so would have revealed a fragment of the human pain ignored and denied by the lie of our nation's common narrative.