Primary Sources: The Black History Hidden in Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners'
A deep dive into the Black history embedded in Ryan Coogler's magnum opus.
Long before Ryan Coogler chose 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, as the location for his genre-bending film Sinners, someone else had already set a horror movie in the rural Delta town located in Coahoma County, Mississippi …
America.
“Clarksdale has the meanest of reputations,” the editor of the Clarksdale Press Register wrote on Jan 16, 1926. “The lynching bee at Clarksdale has now thrown the spotlight of notoriety on this famed Mississippi town.”
The op-ed was a failed attempt at whitesplaining why members of the Coahoma County Sheriff's department allowed local Klan members to lynch a Black sharecropper named Lindsey Coleman, writing:
Four or five [negroes] lodged in the County jail at Clarksdale were at once subjected to the third degree in various forms of cruelty from the ‘water torture’ to half hanging and ‘twisting of limbs,’ one being killed with a broken neck under the ordeal. The torturers were white men having no right in the jail. The sheriff in open court has admitted his error and paid a fine of $500.
The great outrage that shook the state and county was the fact that a negro named Coleman who was acquitted of charge of murder in the case was grabbed by two or four men from his attorney in the presence of the sheriff and several deputies and shot to pieces by the mob in the streets of Clarksdale.
To be fair, the attorney who handed Coleman over to the lynch mob was just doing his job.
He was the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
Clarksdale’s penchant for Klan violence is just one of many stories from America’s history that Coogler embeds in Sinners. Taken at face value, the film is just a standard vampire movie set in a juke joint. Beneath its surface, the movie’s thematic subtext is riddled with explicit and subliminal references about everything from Black music, community, spirituality and race.
But Coogler’s magnum opus is even more than that.
Here is some of the Black history you might have overlooked or completely missed in Sinners (Warning: the story discusses scenes and characters from the film):
Sunflower Plantation: Home of the Original Vampires
When Sammie introduced himself as “Sammie, a sharecropper from the Sunflower Plantation,” he was talking about a real place.
Sunflower County is a short drive from Clarksdale, which is not the same as the Sunflower River and Sunflower Landing, which are both in Coahoma County, where Clarksdale serves as the county seat. Before the Civil War, when the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region in America, Clarksdale, Mississippi, boasted 15 multimillionaires within the city limits, with a few scattered about old Coahoma County. In 1862, Confederate enslavers at Sunflower Landing alleged that “about a $1,000,000 worth of negroes have been taken by the Yankees or enticed off by them from the Counties of Tunica and Coahoma.”
By 1930, according to the U.S. Census, Black residents comprised nearly 80% of the population in Coahoma County. Of the 23,000 “negro gainful workers,” about 19,000 worked on local plantations as sharecroppers and farm laborers. At the same time, most of the white population boasted having “a dash of Irish blood to make them better.”
Coogler may have even used the plantation for his set design:
But the story of the Sunflower Plantation predates the blues, race-based slavery and America itself.
On May 8, 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto became the first European to reach the Mississippi River. Accompanied by translator Juan Ortiz, who had been held captive by indigenous natives for years before being rescued by de Soto, Ortiz warned his fellow white men that the natives wouldn’t take kindly to them encroaching on their territory. Instead of building rafts to cross the river, de Soto’s crew slept during the day and worked at night, using the moonlight to build ferries that would take them across the river.
By the time the “discoverers” crossed, they encountered 200 native Choctaw carrying “the most deadly arrow of all” — the sharpened shaft of a sugar cane, its tip hardened by fire. When the stakes penetrated the conquistadors’ steel armor, it left a festering wound, as if it were dipped in garlic. De Soto was so shook, he decided to try another strategy:
If they would let him in, he’d give them everlasting life.
“They clamored to be baptized so that they too would enjoy the magical properties of the cross,” wrote historian Timothy Severin. “They even suggested that the Spanish leader invoke his Father to put an end to the drought that was parching their crops. Luckily for de Soto, a heavy thundershower soon afterward enhanced his reputation.” Congress even commissioned a painting of the historic invasion, which still hangs in the Capitol Rotunda.
For years, scholars debated the exact site on the Mississippi Delta where de Soto landed. In 1939, a group of historians, archaeologists and geographers tasked with charting the expedition submitted their findings to Congress, documenting the “most likely” place where pale men who appeared to be afraid of sunlight and wooden stakes invaded the Mississippi Delta.
The Commission’s choice was the southernmost of the viable candidates: Sunflower Landing in Coahoma County, Mississippi.
The Final Report of the United States De Soto Expedition Commission.
Blood Money
Tenant farming plays a prominent part in Sinners. While many are familiar with the exploitative post-slavery institution, Coogler repeatedly referenced a little-known part of the sharecropping system. Instead of paying wages to Black tenant farmers, former enslavers used vouchers, coupons or tokens that could only be redeemed at the landowners' “plantation stores.” Smoke thought the vouchers perpetuated a state of quasi-slavery, a feeling shared by many.
“The evil practice kept the ‘emancipated’ sharecroppers in debt, poverty and peonage since the Civil War,” wrote Ward Rogers in the June 1935 edition of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis. “Sharecroppers obtain ‘furnish’ or credit from the plantation owners and are charged from ten cents to twenty-five cents on the dollar for this service. Many plantations use ‘doodlum books,’ commissary coupons, instead of United States currency, thus forcing the sharecropper to trade at a particular store. The commissary store charges from fifteen per cent to fifty per cent higher prices than the regular stores. Settlements at the end of the year are often figured with a ‘crooked pencil’ to keep the sharecropper in debt.”
Stack, on the other hand, was willing to accept doodlum vouchers. He probably hadn’t read one of the whitest articles ever written — The Atlantic’s 1937 piece defending the exploitative practice, but Stack knew the sharecroppers had no choice:
Critics of the share-cropping system charge that this is one of the many methods used by farmers to enslave croppers. In general the charge is untrue. If the cropper received cash each month during the growing season, all or most of it would be spent for gasoline, whiskey, women, and gambling. Yet he and his family must be clothed and fed, and the farmer out of self-interest is compelled to furnish food and clothing. The doodlum book forces the cropper to spend his money for necessaries, and keeps down his indebtedness to the planter, thereby eventually adding to his profits and reducing the planter’s risks. This system has the complete approval of Negro women, who with their children have often borne the burden of the males’ extravagance.
Why did the Grocer Cross the Street?
When Stack goes to town, the camera follows Bo and Grace Chow’s daughter, Lisa, across the street. The long, meandering tracking shot appears to be intentional, yet it reveals no additional information about the plot.
In 1869, former enslavers from Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana met in Memphis to discuss a problem: Not only were recently emancipated freedmen acting like they were free human beings, they were outvoting white men. To solve the problem, they came up with a novel idea:
Chinese indentured servants.
"Emancipation has spoiled the negro, and carried him away from fields of agriculture,” wrote slavery apologist William M Burwell. “Our prosperity depends entirely upon the recovery of lost ground, and we therefore say let the Coolies come, and we will take the chance of Christianizing them." To reboot Jesus-based slavery, the human traffickers sent two unused slave ships to China. The vessels returned with 400 mostly male Chinese workers, promising them a “Gold Mountain.”
According to the book The Mississippi Chinese, when the immigrants realized they had been duped, “eight or nine” sharecroppers terminated their contracts, pooled their money, and opened the first Chinese-owned grocery store in the Mississippi Delta — “First in Sunflower, then in Greenville.”
And if opening a store in Mississippi sounds like a bad idea, consider this:
Many Delta counties were majority Black.
Black residents could not shop in white-owned stores.
Sharecroppers were accustomed to being taken advantage of at plantation stores.
In Mississippi, the Chinese were already considered “colored.”
Chinese-American-owned grocery stores didn’t just offer a place to purchase food at fair prices; they also served as an alternative source of revenue for tenant farmers and Black landowners who were often cheated out of their harvest by the good ol’ boy plantation system. And in Jim Crow Mississippi, Chinese-American-owned grocery stores were often the only place where Black residents could shop. In many of these towns, Chinese grocers owned a white store right across the street from the “negro” grocery store.
Using only his camera, Coogler managed to pay homage to a community and provide a history lesson.
Culture Vultures
The Mississippi Delta in Sinners is more than just home to the blues. In fact, it’s possible to trace the entirety of American music — and how it became white — back to Coahoma County.
When Remmick, the film’s antagonist, appears, we see vultures circling overhead. Later, in one of the more interesting easter eggs in the movie, Remmick shows up at the spot carrying a banjo. Even though he’s hating from outside the club, the Black juke-jointers couldn’t help but bob their heads to Remmick’s Irish banjo and bluegrass music.
That’s because all the music in the movie is Black.
While the banjo’s origin is West African, the instrument is uniquely Black American. But in the early 1900s, Irish Americans began appropriating the banjo into their rhythms. In the 1920s, Arnold Shultz, a formerly enslaved blues fiddle and banjo player, was renowned for thumb-picking his instruments instead of the traditional strumming technique. One night, Shultz needed a banjo player for a gig and invited Bill Monroe. There was just one problem – Monroe wasn’t a blues player; he played folk music on the mandolin. Still, Shultz gave Monroe a quick lesson on the guitar, and Monroe booked his first professional gig. He continued playing white folk music as if it were blues.
That’s how Bill Monroe became the “undisputed father of Bluegrass.”
When Delta Slim, Sammie, and Stack saw the chain gang working on the side of the road, Coogler was referencing “gandy dancers,” railroad workers who used traditional Black music and the blues to keep the rhythm while laying railroad track. Sometimes, they would even mimic the sound of the railroad whistle. Irish men were often charged with leading the railroad crews made up of Black men who were subjected to the convict leasing system.
In 1935, the widow of Jimmie Rodgers, a second-generation Irish railroad worker-turned-musician, revealed the source of her late husband’s music. She explained that he had never been to Switzerland to hear yodeling — he learned it as a gandy dancer. More interestingly, she noted that, “The darkey songs he learned as a boy were transmuted by the natural music in his Irish soul into something distinctive and new.” To be fair, while Rodgers was called “The Singing Brakeman” and “America’s Blue Yodeler,” the Meridian, Mississippi, native became part of white history because of his other nickname:
“The Father of Country Music.”
Clarksdale is also reportedly the home of the “crossroads” where legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for becoming the greatest blues guitarist who ever lived. John Lee Hooker was born there as well as Muddy Waters and Sam Cooke, Nate Dogg and Rick Ross.
In 1951, Clarksdale native and saxophonist Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats recorded “Rocket 88.” The up-tempo blues song was arranged by band leader Izear “Ike” Turner Jr., who was also from Clarksdale. They didn’t think the song was unique or interesting because it sounded like the blues they heard in their hometown juke joints. But because white people had never heard anything like it, they said it belonged to a new genre.
To this day, white music historians consider “Rocket 88” to be the first rock and roll record ever recorded.
The Blues
Perhaps the biggest easter egg in the film is the blues — not the music, but the variation of the color. In contrast to Stack’s red attire, Smoke wore the color the entire film. It was the color of Annie’s dress, and her hoodoo shop was draped in the light blues and greens.
What does color have to do with Black history?
In the coastal South Carolina and Georgia communities, where indigo was the original cash crop, the Gullah Geechee people used indigo dye to paint their porches, doors and even their window shutters a color called “haint blue.” Supposedly, the color allows spirits — or as we call them, “boo hags” and “haints” — to find an exit out of your house and into the next world. According to my grandmother, you could prevent a boo hag from riding you at night or ushering a relative into the next world by sleeping under a haint blue ceiling.
Of course, this is just a crazy Black folktale.
Except in 2018, scientists trying to reduce bird collision in airplanes and buildings discovered that “birds consistently avoided LED lights with peaks at 470 and 630 nanometers, which appear blue and red to the human eye.” More notably, some mammals have a genetic defect that prevents them from seeing the color blue, including one very scary animal:
The Emmett Till References
Just before handing the money to Hogwood, Smoke and Stack asked the Klansman why he washed the floor. We eventually discover that the barn-turned-juke joint had a more sordid history. The brothers also note that they are buying the barn, the land and “the gin and everything else.”
Although Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River tied to a fan from a cotton gin, according to the FBI, he was murdered in a seed barn on the Sunflower River – the birthplace of the Delta blues.
In the movie, when Sammie reveals that he wants to leave the Sunflower Plantation, Smoke tries to discourage him from visiting Chicago. Instead, he suggests that Sammie head to the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where he can be protected. Mound Bayou was founded by formerly enslaved farmers who migrated to the Delta to start their own community.
Carolyn Bryant Donham confessed that she lied on Till in 2007. But William Huie, the white journalist who concealed the identity of Till's killers, described the woman whose lie he helped tell as “one of the prettiest black-haired Irish women I ever saw in my life.”
Fortunately, we know what actually happened because of Willie Reed, a sharecropper who fled to Mound Bayou and revealed what happened to Till. As we covered here, T.R.M. Howard, the legendary chief surgeon at Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, commissioned an armed guard made up of sharecroppers to protect Reed, Mamie Till and the Black journalists who investigated the 1955 lynching.
That’s right, we know what happened to Emmett Till because a community of Black sharecroppers banded together to protect the modern-day griots.
Spoiler alert: It was an Irish vampire.
As usual BEAUTIFULLY written with A LOT of history not being taught.
Finished reading The Barn last week and saw Sinners last night. Whew.