I Saw My Family In Sinners & Its Success Can’t Be Undermined

I saw traces of my own blood in IMAX on Easter. Watching Ryan Coogler’s Sinners on Resurrection Sunday was more of a spiritual experience than a religious one. My ancestors sat on my spirit as I sat in the theater, and they haven’t left since. The film is about so many things: the blues, folklore, vampires, music’s intergenerational impact, and the stakes of humanity. But it’s also about my roots.

Coogler drew upon my family’s legacy for Sammie (Miles Caton). Specifically, Robert Johnson, the legendary blues singer who was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil. Johnson is my maternal grandfather George Ball’s first cousin. 

The film follows twins Elias and Elijah a.k.a. Stack and Smoke, both played by Michael B. Jordan. They return to their hometown of Clarkesdale, Mississippi after a stint in Chicago with the intent to open a juke joint. While Sammie plays in the juke joint, for one night in the Jim Crow South, the community has a moment to be truly free. They let the music carry them before a supernatural threat arrives in the form of vampires seeking to stake claim on Sammie’s otherworldly voice.

The themes in Sinners speak directly to the rumor attached to Johnson’s legacy. But growing up, I had a more grounded understanding of Johnson. He and my grandfather grew up together in the Mississippi Delta. Johnson would buy my grandfather a Coke while they sat on the porch and he’d play the guitar, sometimes joining along with his older cousin to sing. My grandfather, the younger of the two, would follow the “Crossroad” singer and that guitar around whenever he could. Johnson traveled up and down the South, from the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, playing at juke joints. He mysteriously died on August 16, 1938 at age 27.

According to my Aunt Cookie, my grandfather said his music was “beyond anything anybody had ever heard.” His voice had a one-of-a-kind twang and he could play notes no one was familiar with at that time. Hearing him play felt like an out-of-body experience.

I imagine that my grandfather felt akin to one of the most beautiful scenes in Sinners. As Sammie plays, he transcends time, spiritually summoning genres and cultures born of and connected to the blues. I had a visceral reaction watching African tribal music, rock, funk, R&B, regional hip-hop and more come to life in one room with African griots dancing. In a film that reminds us of just how the blues was considered gospel’s sinful, vice-loving twin, I saw more than music history in this scene. I saw a moment for praise and worship. I felt as free, as proud, as confident as Canton’s voice sounded in the perfectly blended instrumentation on “I Lied to You,” written by Raphael Saadiq and composed by Ludwig Göransson.

Coogler said inspiration for Sinners stemmed from the death of his Uncle James, a blues-loving Mississippi man. His family, like mine, had relocated to the West and Midwest for economic gain and a promising livelihood during the Great Migration. Some Black folks found that, many didn’t and many stayed in the South. But both the treasures and humanities of Black Southern folks get erased while discussing the historical traumas that reach back 400 years.

“Very often, and rightfully so, that part of time and that physical location in the United States, is a place that’s associated with a lot of pain, a lot of shame, a lot of discomfort,” the director told IndieWire. “But to completely look away from it is to not look at what else was there. The resilience, the brilliance, the fortitude, and also the art, the artistic wonder, the cultural wonder.”

One of the most powerful things Coogler’s storytelling does is validate the Black experience through art. This film really sees the descendants of the enslaved. It examines our desire for true freedom, reverence for the dead and the spiritual work that’s been carried on for generations.

As I watched Smoke’s lover Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), I saw my grandmother, my grandfather’s wife, Amelia Ball. She used her hands, her prayer and her olive oil to protect and heal us growing up. I continue some of her rituals today, including making sure I have black-eyed peas for every New Year. She issued a warning, “the devil is busy,” to keep us vigilant. I understand now more than ever what that means.

I don’t believe my third cousin sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical talent. I believe the devil was going to come anyway because that’s what he does. The rumor that any secular art form was of the devil was easier to believe than a young Black man from Hazelhurst, Mississippi finding God through his guitar rather than the church. Like Johnson’s music, that concept was ahead of its time. 

I also believe the devil, like in the film, knows when you feel most free and aims to infiltrate and disempower you. The most recent example of that we saw this week was Variety reducing Sinners value to “profitability remains a ways away” instead of praising it for topping the box office with a $61 million global debut or its rich, original storytelling. Despite receiving similar numbers to other white-led projects that the publication have hailed as unequivocal successes, Sinners’ box office win was delivered with a caveat. Variety didn’t lead with the fact that Coogler made a rare deal with the studio to receive ownership of the film after 25 years (in fact, this move has been criticized as “dangerous” and the potential “end of the studio system” instead of applauded as smart business). Nor did they make a grandiose deal about how the film is shifting what an IMAX audience looks for in regards to industry standards. 

With Sinners, Coogler conjured up new possibilities of the form Black storytelling can take. Culture impact isn’t always considered generational wealth, but it is. I’ve always been proud of my roots, but it took the power and glory of that juke joint scene for me to understand the generational wealth I’ve inherited.

My grandfather died when I was too young to really know about the blues, but old enough to feel what it was about in my own immature ways. So his and Johnson’s legacy lived on in my family through oral history and a living shrine in my aunt’s house in Maryland that the family dubbed “the Robert Johnson room” that I’ll be returning to on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death in a few weeks. 

Though I grew up knowing about Johnson and hearing his music, it took that scene to understand the weight of what that meant. My blood helped lay the foundation for the most popular and significant genres and cultural movements today. I realized that the blues begat not only the art we know and love today, but the blues begat me, too.