Depression Life in the South

WHEN I WAS growing up, my mother used to tell me the story of why her family decided to leave the South and migrate to Chicago. My grandfather injured his hand in a mining accident and was disabled for a long time. The owners of the mine allowed him to continue living in the company housing and to shop at the company store. He was named scrip, but only as an advance--its value was deducted from his future salary. In order to help any grandfather through the crisis, relatives in Chicago would send him, his wife, and their six children bacon and ham. But when the company store discovered he was no longer purchasing these staples, they cut off the scrip. There was nothing left to do but head North.

Sounder is a variation of my grandfather's story: in many ways it is a variation of every black man's story. Adapted by black playwright Lonne Elder III (Cerrmonies in Dark Old Men), from William Armstrong's powerful allegory of black life in America. Director Martin Ritt carefully examines the economic, cultural, and judicial elements of white American society that impede the black man's search for freedom.

Centered around the lives of the Morgans, a black sharecropping family in Louisiana during the Depression. Sounder details their struggle for existence and their hope that the eldest son. David Lee (Kevin-Hooks), will one day escape the sharecropper's life. Much like my mother's family, the Morgans struggle endlessly to do the white man's work, because as Rebecca (Ciely Tyson), the mother, says. "We owe him all that money."

Ritt elaborates the theme of white exploitation of blacks in a series of interrelated vignettes, starting from the opening scene in which the father. Nathan Lee (Paul Winfield) and David Lee are involved in one of the basic struggles in life--the search for food. Despite the aid of their hunting dog. Sounder, the two are unsuccessful in their search for a coon. The family goes to bed hungry. Alone with Rebecca, Nathan Lee curses his existence, but she says "We've been through these hard times before, Nathan Lee and we've made it." "But made it to what," he asks, in a remark that captures the spirit of the evaluation blocks have been finally forced to make today.

Economic exploitation forces Nathan Lee to steal from the white man's smokehouse to find his family. His arrest gives Ritt the chance to show the kangaroo justice blacks receive in white courts. After a speedy trial, Nathan lee is sentenced to one year of hard labor at a parish workcamp, a form of modern slavery only slightly more obvious than the scrip my grandfather was advanced.

Besides self-reliance, the only hope the family has is the false one that whites have always held out to blacks: Jesus will provide. But Ritt clearly holds this solution in contempt. Opening a scene by showing a graveyard adjacent to a black church, he cuts to a line of ancient matrons and a zombie-like preacher who drone out in a deathly wall, "Give Me That Old Time Religion." When the preacher (played, ironically, by Rev. Thomas N. Phillips, a real-life black preacher) pays a call on the Morgans to tell them that the whites at the courthouse have refused to tell him where the father has been taken, he quickly cautions Rebecca, "Let us not take in bitterness, for God works in mysterious ways. We brought nothin' into this life and we take nothin' out." "Is that a blessin', Reverend," she retorts, asking a question blacks should have asked themselves a long time ago. Tyson's confrontation with the Reverend is just one of several scenes in which her performance is both evocative and dramatic. Ritt has the ability to flush a flood of emotion from his actors. All the performances are convincing; and child-actor Kevin Hooks is endearing.

A wavering white liberal is shamed into telling the Morgans where Nathan Lee is being held. David Lee goes on an unsuccessful search for his father, but during the course of his journey, he runs across an all-black school where he is befriended by the teacher. Camille (Janet MacLachlan). David Lee stays at the school for awhile, and receives his first instruction in black history.

THE CONCEPT THAT education is the solution to the black man's problems is a recurring theme in Sounder. David Lee is forced to leave school to help his mother finish in the fields, but when his father returns from prison, he confronts the boy and makes him go back to school because, he says, "I want you to beat this life they got cut out for you."

This reliance on education as the way to freedom makes the film's seemingly happy ending ironically sad: in the end David's trip to school brings him no closer to freedom than my grandfather's trip to Chicago brought him. They were both freed of one form of exploitation only to find themselves oppressed in new ways.