“We Are the Bridge”: History as Prologue in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust
Image Source: Cohen Film Collection
BY STAFF WRITER MEERA SASTRY ‘23
Daughters of the Dust is a film to watch slowly. Director Julie Dash makes sure you do so: the shots linger, and much of the plot is delivered so subtly that to turn away for even a second would be to misunderstand the stories portrayed therein. And to misunderstand would be a grave mistake: for many, Daughters, which was the first feature film directed by a Black woman to get a wide theatrical release in 1991, surely has and will serve as an introduction to the Gullah culture it portrays in such complex and immersive detail that it would be a shame—both educationally and artistically—to get anything less than the most out of it.
It is 1902, on an island near the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia—in the midst of what Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross call the “dawning of the Black woman’s era” in their book A Black Woman’s History of the United States. Two women whose activities—for one, devout participation in the church; for the other, working in the sex trade—fall resolutely within the boundaries of this era, being adults born in the first full post-slavery generation of Black people, return here. They are coming to take the rest of their family away from their home of Ibo Landing. The following two days are a reckoning for the Peazant family as several of its members, each with their own stories and circumstances, decide whether to stay in Ibo Landing or to follow “the dream of the North”. This premise seems to narrow down the setting of the film quite precisely: all of it takes place on a single, relatively small island, and the main string of events fits neatly between when these two women—Viola and “Yellow” Mary—first approach the island to when their boat leaves it again. But the real thematic heart of Daughters of the Dust is not nearly so constrained: because it describes a turning point in its characters’ lives, it is as much about the past and the future of the family as it is about the 1902 present.
Thus, though Viola and Mary represent the efforts and trials that Black women experienced around the turn of the century, a reading of Daughters of the Dust may be informed by both earlier chapters in the story of Black women and by their lives and culture in the present-day. What allows the timeline of the story to remain limitless is also the sentiment at its heart—that the past lives on to the present, and does so specifically through an “inheritance of memory” that takes both metaphorical and literal forms. There are symbolic manifestations of the past on the island: a bottle tree that one character attempts to destroy and another character encourages her family to study—sculpted forms of the family’s enslaved ancestors that rise from the surrounding waters. But a more literal manifestation occupies much of the plot: one of the younger women, Eula, is pregnant. Her unborn child (credited as exactly that) narrates the film, with statements prescient beyond her years, and it is this child—as well as Nana, the matriarch of the Peazants—who are the most spiritually in tune. Nana’s connections with ancestral history and the Unborn Child’s visions of her and her family’s future demonstrate the non-linear temporality central to the Peazants’ Gullah culture, which has developed from its African roots in relative isolation and remains unique from mainland African-American culture. For this family, time does not progress linearly but rather inexorably doubles upon itself, so that the future affects the past as much as the past affects the future, and they must reckon with all of time to deal with any of it.
Despite the Peazant family and their Gullah culture’s singularity, their intergenerational memories of enslavement are shared with the greater history of African Americans. Moments from the film are resonant with the history of Black women as mothers and resistors to slavery, as depicted in A Black Women’s History of the United States and Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body. In the chapter entitled “Angela’s Exodus out of Africa”, Berry and Gross describe the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade and the forms of resistance that Black women undertook both aboard the ships and on American shores. Though Daughters of the Dust is set nearly a hundred years afterwards, the weight of one such uprising—that of Ibo Landing (also known as Igbo Landing) —is felt heavily throughout the film. The story as understood by historians today is as follows: a group of Ibo people in captivity aboard the slave ship The Wanderer stage a mutiny. They drown their captors, but once the Wanderer comes ashore, they walk into the marshes to drown themselves as well (Momodu). Eula, the pregnant member of the Peazant family, tells it slightly differently: in her version, upon landing, the Ibo see all that is to come—and with that knowledge, they choose not to walk into the water, but on it, in order to return home to Africa. Her narration floats over shots of her husband, Eli, as he too walks upon the water and cradles the figures, who appear to be the sculpted forms of the Ibo, that rise from beneath it.
Another member of the family tells the story differently: the character of Bilal, who claims to have himself been a captive on the Wanderer, revises Eula’s version of events to be something aligning more with historians’ views, saying “Ain’t nobody can walk on water”. Though certainly more somber than Eula’s tale, Bilal’s story is nonetheless resonant with not only the “truest” story of Ibo Landing, but the similar defiances portrayed in “Angela’s Exodus out of Africa”. The chapter describes revolts such as the mutiny aboard the ship Little George, when African women, men, and children alike would use whatever means they had at their disposal—even resorting to suicide—in order to regain their freedom. Bilal’s depiction of a rebellion like this not only to demonstrates the viscerality of its characters’ connection to ancestral trauma, but also reminds the viewer, as Berry and Gross do, of the agency Black people maintained throughout their captivity, and the dignity with which they confronted their dehumanizing conditions.
Though the events of Ibo Landing are the most distinct historical event portrayed in the film, Daughters of the Dust is also concerned with Black women’s relationship to reproduction. The chapter “Reproduction in Bondage” from Killing the Black Body details the struggles of Black women during slavery to gain their reproductive freedom; though Daughters of the Dust takes place decades afterwards, the foundations of the Peazant family’s treatment of sex, reproduction, and motherhood can be seen in the way these concerns of Black women were handled under slavery. Most explicitly, the film describes the practice of forced reproduction. Roberts calls this aspect of reproductive control as “slave-breeding”, in which enslavers would “[compel] slaves they considered ‘prime stock’ to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale” (27). It appears in Daughters of the Dust as part of Nana Peazant’s narration; she describes the rupturing of families under slavery and the possibility that a male child might be separated from his mother at birth and, years later, be forced to mate with her or with his sister. To avoid this, Nana Peazant says, the “old souls in each family would keep mental records of births, deaths, marriages, and sales”, reinforcing what Roberts describes as the “remarkable success” of Black women in “maintaining the integrity of their family live despite slavery’s traumas” (51).
Despite their resilience, however, the women of the Peazant family are not without internal conflict. One of the women who returns, Yellow Mary, has been somewhat shunned by her family—to them, having worked both as a prostitute and as a wet nurse, she is a “ruined woman” and a “hussy”. It is revealed through Mary’s empathizing with Eula that both women have been raped, likely by white men, and became pregnant as a result. These experiences of sexual violence not only traumatize Eula and Mary but are compounded by rejection from their families: Yellow Mary herself is seen as less of a Peazant, and Eli, Eula’s husband, worries that the baby will not truly be his because it is the product of rape. Though Eula and Eli are more than a generation removed from slavery, this fear is informed by the heritability of enslavement legally established as early as 1662 in Virginia. As Jennifer L. Morgan describes in her article “Partus sequitur ventrum: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery”, any child born to an enslaved woman, even a child born after she was raped by her white enslaver, would also be enslaved. This legal practice was used to break up Black families and Black kinship structures in favor of supporting the economic interests of the white enslaver. Though this is no longer the material reality of Eula and Eli, who live as a free Black couple on the island, they still face the threat of physical violence: Eula fears, for example, that if Eli learns who raped her, he may confront the man and subsequently be lynched. This legal construct, then, not only immediately disrupted the Black family, as Roberts and Morgan write, but traumatized generations of Black women and affected the very connection of motherhood that the Peazants see as so central to their Gullah identity.
Daughters of the Dust is thus certainly concerned with the pain and trauma involved in its characters’ personal and ancestral histories—but though it takes time to discuss the past, it also shows its characters breaking their pasts’ holds on their futures. The main conflict of the film is the decision that each Peazant must make—that is, to stay on the island or to pursue further opportunity in the North—and, by the end of the film, the family becomes divided. Nana Peazant, Yellow Mary, Eula, Eli, and one other Peazant choose to stay, while the rest of the family departs for the mainland. As a result, the Peazants’ future is not simple, nor can it be easily reduced: while they may not abandon their past lives or ancestral knowledge, they also do not disregard the possibility that they might change. This tension reveals the true strength of Daughters, and the gift that it gives the cinematic canon to which it belongs—that is, the way that Daughters evaluates each of its characters as her own person with her own motive, reasoning, history, and vision of the future. This depiction of Black women’s agency is so rich and compelling that it leaves the audience of Daughters worried not whether the decision to leave or stay was right or wrong in each case, but rather reassured that though the trauma of the slavery era may persist, so does the capacity of Black women to resist it and to create love in spite of it.
And what of the future of the film itself? Despite Daughters of the Dust’s Sundance premiere and wide theatrical release, it faded somewhat from prominence in popular culture until it was re-released into theaters in 2016. Though not the sole impetus for this re-release, its popularity with a new generation was certainly encouraged by Beyoncé’s film Lemonade, which accompanied her sixth studio album earlier that year and references Daughters (Desta). Lemonade is in large part autobiographical, but Beyoncé deals with much of the same history as Daughters, such as the resistance at Ibo Landing, and imitates its visual language in several scenes. By tying this history and imagery together to again tell the story of a Black woman and her family, Beyoncé and the audiences she brought to Daughters of the Dust give new life to the film and demonstrate once more its core message—that the present will always inherit the strength of the past.
Works Cited
Berry, Daina Ramey and Kali Nicole Gross. A Black Women’s History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2020.
Daughters of the Dust. Directed by Julie Dash, Kino International, 1991.
Desta, Yohana. “How Beyoncé’s Lemonade Helped Bring a Groundbreaking Film Back to Theaters.” Vanity Fair, 22 Aug. 2016, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/daughters-of-the-dust-exclusive. Accessed 19 Mar. 2021.
Momodu, Samuel. “Igbo Landing Mass Suicide (1803).” Blackpast.org, 25 Oct. 2016, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/events-african-american-history/igbo-landing-mass-suicide-1803/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2021.
Roberts, Dorothy. Killing of the Black Body. 1997. Vintage Books, 2017.