Daughters of the Dust

I recorded quite a few movies during TCM's spotlight on the Black Experience in film back in September. Among the films I hadn't seen before was Daughters of the Dust.

The basic plot synopsis is interesting enough. It's 1902, and on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, the extended Peazant family is preparing to leave for the mainland because of how little economic opportunity there is on the islands. The islanders are descended from slaves of various west African cultures, with their languages and English having become intermixed to become a creole known as Gullah; the islanders also wre among the last of the people to maintain many of the old African traditions.

A couple of cousins in the extended family have already gone to the mainland, and are now returning to help their cousins move. Viola (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) has become more Americanized, having brought over a photographer to document the migration and get portraits of everybody, especially the matriarch Nana (Cora Lee Day) who knows her time has passed but for whom time is more or less a circle, so the next generation will share her story. There's also cousin Yellow Marry (Barbara-O), who was a wet-nurse on the mainland and brought over her friend Trula. Yellow Mary is intending to go to Canada.

While everybody is preparing for the migration, various cultural practices are engaged in, and some old family conflicts are gently brought up. Eli is married to Eula, but there are some serious issues regarding their unborn child who is also the narrator of the film. There's a Cherokee whose ancestors escaped the forced migration from Georgia during the Andrew Jackson administration and made their way to the Sea Islands, and he and Iola Peazant have a realtionship. There's a Muslim, since many of the cultures from which the slaves had been taken were Muslim; Viola on the other hand is a devout Christian and tries to instill that in the youngest generation of Peazants.

I found Daughters of the Dust to be interesting, but at the same time difficult. The difficulty is in the non-linear storytelling, which I found made things quite difficult to follow at times. Some scenes suddenly switched to a sort of slow motion, which as far as I could figure was supposed to be a sign that these were events that had happened at some time in the past.

One of the big pluses was the cinematography, which was mostly beautiful and not just because of the locations; having a backdrop like the Sea Islands certainly helps. The biggest positive about the movie is the fact that it got made at all, showing a dying cultural tradition that would probably be unknown to most people. (I knew about the Gullah language, but didn't know anything about the cultural traditions of the Sea Islanders.)

Overall, I'd definitely recommend Daughters of the Dust, with the one caveat that it helps to know going in that there's a non-traditional (from most Americans' point of view) narrative structure. The movie was restored a few years ago, and part of that resotration included a release to DVD and Blu-Ray.