Femme fatales, the Bechdel Test, and Multi-tasking Men

 

The (racially) mysterious man-eater and vamp trope. Literally! That is exactly what Mary is. Whoa. Thinking about her through this literally device, she was always going to be turned and then turn Stack. The trope made her do it.

Bad men and femme fatales…you better write, Coogler!

On your question of Coogler imagining a narrative where people paid attention to a visibly Black woman lead character like we do Mary…first thought is no, not his lane. Or let me put it in your own words: “it's also important to think about Mary based on some of what Coogler was doing with his main character(s).” Coogler’s women characters only matter as tools to flesh out the men’s inner lives. But, I’ll be fair and think on it more. --Cindy Reed

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Well, don't think too long on Coogler's representations of women, as you'll end up a bit annoyed.

In the popular culture classes that Cali and I have taught, we're kind of obligated (in a good way) to reference the Bechdel Test. Well, Sinners fails that test in a big way. I don't think any women in the film speak to each other, and if they do, they don't talk about anything other than a man. Conversely, think about how many people that Smoke, Stack, and Sammie talk to. Men. Women. Children, Lovers. White people. Black people. Asian. What do the men talk about? Other Men. Business. Women. Sex. Negotiating. Traveling. Crime. Violence. Dreams. Racism. Regrets. Vengeance. --Howard Rambsy II

Related: 

• A Notebook on Sinners

Even More Bad Men

By Howard Rambsy II

       "[Stack]...is said to have done bad man things, but we never actually see him doing it." (Cindy Reed)

This is evidence that he is a quintessential bad man. No one actually saw Shine swim from the Titanic or before that nobody saw Stagolee shoot a white policeman, and long before that, no one really saw John De Conqueror smack both the Devil and God. Black folks told each other those things happened. Only black folklore nonbelievers would question the truthfulness of any of those sacred tales.

In Sinners, everybody has heard about the twins. In fact, early on right before getting the little girl to watch the truck, Smoke asks, "You heard of the Smoke Stack twins?" She's like of course. She would've been too young to know them when they were there, but she's heard of them, meaning, they were already firmly in the local lore.

I love Etheridge Knight's poem about this bad man "Hard Rock." Well, I love the first part, the idea of him, and then I get sad when I learn that the system has diminished him. It's the hearing about how bad he was that draws me in and has me wondering. 

And Lord oh Lord, don't even get me started on Morrison's Seven Days. You know, what? We never actually see those guys commit any murders, do we? It don't matter. But you already know when you cover the novel in class, students, especially the young brothers, are going to come to you, and in a whisper, go, "The Seven Days: were they real?"

By the end of Sinners, Stack is still bad. He ain't aged after 60 years, got a B-girl on his arm, and only comes out at night. What folks say? Boss moves. Look, as someone who's thought too long about bad men, I gotta give the duo of Coogler and Michael B. Jordan a lot of credit in this regard. Between Killmonger and Smoke/Stack, they've done outstanding work.

Related: 

• A Notebook on Sinners

Even More on Mary

By Cindy Reed 

I watched the film again and caught something I missed the first time, something crucial to understand Mary as nonwhite and why Sammie would ever ask her what her race was. Y'all know I struggled with him asking her because other Black folks would know a passing person from their hometown, right? It turns out he did, and one brief line told it all.

At the train station, we all recall Sammie telling Stack a white woman—Mary—was staring at him from afar. Of course, she comes over and confronts him for mishandling her heart. What I caught this time was Sammie and Delta Slim eaves dropping on Mary and Stack's convo after which Sammie walks up to his big cousin and says something like, "Maybe, she ain't white woman after all."

Sammie's big observation came out in hushed tone because, well, this white woman not being quite white ain't anybody else's business because that info in the wrong hands is a matter a life and death...I needed Sammie to have some questions about Mary's race or notice something different about her before that bar scene. I'm so glad he did.

Along the same lines, I paid closer attention to Mary's race explanation to Sammie at the bar and caught something else I missed. As Mary explains her half black grandfather as her claim to blackness (I'm still rolling my eyes a little at that, but ok, one-drop rule), she implies that her mother passed as white when explaining that her grandfather wanted to keep his daughter safe from the KKK at all costs--in this case, passing as White to avoid being a target. From that, I originally inferred that her mother passed as White forever in perpetuity. But, nope. I didn't connect the dots the first time that Mary's momma had to stop passing at some point.

If momma was still passing, it wouldn't make sense for her to work among Black folks as a midwife and live among them raising two brown-skinned Black boys that she delivered. She can't do any of that living among White folks and passing as one of them. Socially impossible....Now, I'm wondering why momma stopped passing and just who Mary's daddy is. I have my speculations. But, I digress.

The point: I have only ever understood the one-drop rule theoretically from my contemporary position in time. I imagined what one drop of Black blood looked like, and it never looked like Mary! But, casting Hailee Steinfeld as white-passing made me move from theory to practice and consider how one drop of Black blood could look like at the time. It absolutely could look like Mary. Whew. That's messy. Complicated. Even with fresh illumination about my dilemma with Mary, I know I'm only scratching the surface on how the film represents versions of Blackness in the Jim Crow South.

The way Coogler makes these nuanced implications and expects viewers to infer the right way kinda takes me back to how Morrison does her readers, you know, expecting us to be smart and piece things together. We can't piece a good puzzle together in one sitting but rather by seeing and reading the film multiple times. By wrestling with the questions and letting the ahha moments come one viewing at a time.

This second watch made Mary and her passing momma clearer; I'm wondering what I'll catch the third go 'round.

Related: 

• A Notebook on Sinners

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Black Playwrights

Yesterday, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Purpose. That's a major accomplishment. What I hadn't considered until taking a closer look was this: over the last six years, five Black playwrights have received the Pulitzer for Drama: Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, 2019), Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop, 2020), Katori Hall (The Hot Wing King, 2021), James Ijames (Fat Ham, 2022), Eboni Booth (Primary Trust, 2024), and now Jacobs-Jenkins (Purpose, 2025). 

Earlier African American recipients of the prize include Charles Gordone (No Place to Be Somebody, 1970), Charles Fuller (A Soldier’s Play, 1982), August Wilson (Fences, 1987; The Piano Lesson, 1990), Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, 2002), and Lynn Nottage (Ruined, 2009; Sweat, 2017).

The Church & the Jook Joint

Angel C. Dye

I finally saw Sinners on Tuesday night in IMAX. I've clearly been gathering myself since then. Whew. It's 

hard to even know where to begin, but all of your insights have certainly helped me to give language to what I felt and experienced in that theater. 

 For one, I'm a church kid. Grew up verrrrry Pentecostal (Church of God in Christ [COGIC] to be more specific), so I'm always thinking about the boundaries that certain brands of Christianity have erected between the so-called sacred and secular. And now that I am years into researching the very social institutions that Sinners centers around, jooks and their northern cousins, rent parties, I understand just how malleable those boundaries are. A preacher's kid being the one to survive death, darkness, and devastation and escape with the lifeblood of blackness—the Blues? Well if that isn't the epitome of holy and sacred, I don't know what is.

Related: 

• A Notebook on Sinners

Percival Everett's Pulitzer Prize Win In Context

Last March while reading Percival Everett's James and tracking the coverage of the novel, I, along with many others, predicted that the novel would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The prediction came to fruition yesterday when it was announced that James had received the prize. 

This is not the only major honor James has garnered. In 2024, Everett won both the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel was a finalist for the Booker Prize. In March, the audiobook version of James, read by Dominic Hoffman, received an Audie Award in the Literary Fiction/Classics category. 

This marks the third time an African American novel has won both the National Book Award for Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The first was Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), followed by Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and now Everett's James. 

Notably, this James is also fourth Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by a Black writer to take the form of a neo-slave narrative. The others Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003),  and Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016). Put another way, four of the seven African American books to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction are neo-slave narratives. 

To date, six African American writers have received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: James Alan McPherson (1978), Alice Walker (1983), Toni Morrison (1988), Edward P. Jones (2004), Colson Whitehead (2017 and 2020), and Everett (2025). 

Blogging about Poetry in April

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• April 24: Ryan Coogler, C. Liegh McInnis, and Black Convergences

• April 24: Ryan Coogler, Amiri Baraka, and Black Music

• April 11: Amiri Baraka, Eugene B. Redmond, and the Art of Cultural Cataloging

• April 10: Margalit Fox's Black Poet Obituaries for the New York Times

• April 1: Blogging about Poetry in March

Toward a Sinners Poetry Reading List

• "tell the black girls" by Lamont Lilly (2016) --- Lilly toasts Black women in his poem, noting an inheritance passed down to them as one of natural beauty, power, and, and most notably, wonder-working. The poem calls to mind Annie, situating her among the lineage of Black women Lilly praises. Her dark-skinned, full-figured, natural-haired beauty matters as much as the power that comes from being her own boss. What's more, Annie's ways of being and knowing move from folk and speculative to real and practical in consequential ways (ask her man). Annie's abilities to read people, protect, and problem-solve save the day. --Cindy N. Reed

• "Molly Means" by Margaret Walker (1942) --- A poem about the spells of a Black woman witch in a southern town reminds contemporary audiences that the American South has long been a setting in creative representations for exploring the speculative and otherworldly, a tradition in which Coogler's film joins. --Cindy N. Reed

[Related: Toward a Sinners Nonfiction Reading List]

• "Flight to Canada" by Ishmael Reed (1976)  -- a comical poem about a fugitive slave on the go, which connects in some ways with the audacious Black men twin brothers in Coogler's film. --Howard Rambsy II

• "I Sing of Shine" by Etheridge Knight -- A poem derived from black men's folk songs and stories of bad men, a subject that connects with the experiences of Smoke and Stack. 

• "Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem" By Helene Johnson -- A Harlem Renaissance-era poem about a confident and bold Black man strolling down the street. It's an early 20th century bad man poem, linking to the twins Smoke and Stack. 

• “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay (1919) — A sonnet situated in the bloodstained grips of Red Summer when white supremacist terrorism wreaked havoc on Black communities across the country.

 The poem reads like a pep talk before the fight for one’s life and calls to mind Grace’s speech to the crew before she escalates the drama. —Cindy Reed 

• “Hey-Hey Blues” by Langston Hughes (1939) — A blues poem loaded with levity that boasts of a musician’s ability to keep the juke lively as long as he has the right drinks and a fellow musician on par with his skills. It’s reminiscent of early dialogues between Delta Slim and Preacher Boy. —Cindy Reed 

• “Share-Croppers” by Langston Hughes (1942) — A poem that highlights the labor, objectification, and destitution of many Black folks in the Jim Crow South who worked the land. Preacher Boy, Cornbread, and their fellow laborers understand the injustice of the job firsthand. —Cindy Reed 

• “For Saundra” by Nikki Giovanni (1968) — This free verse reminds us that if Black poetry is meant to reflect its times, then it won’t always be pretty or peaceful because times are rarely pretty and peaceful if you’re Black in America. Instead, the times are overtly and covertly violent and must be treated as such if we expect to survive, which is what the remaining jukers realize as they gather anything they can use for weapons. —Cindy Reed

Related: 

• A Notebook on Sinners