Variations on the Killing Floor Blues

On Sinners (the film) and Haints—the saints are dead

The Blues is a closed practice but it entices thieves who become cracks and tectonic shifts in its foundation through their obsession with finding a way inside a circle that will be unbroken. Clarksdale, Mississippi, where highways 61 and 49 meet, is said to be the crossroads and portal where the devil entered black and blues music. Who might the devil be, besides Robert Johnson’s op when he cries me and the devil, was walking side by side ? You and me in stride with industry, mass production, propagandized bastardizations of true music and its muses, for the market, the radio, the streams purchased by record executives to promote sound’s bastard children now called industry plants, we mus be the dev-I-el, a deviant species violating ourselves for a demented culture. An audience conforming to genre and cults of personality where there is only frequency also invites the luciferian pitch of a muffled or baffled celebration imposed by people who don’t understand what they’re praising and why, and couldn’t really tell you what they liked about it if asked to evaluate its qualities in a private interrogation. Luke 23:34: forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

In the relatively new discipline, “sonogenetics,” scientists use specific sounds and their attendant frequencies to alter the expression of cells, genes, mitochondria, diseases, neurons, the brain itself, which we now know is powered by the gut microbiome. And where do we think the “gut bucket” blues comes from besides in the pit of the stomach where thrill overthrows or succumbs to dread over and over bar after bar,, until the bars themselves bend telekinetically to serve and heal the bodies inventing and inviting them. The devil for me is anything that jeopardizes my unmediated access to those frequencies, before they are patented by scientists or scapegoated by record company minions who cannot play the blues, and codified as currency by those technocrats, who the very music they traffic would wound the way the sun does a vampire, if they could listen. But they don’t listen and are protected by spiritual ignorance. I tried to put a spell on him, but his spirit was illiterate—Baraka’s blues.

Sinners, set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, at those crossroads, reminds us how black music is in a holding pattern with the devil and it is very personal. My dad was born in a nearby Mississippi, Delta down in 1934, into a family of sharecroppers. I went to see the film with my sister and am writing about it quickly out of what feels like duty against the tide of competing duties. The imagery in the film took me out of the film itself and into my father’s psyche as a child in one of those fields and by night in the jukes seeing or playing his own music before he left on the first railroad in town, for New Orleans, and began recording that music for small labels. I’m not reviewing the film, just walking side by side in stride with it for a few bars of my own blues and my family’s.

The white woman in the film, who is first bitten and introduces the botched eternity of vampirism into a family of bluesmen and militants, because she’s invited in, because she’s near, because she’s forbidden fruit, while a metaphor for more than one infiltrator, reminds me of my mother, or any non-black wife a Delta musician who can shape-shift between nurturer, wanna be savior, martyr, and most of all, in her final form, handler. She has decent and innocent intentions, she is protected by her spiritual ignorance until she overcomes it. She takes on your blues in exchange for a part of your soul. The undermine is inevitable, not so much due to her race as due her desperation to be saved, baptised in your blood. The devil is her attention, swooping in as angel of death and eternal life, infatuation and love, transcendence by entrapment. The musician is scouted, courted, then branded, based on her attraction to him, which begins simply enough, with her internal struggle between two opposing forms of power: the power that comes with white privilege and the power that lives in the closed system that is the blues, which here stands in for the souls of black folk. There’s nothing sentimental about it, is what white people tend to miss; it’s more pathological than sentimental because we don’t revel in being essentialized in order to be loved and their gaze isn’t healing or enriching, it’s greedy, self-serving, an aspect of their own “sentimental capitalism” wherein black art figures as the next commodity once the first plantation system is obsolete. The perks are that it’s beautiful and fun to be immersed in.

I couldn’t really watch this film in any objective way, I was too busy feeling both implicated and avenged, seen and sold out, like the trouble and the revenge taken on or for it. Not because the depiction sold the blues out, but because I was watching my father’s story, a version of it, on the big screen for the first time and everyone died but him, his archetype. Human life is a battle of archetypes and if you’re between them or none of them you either have to invent a new one to survive or wither with into alienation and irrelevance. All the bluesman’s people had to die or disappear for him to make it from the South to Chicago and make a name for himself. What archetype are the others and where is their movie or parallel universe in which they play the hero and who would that make him? I couldn’t help but attune to my own ruthlessness, to come forth from such a man and his handler/muse, as both witness and co-conspirator, his chameleon and hers . The one man that gets out of town and is also a cannibal, in the current social dynamics, but more like the griot in that tradition of the closed or underground system of the blues. He agrees to tell the stories of the dead or distant forever as atonement for their covering for him and those stories live on because I live on and also agree and that is my karma or inheritance, not some idea I had about what I want to be when I grow up, but why we are a destiny. The devils give us wings to get closer to God, or the pretty delusion that lets us mistake shackles for wings.

All the bloodshed in the film was unnecessary woodshedding with demons; the fights went on a little too long past their collective surrender to this fate. It’s the ego, sickly enough to believe the griot has a choice in the matter, or that the woman who needs in does, that begs to be killed before it eats the soul alive. The story continues because that ego refuses to die and attracts pedestals and deals. All deals are with the devil at the crossroads, that is what a deal is in this society. Retraction would be what, though? Remaining knee deep in mud, hands bloody with the thorns of cloth? Is that all there is, the terror of anonymity or the terror of celebrity? Yes, that and the story.

Sinners was Ryan Coogler’s elegy for an uncle of his who cherished the blues. Coogler points out in an interview, how a lot of us fantasize about going back to Africa but haven’t been back to Mississippi. Black music in this film is what precious metals are in Black Panther. We haven’t been back because that version of home feels like a trap, too, and less glamorous, like failure, a fear passed down from the ones who got out to their children and children’s children. There’s a sense that you’re returning to renew your contract with Lucifer and abscond again and what if you get stuck in purgatory, or worse, like it and long to stay. Obsession resists being turned into fables so it’s safe to just be honest and confess—our music has been more important to us than anything else and we shepherd it and pursue it no matter what it costs or how long it makes us exiles from home.

If that sound survives a massacre by using everything around it as a decoy or sacrifice, it knew what it was doing. I feel righteous and evil at the same time realizing this, also territorial. I think of Biggie affirming born sinner… I’m on the precipice feeling devilish, his blues. I think of Kurt Cobain covering Leadbelly for his MTV Unplugged concert, telling the audience Leadbelly is his favorite performer, and that the Leadbelly estate wants to sell him the original guitar for five hundred thousand dollars. He seems to think he cannot afford it— My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night… In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine, I would shiver the whole night through. You can read Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, as Coogler did, to better understand the blunt poetics of these concessional lines. Or you can attend a church service somewhere you’re afraid to travel and visit a juke the same evening like making a pilgrimage through your own discarded soul.

The blue’s had become soul music by the time my dad was a teenager; he was categorized as “northern soul,” which got very big in Inglan and comes with its own style of ecstatic dance in discos there. But this doesn’t mean it had left this closed system. James Baldwin, while in a small resort town in Switzerland around the same time the blues begat soul, rediscovered Bessie Smith and the South with enough vividness and urgency to write Another Country. The karma is that no matter how far away you get from this enclosure that the blues is, it will yank you back into its quicksand orbit until you confront and accept it. The only way to confront it is to sing it. Your money is no good here. My father’s rich and my mother’s good looking and I still play the blues, Miles Davis warns. Heed him, dying of nothing but the blues, like all of us. Who said we were looking for saints, sounds a lot like haints, which in the movie and in the Delta, are the undead roaming around pretending to be alive so they can make you one of them. You just have to invite them in, to the club or the song. It be your own family, the swamp might whisper to the searchlight.

I enter like a loophole where sonogenetics and epigenetics meet in blue and gold, yanked back to the root to put it on something, and when I do, that thing mirrors my blues back to me, recovers them. Closed for business. This is closed system. But seduction is a survival mechanism we’ve subjected all black beauty to, until everyone seeks some blues to seduce and sedate what it was meant to awaken and abandon. They’re consuming our flesh for redemption and our flesh is our music and now that music is a ruins we have to dig into and reassemble into Trueblood’s blues, sure, but now we’re walking backwards in the forward direction facing the devil and he’s smiling in infinity like one of those benign snakes who has run out of venom and needs us to be afraid anyways. And the movies about our lives all end there.