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| Director Horace B. Jenkins, 1967 |
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| Jenkins as a young man, far right |
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| Nicolas Augustin Métoyer painting, St. Augustine Parish Church |
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| Marie Thérèse Coincoin and Augustin Métoyer |
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| Lolis Edward Elie |
CANE RIVER B USA (104 mi) 1982 d: Horace B. Jenkins
See the morning sun bright up in the sky How I wish that I could fly away Fly to where the sun never leaves the sky Where the star-filled night clings like the day Strolling through the woods, dear, You and I will be there And no one would see where we made love. Come, let’s fly away, to that brighter day Let the palm trees sway the whole day through Fantasy is right here And I’m in paradise here when I’m with you.
—See the Morning Sun, by Peter Métoyer (Richard Romain)
Following the commercial excesses of the Blaxploitation era of the 70’s, with films like SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSS SONG (1971), SHAFT (1971), SUPER FLY (1972, Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974), this fully independent black film came before Spike Lee’s first feature, SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT (1986), which was received so enthusiastically, as independent black film was all but non-existent, where the revelation was seeing a black couple kiss in a major motion picture. The L.A. Rebellion produced Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), also Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), all in the National Film Registry, which were small independent black films intended to counter the exaggerated stereotypes of drugs, gangsters, and criminality associated with blacks in film. The stylishness of this racially-charged love story has more in common with Kasi Lemmons’ Eve's Bayou (1997), which is rooted in Creole history, folklore, and mysticism, written and directed by an Emmy award-winning documentarian for his PBS productions of segments of The Advocates, Sesame Street, and 30 Minutes, a youth version of 60 Minutes, also affiliated with the long-running TV series Black Journal (TV program) that ran from 1968 to 1977 exploring black activism, while his 1978 documentary on public television, Sudan Pyramids: A Zandi’s Dream, won him the Oscar Micheaux Award for best film and best documentary. Jenkins was educated at the Sorbonne Film Institute, quickly becoming friends with Melvin Van Peoples as two American ex-pats living in Paris, following in the footsteps of Josephine Baker, Loïs Mailou Jones, Sidney Bechet, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and a long history of black artists moving to Paris for opportunities America denied them. Long considered lost, undistributed for more than 30 years after Jenkins died suddenly at the age of 41 from a heart attack before the scheduled opening which never happened, a print was rediscovered in 2013 and given a 4k digital restoration, reemerging in 2016 as the director’s only feature-length film. If only because so few films like this ever saw the light of day, as studios simply weren’t making black love stories that didn’t feature established stars, like Cicely Tyson in SOUNDER (1972) or Diahann Carroll in CLAUDINE (1974), while much less known are Sidney Poitier in A WARM DECEMBER (1973), Irene Cara in AARON LOVES ANGELA (1975), who then bolted to stardom in the musical FAME (1980), and Seret Scott in LOSING GROUND (1982), who was never offered another movie role. With the financial backing of Duplain Rhodes Jr. and Rhodes Enterprises, one of the wealthiest black families in New Orleans running a funeral home business since Reconstruction, the film is primarily set in the Natchitoches Parish of Louisiana with a brief journey into New Orleans, offering glimpses of Bourbon Street, Canal Street, the Superdome, Jackson Square, the Algiers Ferry, Xavier University, and Armstrong Park, crafted by an entirely black cast and crew, laying bare the tensions between two black families, like the forbidden love between the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, both descending from slaves, but with uniquely different opportunities, the light-skinned, property-owning Creoles and the darker-skinned, working class black families who remain largely disenfranchised and oppressed. According to this New York Times article, This Movie Was Nearly Lost. Now They're Fighting to Save It., much of this film is based on the life of Carol Balthazar, the partner of Horace B. Jenkins and consultant on the film who graduated from Xavier University in 1972 and earned a master’s degree in social work at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college, earning another master’s degree in business administration at Pace University in New York City, but turned to farming after her father died in 2003, working their 200-acre spread near Natchitoches. Exhibiting a light touch, creating a lyrically meditative story told with sophisticated warmth and affection, there is an old-school R&B musical soundtrack written and arranged by Leroy Glover, sung by New Orleans vocalist Phillip Manuel, very much in the style of the times, with songs that permeate throughout the entire film, offering an appreciation of the pastoral beauty of the Louisiana countryside through lyrics that provide a poetic narrative matching the naturalistic imagery captured by Gideon Manasseh in his lone movie credit, originally shot on 16mm but blown up to 35mm in the restoration.
A distinguishing aspect of the film is how the storyline revolves around a scholarly book, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color, by Gary B. Mills, an in-depth study of the long-neglected and inaccurately presented history of the region, which is not without controversy, as the characters in the story vehemently argue over the facts and historical repercussions in their modern day lives, becoming an exploration of their own history playing out onscreen, where one would be hard-pressed to find another film where a non-fiction reference book is the centerpiece of the story. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967) comes to mind, but that’s a newsworthy story as opposed to a complete sociological history of a region. A few words about The Forgotten People, Mills reveals how the descendants of the Cane River free people of color, or gens de couleur libre, began a colony in the 18th century largely from the efforts of a black woman named Marie Thérèse Coincoin, a descendant of African slaves brought to the region by the French, originally coming from the Bakongo People. She had 15 children, ten from a white planter named Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer, a descendent of Bordeaux, France, where a Catholic priest threatened to break up their union, filing charges with intentions to sell her away to New Orleans, so they moved away, settling in the Cane River region where he granted her freedom, with her offspring representing the core of the colony of free people of color. Her eldest son, Nicolas Augustin Métoyer, donated land for a church at Isle Brevelle in Natchez, Louisiana, and commissioned his brother Louis to build the St. Augustine Parish Church, which is believed to be America’s first church built by free people of color for their own use. Cultured and deeply religious, the Métoyer family of Louisiana provide intriguing evidence of the degree to which class, race, and economic lines were blurred in early America, with some family owning slaves while others were themselves enslaved, something that was not at all unique to the region, however, as the degree of their economic success shows a startling level of enterprise and ambition, raising cattle, indigo, and cultivating tobacco, while acquiring land grants from the Spanish authorities and purchasing slaves, extending the land ownership along the Cane River area to 17,000 acres of land, which has slowly been stripped away from the family over time. Because they tended to marry other free people of color, the Cane River Creoles became economically and socially successful, yet this aspect of black land loss in Louisiana is an underlying component to the film. While free blacks in New Orleans had been the subject of earlier studies, free people of color in rural Louisiana received little attention. What Mills discovered is that Cane River Creoles, like their white neighbors, publicly supported the Confederacy, actually benefiting from slavery while becoming local elites, though the book was largely neglected when released, perhaps because it dealt exclusively with Louisiana, but also the state’s non-English-speaking colonial history. Louisiana’s black history may have been neglected by white scholars who were skewed by an East coast bias that viewed history exclusively through the British colonial experience. What this book uncovers is that the treatment of free people of color in Natchitoches differs under the French, Spanish, and American rule. The French brought the plantation slave system to the region and established trading practices with local Indians, while the Spanish control altered the rules in accordance with its own empire while also responding to planter resistance, establishing practices that were more advantageous to both slaves and free people of color, yet life became much more difficult under American rule, where free people of color weren’t viewed any differently than slaves, with land routinely stolen from them. What’s important to recognize is that Creole is a culture, not a color.
A sweet and reflective romance immersed in the complexities of history and race, the film manages to be both modest and ambitious, starring Richard Romain as Peter Métoyer, a college graduated black athlete who would prefer to be a writer and poet, turning down the chance to play pro football after being drafted by the New York Jets, but they made him feel like he was being treated as a “specimen,” a human commodity, and instead returns to his hometown in rural Louisiana, greeted by a throng of family and friends when he gets off the bus, but he apparently prefers a simpler life, Phillip Manuel - Back To My Ole Hometown YouTube (3:24). Romain, incidentally, went to LSU on a college football scholarship but suffered a career-ending knee injury, becoming the lead funeral director at D. W. Rhodes Funeral Home in New Orleans for forty years. One of the first things he does is hop on his horse and go riding out into the countryside, jotting down a poem in his notebook that happens to be the lyrics for the song playing on the soundtrack, with music manifesting his creative impulses, before heading to a historical tour of the Melrose Plantation once owned by the offspring of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, part of his Creole landowning family. It’s there he happens to find an attractive young woman reading The Forgotten People, Maria Mathis (Tommye Myrick, the artistic director of the Voices in the Dark Repertory Theatre Company in New Orleans since 1992), immediately taking an interest, offering her a ride, as the two go horseback riding through the country roads and open fields, where he remarks, “What is more poetic than planting a seed and watching it grow?” While she’s headstrong and independent-minded, about to head off to Xavier University in New Orleans, she can’t wait to get away from a dreary small-town life where nothing ever changes, living a suffocating existence with an overbearing mother (Carol Sutton) and a nosy brother (Ilunga Adell) who sacrificed a potential football career as he was needed at home to support his family, working long hours at the local egg hatchery, a stark contrast to Peter’s more easygoing life of privilege, suggesting years of resentment and disappointment, making home life frustrating, so the two are heading in opposite directions, as Maria is about to embark on a new life, while Peter is consolidating what’s important to him. Sparks fly between the two, rhapsodized by the soulful musical soundtrack, Phillip Manuel Sings Cane River - Now That I Know You Love ... YouTube (4:38), but when Maria’s mother hears he’s a Métoyer, she grows indignant, viewing her daughter’s interest as a shameful betrayal of the family, believing Creoles think they’re better than everybody else, having had all the advantages, as the Métoyer ancestors owned “the biggest slave plantation in these parts,” while they happen to be descendants of the Melrose slaves. Literally forbidding her daughter from seeing him again, believing she will never be accepted into his family, she ignores her mother’s warnings and a relationship ensues, but she’s reluctant to get too close, feeling skeptical with mixed feelings, where the film gets at the heart of a legacy of grief uniquely suffered by black women, often buried in repressed emotions, as their intelligence is routinely overlooked, having been silenced for such a long period of time. Peter’s father (Lloyd La Cour) and younger sister Dominique (Barbara Tasker) are both educated, but we quickly learn his father lost a court case where land was snatched away from their family by a white attorney, where the judge just happened to be a relative of the attorney, so justice becomes a central component of the film, as Peter is determined to get it back. With different religions, the film offers different sides of black spirituality, as the couple agree to attend each other’s places of worship, as she attends a Baptist church with a spirited gospel choir, while he is Catholic, actually taking us inside the St. Augustine Parish Church, identifying his family connection to Marie Thérèse Coincoin and Nicolas Augustin Métoyer. Skirting around her mother’s reservations, the two concoct a plan for Peter to drive Maria to college, as she registers for school while he visits a lawyer in New Orleans about the stolen land, who is none other than Lolis Edward Elie, a prominent Civil Rights attorney whose clients included the Freedom Riders and the Black Panther Party, and one of the driving forces behind desegregating New Orleans schools, openly addressing the subject of black land ownership, “We are now losing land in this country at the rate of a thousand acres a week.” With an affluent cousin in Lacomb (Lacombe History Highlights), the couple spend a carefree afternoon all to themselves on the lavish premises before an evening party, spending a romance-filled week with plenty of quiet moments together on the estate, growing much closer, where in a sequence along the riverside he asks to marry her, which just adds to her influx of confusion, as it’s all happening too fast and too soon for Maria, who wants to assert her own independence, and not be reliant upon any man, yet building a family is exactly what Peter has in mind. Part of the beauty of the film is how integrated the story is with the surrounding rural landscape, offering remarkable settings with a painterly allure, where the land is an extension of their own history, yet their conversations, rooted in the legacy of slavery, remain glaringly relevant, with the past playing out in the present, still facing many of the same obstacles, yet an overriding theme is that knowledge of one’s own history offers a window into the future.
