Turning into Drops:
Water in Daughters of the Dust, Moonlight, and the Black Imagination
As enslaved Africans traveled across the waters, a new African American identity was forged. Functioning as the second leg of the triangular trade between Europe, the Americas, and Africa, the Middle Passage carried between ten and eleven million captive Africans, where they were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in slave ships (Johnson 4 qtd. Wardi 7), causing over one-third of them to die (Wardi 3). While the beginnings of a new Pan African identity emerged during this ocean voyage, it was at the cost of stripping millions of Africans of their cultural heritage and humanity.
But America’s inland rivers also flow through the history of African Americanness. As Langston Hughes writes, in his The Negro Speaks of Rivers, “I’ve known rivers:/ I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older/ Than the/ Flow of human blood in human veins.” Just as the Mississippi River carried slaves “down river” to plantations with the worst working conditions, crossing the Ohio river signaled freedom in the North — up until the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (Wardi 3). As a witness to the brutality of slavery and the resistance of those enslaved, water transformed, physically and metaphorically, into an embodiment of a collective African American memory ever fluid and changing.
Water has also carried its way through film, especially those imagined by African American creators. Set in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the 1991 Daughters of the Dust, written and directed by Julie Dash, was the first feature film directed by an African American woman (Martin). 25-years-later, the 2016 Moonlight, was the first film with an all-Black cast to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (France). Whether in the calm of a bathtub or raging in the sea, both Daughters of the Dust and Moonlight center water in their narratives — as a motif that ties history into the present. Within each film, water serves as the evocation of memory and possibility. While the memories that water carries can be difficult to bear, these films offer returning to the water as returning to oneself, and water as a force capable of emancipating.
Since many African cultural traditions and early African American histories only survive in memories, they are also subject to the biases of the mind and the possibility of forgetting. The water, constantly moving and surrounding whatever exists with it, is apt to function as a symbol for the convergence of memory with possibility. Cornel West writes that African Americans were those “who could not not know” (West qtd. Fabre 3). The tragedies of slavery and the inequality following it have caused African Americans to be “braced by the awareness that the past, as Faulkner put it, has never really passed” (Fabre 3). As an element vast in its abundance, depth, and dynamicity, water physically embodies a view of history that is non-linear but repeating and time-traveling.
The physical nature of water both gives rise to and reinforces the artistic role it plays within African American imaginations. In the depths of the Atlantic Ocean lies the bones of the estimated 2 million enslaved Africans who died during the Middle Passage. But the ocean was not only a graveyard for Africans who died on slave ships but also for those who were thrown off ships alive. A notable example is the 1781 Zong Massacre, when British trader Luke Collingwood threw close to 133 sick but alive men, women, and children off his ship for insurance money (Mustakeem 188). Anissa Wardi, author of Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective, posits that the humans who died “in the currents, have, by their very materiality, changed the composition of the waters.” Given its ability to put the molecules of nearly everything it touches into solution (Marks 25 qtd. Wardi 7), water is a transcript of the Middle Passage, and as it constantly cycles through the hydrologic cycle (France 18 qtd Wardi 9), it serves as a never-fading reminder of the past. Not bound by the limits of time, water represents the African American memory, which must remember the past to survive the possibilities of the present.
Combined with director Julie Dash’s non-linear narrative structure, the Sea Islands featured in Daughters of the Dust cause time to appear less rigid, as centuries of history are embodied within its geography and inhabitants. Narrated both by the matriarchal Nana Peazant and the Unborn Child, Daughters periodically flashes from the 1860s, before President Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation, to 1902, where most of the film takes place (Sudhinaraset 47). As Nana’s granddaughters, Yellow Mary and Viola, travel from the mainland to visit their family on the islands, Yellow Mary plays with a kaleidoscope (Daughters 11:25–12:15). The kaleidoscope, which like water, refracts and reconfigures the world as one peers through it, is often connected to Dash’s non-linear narrative style (Sudhinaraset 47). By combining past, present, and future, Dash tells the story of the more than one-hundred Sea Islands, which, separated from the Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina coasts, were often the first images of America faced by captive Africans (Wardi 33).
Moreover, Viola recounts to Mr. Snead, her photographer companion (Daughters 8:25–8:30), that Africans continued to be brought to the Sea Islands, under the covering of miles of rivers leading into the mainland, as late as 1858 (Jones-Jackson 9 qtd. Wardi 33). However, given the islands’ humidity and less-than-comfortable conditions, white owners often left plantation operations to others, allowing African culture to survive longer (Wardi 34). As the home to the Africans most recently brought to the Americas, scholar Lindsay Tucker argues that the Sea Islands became “with the exception of New Orleans, the most African of places in America” (Tucker 180 qtd Wardi 34). Emerging from the Islands, the Gullah culture was rich with African religious traditions and memories of the Middle Passage. Wardi argues that even the rhythmic flowing of the ocean “catalyzes the Sea Islands as a space of living history, where rituals and rites enable ancestral communion… and, as such, acts as a conduit to the otherworldly” (Wardi 35). Through water and its ability to contain and transcend time, memory is passed down within the Peazant family.
Dash couples water with the passing down of memory and the cultural heritage it maintains from generation to generation. Even before the film’s title card is flashed, Daughters of the Dust focuses on two hands filled with Sea Island soil and then onto Nana Peazant’s hands in 1860, stained blue from boiling indigo as a slave. Daughters then travels to 1902, where Nana is bathing fully-clothed in the sea and Bilal Muhammad, the lone Muslim on the island, is praying on the beach. Bilal and Nana, the patriarchal and matriarchal figures on the island, share their memories and myths throughout Daughters (Wardi 48–49). By praying in Arabic and bathing in the ocean waters, Bilal and Nana establish the water as a still-present passage between the shores of Africa and America (Wardi 46). Foregrounded in the backdrop of water, Dash introduces Bilal and Nana as storytellers who, like the water, contain memories, secrets, and lessons within its depths.
Nonetheless, within the memory of enslavement lies unspeakable horrors which continue to inform the present lives of the residents of the Sea Islands. Another one of Nana’s granddaughters, Eula, was raped by an unknown man and is pregnant. Scholar Catherine Clinton asserts that rape was an “integral part of slavery, not an aberration or disfunction” (Clinton 208 qtd Wardi 47), and recent genetic studies put forth that nearly a quarter of the African American gene pool is of European descent (Wade). Regardless of how commonplace the raping of Black women was, Dash argues that sexual abuse will always leave a scar of some sort on a woman’s memory. Eula, fusing the physical violation committed against her with that which was repeatedly committed against enslaved women, explains that “as far as this place is concerned… deep inside we believe we are ruined” (Daughters 1:37:44–1:37:50). Even Yellow Mary, who was sexually assaulted on the mainland, says that she “got ruint” due to it (Daughters 52:40). Although this can be interpreted solely as a statement on the lasting trauma of sexual violence, Eula and Yellow Mary’s shared experience is fused with the realities of their Blackness. After Eula explains that Eli does not know who raped her, Yellow Mary advises her never to tell him, arguing that “there’s enough uncertainty in life without wondering what tree your husband’s hanging from” (Daughters 50:00–50:02). Although Eula cannot tell him who the rapist was, out of fear of Eli being lynched in the Jim Crow south, her silence is at the cost of Eli’s paranoia and anxiety over having a child unrelated to him. To navigate his situation, Eli must look to his ancestors, and Dash positions the water as the way for him to do so.
Just as the water carries the physical remains of the Middle Passage, it also holds myths of resistance, which serve as an emancipating force for the residents of the Sea Islands. Like the captive Africans, much of the Peazant family oral tradition is recorded in myth and memory. On the Sea Islands, the myth of the Ibo Landing is deeply ingrained in the culture and pride of the Gullah people. Although there are different tellings, it is believed that once the Ibo captives made it to America and saw the enslavement that awaited them, they walked atop of the water, still in their chains, all the way back to Africa (Cooper 168). While researching for the film, Dash recounts that she heard some iterations which told of the captives flying back to Africa and “the truth or the myth” that they walked into the water and drowned (Dash 29). As a pregnant Eula stands on the shore of where the Peazant family believes the Ibo Landing occurred, she joins past and future, telling her unborn child the story of their Ibo ancestors (Daughters 1:18:00–1:20:00). Eli, who was just advised by Nana to “call on your ancestors… let them guide you” (Daughters 26:15–26:20), walks on water as Eula tells the Ibo Landing story. Floating in the inlet is a rotting figurehead carved to look like an African slave, which would have sat on the bow of a slave ship (Dash 41). As he kneels atop the water, Eli pours a libation into the figure’s mouth, demonstrating his reverence for his ancestors who hold him above the water (Daughters 1:18:54–1:19:54). After Eli makes it back on the shore, he embraces Eula’s pregnant belly, no longer aching the pain her rape brings him. Not only does Dash connect Eula’s rape to the logistics of slavery and the realities of resisting it, but she asserts the Ibo Lading myth, a memory that lies within the water, as a force capable of emancipating through the healing of others across time.
Like Daughters of the Dust, the 2016 film Moonlight imagines water as a facilitator of the passing of memory through generations of African Americans Primarily set in Miami, Moonlight chronicles the growth of the fatherless and gay Chiron, known first as “Little” during his childhood and later as “Black” during his adulthood. After being chased by bullies yelling homophobic slurs, Little hides in an abandoned motel until Juan, a stranger to Little, finds him and offers him a place to stay for the night. But after Juan drives Little back to his mother, he shows back up at Juan’s house after school, inspiring him to take Little to the beach and teach him how to swim (Jenkins 1–20). With tense music and the camera bobbing up and down with the waves, director Barry Jenkins envisioned Juan “teaching Little how to sustain himself” in a “moment of spiritual transference” (Mekado). As Juan holds Little’s head above the water, it appears as though Juan is baptizing Little, facilitating his rebirth into a boy more connected to his African American identity and what being a Black man has the potential to mean (Jenkins 18). In water rich with history, the same water in which captive Africans were transported to the Americas, Juan is a bearer of memory. Growing up in the Caribbean, Juan tells Little that a Cuban woman told him that “in the moonlight… Black boys look blue. You blue. That’s what I gon’ call you — Blue.” After Little asks him, “so your name Blue?,” Juan responds, “Nah. At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you gon’ be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you” (Jenkins 20). Like the water Juan and Little sit before, blue serves as the color of the memories and possibilities that fall below the façade of Blackness. In the blue, an identity emerges that does not fit within the view of Blackness formed by the white male gaze: Chiron’s queerness. When Juan lets Little try to swim without his help, the camera focuses on him at the level of the water (Jenkins 18), making the ocean appear as it would to Little — who swims alone but is free in the embrace of the sea. It is in the water where Little must decide how far he dives, for there is both treasure and danger beneath the waves.
By coupling water and its intriguing yet dangerous depths with Chiron’s sexuality, Jenkins connects queerness and African Americanness — and the problems encountered when those identities intersect. Chiron’s best friend Kevin not only serves as a guide for Chiron as he navigates his masculinity but also becomes a sexual interest. After bullies ostracize Little for having a small demeanor saying, “get your gay ass right here” and “catch that f*ggot ass n***a” (Jenkins 2–3), Kevin explains to Little that all he must do is “show these n***as you ain’t soft” (Jenkins 14). As he attempts to help Little deal with the bullies, Kevin also demonstrates how toxic masculinity is integral to their survival as Black boys. While simultaneously feeding into the established trope of a sexually-focused young Black male, the teenage Kevin shares with Chiron how he was caught having sex with a girl at school, but then changes directions, saying, “that stays between us, a’ight? I know you can keep a secret dawg” (Jenkins 36). Through this line, Jenkins offers the possibility that Kevin and Chiron had previously engaged in some sexual act outside of the traditional confines of heterosexual masculinity. But, in the present, as Chiron must face his sexual attraction to Kevin, Jenkins provides the ocean to accompany him. Like the waves, Chiron’s queerness may be repressed but will always exist — never-ceasing to rhythmically crash onto the shore. When Chiron dreams of Kevin having sex with a girl in front of him, the ebb-and-flow of the ocean is heard in the background, coexisting with his desire to engage sexually with Kevin and with his fear of what that could bring. With the waves as his witness, Chiron faces a decision: whether to continue to exist within the façade of his Black masculinity or to explore his sexuality and possibly risk rejection, ostracization, and violence.
Sitting on the beach of the same ocean where he and Juan swam together years earlier, Chiron once again breaks free before the waves. Soon after his mom kicked him out of the house for the night, Chiron happens to meet Kevin at the beach. After laughing as two friends smoking a joint together, Chiron responds to Kevin’s assertion that he never cries, admitting, “Shit, I cry so much, sometimes I feel like I’mma just turn into drops” (Jenkins 51). Equating water with the difficulty of his life — as a closeted gay man, often bullied at school, and with a mother addicted to crack — Chiron also challenges Kevin’s masculine front. Responding to Chiron’s vulnerability, Kevin argues, “but then you could just roll out into the water, right? Roll out into the water like all these other muhfuckers out here tryna drown they sorrows?” (Jenkins 51). While he is apprehensive of expressing emotion, Kevin’s tone reveals genuine curiosity in Chiron’s answer, in hopes of learning from Chiron a way to be vulnerable yet strong. However, Kevin also reveals how the water can be both empowering and despairing. As a vessel for memories of resistance and trauma, one can easily hide within the water’s depths, failing to ever move on from the transgressions of the past. But Chiron alludes to his sexuality, saying, “I wanna do a lot of things that don’t make sense,” to which Kevin responds, “I didn’t say it don’t make sense” (Jenkins 52). Kevin and Chiron, growing closer to one another, begin to kiss, and then Kevin masturbates Chiron. After this moment of great intimacy, Chiron apologizes, but Kevin tells him, “what you gotta be sorry for?” (Jenkins 52–53). Eric A. Jordan and Derrick R. Brooms argue in Black and Blue: Analyzing and Queering Masculinities in Moonlight that in doing so, Kevin indirectly reiterates “Juan’s message about being oneself and being okay with that choice” (148). Although under the protective moonlight, having assessed the possibilities of the moment against the memories of the sea, Chiron and Kevin break down their façades, once the sun rises, the reality of surviving as a Black man must take precedence.
While water helps to momentarily emancipate Chiron from his heterosexual front, it also marks his maturation to the hardened Black. The next day, during lunch at school, Terrel, a boy who consistently bullied Chiron throughout the film, tells Kevin to beat up Chiron. Out of fear of losing his social status, Kevin betrays his intimacy with Chiron and assaults him as a group of students watch. As Jordan and Brooms argue, the literal night-and-day changes to Kevin’s demeanor are representative of Black masculinity, that while it is “sincere, emotional, connected, intimate, and nothing to be ashamed of” (148), it must exist within a society where “Black men are expected to be ‘hard’” (149). Although Kevin continuously pleads with Chiron to stay down during the fight, he refuses to, thus forcing Kevin to continue to hit him (Jenkins 59). In doing so, Chiron indirectly removes Kevin’s ability to assert his masculinity as something untied to his sexuality — requiring Kevin to face him for who he is. But after the fight, moments after a bloodied Chiron dunks his head in a sink filled with ice water, he enters class and lifts a wooden chair, slamming it on the head of Terrel, who falls to the ground (Jenkins 61–62). Transitioning from victim to predator, the water signals Chiron’s decision to not continue to exert masculinity that can be preyed upon by bullies. After Chiron is led out of the school in handcuffs, Moonlight pivots to Black, the adult Chiron, who wears golden grills, is physically imposing, and is a drug dealer in Atlanta. After Black wakes up from a nightmare where his mother is screaming at him, he dunks his head in a sink full of ice water (Jenkins 63–64), once again transforming into a hardened Black man. While the water helped Chiron find freedom in vulnerability and sexual intimacy, Moonlight also asserts that for an African American gay man, the memories of a violent past must inform the possibilities present, requiring Black to put on his façade out of survival, regardless of how tortuous repressing one’s need for intimacy may be.
It is not until Black returns to the water once more and reconnects with Kevin that he finds freedom within his masculinity and sexuality again. Following years of not talking, Kevin calls Chiron, and after vaguely apologizing for what occurred between them as teenagers, Kevin asks him to come to the restaurant where he is a cook (Jenkins 71–74). After Black arrives at the restaurant, Kevin attempts to tear down Black’s façade, understanding it as merely a front to the Chiron he intimately knows. As he cooks the “chef’s special” for Black, Kevin appears to appreciate the task as he delicately prepares the food, and after sharing a bottle of wine, Kevin plays a song on the jukebox that reminds him of Black (Jenkins 83). Slowly, Black emerges from behind his hyper-masculinity, just as the moonlight shining through the window makes both Black and Kevin appear bluer. After Kevin and Black drive to Kevin’s house, Black looks at a path to the beach, with waves crashing between the treelines, and smiles (Jenkins 92–93). At this moment, Moonlight offers the sea as Black’s invitation to expose his vulnerabilities and open up sexually to Kevin once again. As he holds back tears, Black confesses to Kevin that “you’re the only man who’s ever touched me. The only one. I haven’t really touched anyone, since” (Jenkins 96). Standing apart from each other, Kevin in a blue shirt and Chiron in a black one, they both look at each other, saying nothing but nonetheless communicating their shared need for intimacy. The two share one final moment, and leaning against one another, Black and Kevin close their eyes, listening only to the sound of waves crashing against the shore (Jenkins 97).
With its rhythm like a human heartbeat, the ebb and flow of water strengthens and emancipates, marking the passing of time and history. Yet, water simultaneously maintains and records the lessons that its memories hold for the possibilities ahead. Moonlight, transitioning from Chiron’s blue before the water to black atop of the land, asserts that the water continues to serve as a witness to an unfolding coming of age. As society strips Black boys — and girls — of their youthfulness and innocence, it also takes away their ability to encounter and explore their gender and sexuality. While a heteronormative and patriarchal social order impacts all, Moonlight evokes queerness as a method for understanding African American identity. As social expectations combine with the reality of living within underserved communities, a hardened façade serves many African Americans as a means of survival. But although the waves obscure what lies in the depths, they also can be traveled and crossed. As the Unborn Child, within her mother’s amniotic waters, utters her final line, “we remained behind, growing older, wiser, stronger” (Daughters, 1:51:35–1:51:40), it evokes the final image of Moonlight, of Little looking out into the sea, blue under the moonlight (Jenkins 99). By returning these waters, the origin of great pain but also of immense resistance, the memories that lie within its waves encourage and fortify. Whether deep in its sorrow or in its hope, as Langston Hughes writes, “my soul has grown deep like the rivers,” the water offers a place to swim — bobbing out into the sea, eagerly ready for whatever lies ahead.
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