In Era of Book Bans and War on History, Sinners Reveals What US Tries to Forget |
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Warning: This article contains spoilers.
Near the end of Sinners, there is a moment that Hollywood rarely permits. The character Smoke guns down a gang of Ku Klux Klan members who have come to murder his people — and then, with hands still trembling, he cradles his newborn child in his arms.
Watching it, something strange and powerful stirred within me — as if the film were bending time, reaching across generations to reply to a story I recently learned in my journey to understand my family history.
A few years ago, my dad, Gerald Lenoir, made a stunning discovery: He found the Mississippi plantation where our family had been enslaved and the land where they lived after emancipation. In the process, he also discovered that the ancestors of the legendary bluesman J. B. Lenoir were likely enslaved on that same plantation.
That news bent me like a blue note on a National guitar.
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I’ve spent much of my life devoted to the blues — I play harmonica in the band The Blue Tide — and this discovery was a revelation that bound me to the music’s tradition of protest and truth-telling in a way words can scarcely capture. After several trips there with my dad and brother, I brought my kids to Jayess, Mississippi, where we dedicated a headstone to my great-great-grandparents, Thomas and Laura Lenoir, who had been enslaved nearby.
At the ceremony, a woman in her nineties approached and told me she had once been friends with my great-great-grandmother Laura. The fact that I was talking to someone who had been friends with a person who had once been enslaved was stunning.
This history isn’t distant. It’s breathing right beside us.
Then she told us a story I will never forget. During Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan burned down the preschool that Black families in Jayess had built for their children in an effort to drive them off their land. But the community didn’t run. They armed themselves, rebuilt the school in a tent, and stayed. They fought back and held onto their land.
That’s why that scene in Sinners hit me so hard.
For families who have passed down stories of surviving the Klan — and the trauma and resilience of those encounters through their blood — that moment on screen was not just witnessed. It was remembered in the body.
Cultural critic bell hooks once wrote that enslaved Black people were often punished simply for looking at white slaveowners, and she wondered how that traumatic history shaped “Black parenting and Black spectatorship.” Out of that history, hooks argued, Black audiences developed what she called an “oppositional gaze” — a way of watching films critically, aware of how Hollywood has long distorted or erased Black life. Instead of forcing Black viewers to watch themselves through a white lens, Sinners centers Black memory, Black defiance, and Black love.
In doing so, the film also understands something the writer Amiri Baraka captured in his landmark study Blues People: “Blues means a Negro experience.” He understood that the blues is not merely music but the historical expression of Black life in America. Sinners takes that insight seriously.
The Blues Summons Monsters and Opens Portals
Set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, Sinners follows Smoke and Stack (both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan), twin brothers who return home from Chicago after years working in Al Capone’s criminal empire to open a juke joint.
They recruit a band of extraordinary musicians, including their cousin Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (played with electrifying grace by actor-musician Miles Caton in his film debut), a blues guitarist and preacher’s son; Delta Slim (poignantly portrayed by Delroy Lindo), a piano and harmonica player; and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a blues singer who catches Sammie’s eye and lands a gig at Smoke and Stack’s juke joint.
Smoke and Stack purchase an old sawmill from a white man, who hides the fact that he is the local head of the Ku Klux Klan, and turn it into their juke joint. That evening it becomes a sanctuary for Black residents of Clarksdale — a place where music, laughter, and community create moments of magic and freedom.
Inside Smoke and Stack’s juke joint, Sammie’s music does something astonishing: It bends the space-time continuum, transforming the room into a portal. West African griots appear — playing, drumming, dancing — their sound threading across centuries. Then Sammie’s blues music opens up a portal to the future that ushers in an electric guitarist in the tradition of Jimi Hendrix or Parliament, followed by a hip-hop DJ scratching a record, a break dancer, and Black women twerking that echo the African women also on the dance floor. Even the dancing Chinese ancestors of Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and her husband Bo (Yao) — immigrant shopkeepers in Clarksdale who help with supplies for the juke joint — are summoned into the space, showing that this musical connection has no borders.
The sequence becomes one of the great scenes in cinematic history and one of the greatest tributes to Black musical genius ever expressed. In a few electrifying minutes, the film does something that has rarely been accomplished: It makes visible the living genealogy of Black music — from African rhythms to the blues to rock to hip-hop — revealing it not as a series of separate genres but as a single river of creativity flowing through centuries of struggle and........