‘We Have Just Begun’
A filmmaker is an artist who tells stories with dancing lights and sound. Those lights bounce off a wall, and the final product is mixed in the individual minds of all who see it. Because we are different and are constantly evolving, no one sees the same movie as anyone else. And no one sees the same movie twice.
I think this is important to keep in mind, especially when we watch movies that purport to tell us the truth. A documentary is a nonfiction film, which is not the same thing as a true film. There are documentaries that get their facts right, and there are those that are playful with facts, and there are those that outright lie. Americans can be a credulous lot; though we ought not impart any especial authority to form or presentation, sometimes we do.
I do not know that everything presented in multimedia artist Michael Warren Wilson’s “We Have Just Begun” is verifiable truth. The film is powerful and deserves sober consideration. It has a place in the ongoing conversation about how we ought to remember and redress some of the terrible crimes of the past, crimes that generations buried and many people believe should be left undisturbed.
“We Have Just Begun” is about the Elaine Massacre of 1919, a chapter in Arkansas history that was underplayed and disingenuously characterized for decades. Untaught in Arkansas history classes, it is a terrible story, possibly the deadliest single incident of racial violence in American history, and there is no consensus on how many people were killed.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the massacre (written by the late Grif Stockley, who wrote the 2000 book “Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919”) says estimates of the number of Black people killed “ranged into the hundreds” while five white people died.
The Arkansas Legislature has officially acknowledged a death toll of between 100 and 237 Black people. Arkansas Gazette sales agent Sharpe Dunaway, an eyewitness to the massacre, put the death toll at 856. “We Have Just Begun” suggests the death toll may be even higher, as there is an oral history of mass grave locations and stories of bodies dumped in the Mississippi River or burned.
What is agreed is that on the night of Sept. 30, 1919, about 100 or more people, mostly Black sharecroppers who worked on the plantations of white landowners, gathered at a rural church in a place called Hoop Spur about three miles north of Elaine in Phillips County. The purpose of the meeting, called by the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, was to strategize about ways to obtain better prices and more reliable payment for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners.
In the months before the meeting, racial tensions had exploded in violence in several cities across the country, including Chicago, Indianapolis and Washington. At the same time, labor conflicts were rampant — a trend both government and business leaders attributed to the infectious nature of foreign ideologies such as Bolshevism. Added to that volatile combination of factors was the return of Black soldiers from World War I, who — having tasted a different kind of liberty overseas — were less likely to submit to a system of reflexive white superiority.
The farmers gathered at Hoop Spur had reason to suspect their meeting might be disrupted; armed guards were stationed around the church. When a car with three white men, including a Phillips County deputy sheriff and a security officer for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, pulled up to the church, shots were fired (who fired first is disputed). One of the white men was killed, another wounded.
The next morning, the Phillips County sheriff sent a posse to arrest those involved in the shooting, and an estimated 500 to 1,000 white men armed themselves and descended on Elaine to put down an imagined insurrection. By Oct. 2, more than 500 white soldiers from Camp Pike were sent to Elaine. The official line was that a few dozen Black people were killed before order was restored.
In reality, white mobs slaughtered many more Black people in and around Elaine. Anecdotal evidence has whites — including soldiers — hunting Black people and shooting them indiscriminately. In 1925, Dunaway wrote in his book “What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas” that soldiers “committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.”
“We Have Just Begun” tells this story economically, with restrained fierceness. It marshals the narration of its co-writer (with Wilson) Tongo Eisen-Martin, a San Francisco-based poet, and some stunning animation based on archival photographs by Wilson and music by Joshua Asante and Brandon Kendricks. Along with this retelling are the testimonies and arguments of many of the descendants of victims and survivors of the massacre, through which we catch a sidelong glimpse of how things have — and haven’t — changed in Elaine over the past century.
Wilson uses to harrowing effect an archival interview with John Elvis Miller, who was the prosecutor for the First Judicial Circuit of Arkansas, which included Phillips County, in 1919.
“The n ****** had been told that the army was comin’ in to protect them, and they were looking for them. And the train went out of Helena down toward Elaine, and just before it got to Elaine, they must have killed a hundred n ****** , right there,” Miller says, at one point.
There is another part of “We Have Just Begun” that has already proved controversial: allegations of land theft from Black farmers by the white gentry. Some historians have voiced their dissent, saying these allegations are overreaching. They may be.
But they are reflective of the emotional truth of the people who live in and around Elaine today, and it’s beyond the ken of a film critic in a 1,000-word review to re-investigate the claims made within the film. It is always incumbent on the audience to consider both the source of the information delivered and the motives of those delivering it. “We Have Just Begun” is journalism, but it is — like this review and every column that runs in this newspaper — opinion journalism.
Wilson and Eisen-Martin give voice to an understandably angry and long-ignored contingent of people directly affected both by the massacre and the prevailing economic conditions and power dynamics in the Arkansas Delta.
In a relatively brief and accessible film, they have constructed a legitimate perspective that needs to be heard. Their main point is that the Elaine tragedy persists — something that I doubt many people who have studied the incident and it reverberations would dispute.