Dee Rees chipped in with her personal touch
For Earnestine Smith, grandmother of writer-director Dee Rees, making her family’s history tangible, in the form of a journal she titled “Memories of My People,” was important.
Years later, Smith’s effort has even greater use than potentially intended. Her journal became a significant reference and inspiration for Rees’ latest film, “Mudbound,” in theaters and available on Netflix on Nov. 17.
“Mudbound” is about two families connected by land. The Jacksons are black sharecroppers who claim an ancestral connection to the soil they till, while the McAllans are white, middle class and bought their their way in. Each family has someone in it that has just returned from World War II to rural Mississippi and must deal with racism and adjusting to life after war. The ensemble cast includes Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jason Mitchell, Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke and Jonathan Banks.
The initial script, written by Virgil Williams (“Criminal Minds”), came to Rees in 2015. She decided that if she was going to sign onto the project, “I had to make this a story that would be interesting for me to tell.”
Enter her grandmother’s journal. In its hundreds of pages is everything from family photos of their slave ancestors to the names, ranks and medals of relatives who fought in wars, to floorplans of Smith’s childhood homes.
Three photos from the journal particularly inspired her. The first was a shot of her great-great grandparents Emma and Bill Johnson, taken between 1900 and 1916 in Wildwood, La.
“They would refer to her as ‘the Guinea Woman,’ even though she wasn’t necessarily from Guinea, but because she spoke her native language,” Rees said. “They called him ‘the Arab man’ and the mythology is that he was the son of a slave trader and his father told him not to go up near the boat, but he did and that’s how he ended up enslaved.”
The second photo is a family portrait of some of her relatives who were slaves. They’re dressed in their Sunday best, holding flowers and cigars.
“Apparently it was a picture of all the slaves on the plantation, but they stood in family groups and cut [the photo] up and everybody got their piece of it.”
The third image is of Rees’ great grandmother Famie, Smith’s mother. She holds a handkerchief and a flower, her hair coiffed and swept to the right side of her face.
“My grandmother told me stories of how she would comb her mother’s hair and there was a sink in her skull, where it was caved in, where she was bashed in the head,” Rees said. “And she told me how she and her brother, Clarence, used to ride on the back of her mother’s cotton sack. That’s why there’s a scene like that in the movie.”
These photos told Rees that the time period “looked differently than it typically gets presented,” she said.
“[Black] people kept homes and had ideas about ownership and advancement that they didn’t share necessarily with their white counterparts.”