March 20, 1998

REVIEW: Soul Food

Soul food comes in foilwrapped Tupperware, and in greasy-bottom pans and pots; the Sunday potluck dinner menus being a residual hodgepodge of tastes and cooking styles. The multiple cooks, however, each with a modicum of control over what they choose to bring, do not spoil the broth, but only because each has creative control over a separate portion of the meal. If one were to mix the peas with the cornbread, and that mush with the fried chicken, and that clumpy mess with the peach cobbler, the food would soon be ruined. It might still taste good, but the aesthetic would be gone.

And isn’t that what black culture has been about? The preeminence of appearance? After all, the culture is not beautiful—it is damn near ugly—without the notion of black survival to make some sense out of our intermingled flavors. It is the idea of black culture that sells Nike tennis shoes and rap records, i.e., Nike shoes and rap records, or Nike shoes in rap records, or Nike shoes via rap records; it is only the idea of black culture that made certain forms of jazz precious, meaning those forms which are more experimental, and not so easy to listen to; it is often the concept of black culture that makes the culture itself acceptable. And movies, of course, have no choice other than to reside in the realm of concept-driven appearance.

It is quite a paradox then, that in order to tolerate the mushy sentimentality of the movie named after this popular Southern American Cuisine, I would have had to rid myself of any notion of black culture at all. Notions of black culture, and the resulting forms of aesthetic appearance, are organized around certain points of view, common perspectives, and popular narratives. I should not have to mention that the notions do not, or should not, attempt to represent the entire culture as it “really” is; good criticism wouldn’t dare, as that would result in the imposition of stereotypes instead of the discovery of narrative forms.

One of the most popular narratives is that of the black matriarch. Harriet Tubman was the first, but she produces no aesthetic. For that, think of Florida from Good Times, or almost any Hattie McDaniels character. Another popular narrative is the inside joke of the hypocritical and voluptuous preacher. It is not an inside joke because it is funny, but because you’ve got to laugh to keep from cryin’, and only black folks know how shameful it really is. By now we all know about M.L.K. Jr.’s skirt-chasin’ exploits, which were prefigured and codified contemporaneously in Ralph Ellison’s portrayal of the semischizophrenic, numbers-runnin’, Big Ol’ Pimp and Holy Rollin’ Preacher, Rinehart.

The voluptuous preacher makes a nice segue; not because he is ever important anymore, but because in Ellison’s codification, it is only in absence that the preacher is overwhelming. When he finally saw Rinehart, in the flesh, preaching in the “Holy Way Station,” a storefront church, the Invisible Man realized that Rinehart was not necessarily “in the flesh,” or concrete, at all. “His world was possibility and he knew it.” Possibility always entails a potential reversal of fortune: “It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be beleived. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.”

In Soul Food, one might say that Big Mama and the Preacher are such lies, as they have switched places in order to become the Black Matriarch and the Voluptuous Preacher: the Preacher talks just about as dirty as Big Mama’s good-but-gamblin’ husband must have talked several decades ago (seeing as how she now has a passel-o’-kids), in order to become the Voluptuous Preacher; Big Mama takes all the feelgood, Christianhearted words, and is just about as ephemeral and not-really-there as that other voluptuous preacher, Rinehart, was: she talks as though she already has no body, as if she is already an asexual “spirit.” Can she do anything but die? (I expected her to break into song at any moment. Something “traditional”—the repetition of the word giving the lie to the “Message!”; ironic-meaninglessness-from-trying-too-hard courtesy of Keenan Ivory Wayans in a multitude of cameo appearances in that movie whose title no one is capable of remembering—like Across the River Jordan.)

Nope. We know that she’s gonna kick the bucket of fried chicken from the moment she opens her mouth.

And, expecting the Death of Mammy, we look to her daughters to finally get it together, although we know “it will get worse before it gets much better.” But perhaps the reconciliation of the sisters with one another will come in accord with Freud’s myth of the Primal Father, as given in Totem and Taboo. The sons of the ancient primal father desired to sleep with their mothers and sisters (Freud was probably projecting, as they say, his own desires), but their father was preventing them from doing so. They got pissed, and killed him. But then, like all psychoanalytic magic, the sons found each one of themselves in their father’s position: they had long since internalized the domination of the father, and now that he was gone, it bubbled up to the surface: they found their incestuous desires repressed, and they found themselves each as protective of their sisters and mothers, against all the others, as their father had been before.

You see what I am getting at. We expect each of the daughters to be sucked into the vacuum left by Big Mama’s death. But Freud does not apply here. That’s not always a bad thing. The problem is that nothing sensible applies at all.

The black matriarch narrative requires that she wield some sort of primeval feminine power, which must be magically passed from one woman or mother-figure to the next or the next generation, because black matriarchs are the magicians of midwifery, the bearers of voodoolike power over life and death, not to mention multiple children of their own. Sometimes, the black matriarch narrative is too strong to swallow, so it is diluted into a mere Black Woman Thang, a je ne sais quoi of the dark big-booty set. A dilution of the narrative is also what drove the welfare-mother rhetoric from the mid80s on, so you know it’s strong.

But, alas, there is no Black Woman Thang at work here either, despite Big Mama’s appearance, prophetic demeanor, and the protestations of the characters to the contrary: that the older sister, Vivica Fox’s character, was “always the strongest,” and thus would inherit Big Mama’s position. The untruth of this questionbegging rhetoric—as though the characters themselves knew that the older sister could not fill the spot, but nevertheless were trying to persuade themselves otherwise—was not merely a lie, but an attempted erasure / masking of the key to the only truth in the movie.

First, a mischievous Richard-Wright-like Black Boy takes the kudos instead. He does not know how to handle the family problems. He has to lie to get his mother and her sisters to come together. That proves once and for all the untruth of the Black Woman Thang which the movie pretended to promote. No internalized Matriarch draws each of the squabbling, catty women into the single space formerly occupied by Big Mama, allowing them to achieve an understanding of Her perspective all along, cementing the bonds between them; much less do they create a new tradition or lay the foundations for some viable future society (what Freud hypothesized for his Junior Achievers).

What does our Junior Achiever lie about in order to force the women together against their will? The women become whores and the boy becomes a pimp when he promises to pay them off a bunch of money, some money that Big Mama left for him: this was the persistent “myth” of the movie, the repetition of which into multiple ears over years and years makes for its undoubtable truth. What the writer of the story could not achieve through brainwashing us, the audience, with repetitions of the strength of the would-be matriarch (the older sister), he achieves in spite of us, forcing his characters even to suspend their disbelief, in order to walk right into a true lie.

What did Ellison say? Out of the vacuum comes Ellison’s “unbelievable,” the movie’s final sign of Big Mama’s absence, her virtual estate, the proverbial pot-full-o’-money, which finally pulls the daughters together, husbands and children dangling along. What happened to the power of the boy? He never had any. It was a lie. We established that the fact that the boy had to step up, or even that he could step up, belied any black matriarchal power Big Mama seemed to have had (because that power must be passed on to another woman). Perhaps she had been lying too. Or maybe her power was a freak accident of history.

At the end, the black matriarch’s powerlessness, or at least the lack of a suitable inheritess, which the protesting characters attempted to prevent us from seeing, provides the key to the only truth in the movie: only the dollar bills which come fluttering out of Uncle Pete’s broken television set are capable of bringing the family back together again. The transgenerational “tradition” was the worship of Mammon, and the notion of black culture was the same.

ellison film movies black.women