By Donna Bryson
CLARKSDALE, Mississippi – Clarksdale didn’t just provide history and blues for director and writer Ryan Coogler’s hit movie about art, Jim Crow and vampires. One of the Mississippi Delta town’s musicians contributed to the “Sinners” script.
After a special screening in the town, which has no cinema, Coogler told the audience gathered in a community hall about the first time he described the movie’s plot to a group of Clarksdale blues musicians he had asked to contribute to the score.
He said he hesitated when he got to the part about the vampires. He went ahead. Then, Grammy winner Bobby Rush filled the silence.
“I had a girl once that was a vampire,” the musician joked.
The line was given to Delta Slim, played by Delroy Lindo, a piano-playing character who brings both comic relief and depth to the movie.
Thursday’s screening and discussion came after Tyler Yarbrough, a community organizer and movie buff in Clarksdale, wrote an open letter asking Coogler and Warner Brothers to bring the movie to a town where people drive 80 miles (130 km) to Memphis, Tennessee to get to a cinema.
Warner Brothers outfitted the Clarksdale Civic Auditorium with a big screen, projector and sound system. There was even popcorn.
“Sinners” has been widely acclaimed by reviewers and moviegoers, who praised the film for its stars’ performances, its showcasing of African American art, and its wrestling with painful history and big ideas.
According to Variety, by the end of its opening month of April “Sinners” had grossed $122.5 million in North America and $161.6 million worldwide.
At what was billed as a community screening, it was apparent the community was not just the geographical entity of Clarksdale. The audience came together around art and American history, including Jim Crow, the legal and often brutally policed racial hierarchy that subjugated Black people in America’s South.
Shelby Simes arrived at 7 a.m. from nearby West Helena, Arkansas, earning first place in a line that had grown to hundreds by the time the doors opened about an hour before Thursday’s 11 a.m. screening, the first of six scheduled over three days.
Simes said Coogler’s film, which she had already seen seven times, was particularly important at a time when what many see as the truth about the Black American experience has been criticized by President Donald Trump as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.”
“They’re taking books off shelves,” Simes said. “They’re not teaching us properly in the schools.”
She said with “Sinners,” which is fiction but offers a realistic portrayal of the Jim Crow era, Coogler and his team made the past tangible.
“I love how they were able to create a path to talk to our ancestors,” she said, echoing the reaction of other Black viewers.
Michael Johansson, who has worked with community members to memorialize lynchings in the county where the University of Mississippi is located, said it made sense for Coogler to weave vampire folklore into his storyline.
“The horror genre is appropriate for the damage, the cruelty, the barbarism of what has been done to Blacks in this nation,” said Johansson, who came from Jackson to see the movie on Thursday.
Andrea Driver, who supports library sciences students at the University of Mississippi in Jackson, was touched on a personal level. She cried when she saw that a young character had survived horror and reached old age.
“He somehow carried that experience with him for years and didn’t perish, didn’t take his own life. I don’t know that I could live with those memories my whole life,” she said, saying it spoke to the experience of many Black Americans.
Poet C. Liegh McInnis, who was born and raised in Clarksdale, noted the hometown audience recited the Lord’s Prayer along with a character during a tense moment in the film.
He said Coogler had drawn from history, folklore and religion.
“I love the fact that Coogler gave us a three-dimensional film,” he said.
“Sinners” is set at a time when Clarksdale was a bustling agricultural center in which Black residents were exploited. Many fled north, bringing the blues to cities such as Chicago and Kansas City.
While Coogler set his movie in Clarksdale, he filmed it in neighboring Louisiana, in part because Mississippi lacked infrastructure such as the soundstages he needed.
Clarksdale Mayor Chuck Espy said the attention “Sinners” had brought could help revive his majority Black town of about 14,000, where 40% live under the poverty line. He hoped to capitalize on Clarksdale’s status as a cultural capital by expanding performance and educational opportunities.
Coogler saw a future for Clarksdale because of the entrepreneurial spirit that led residents to reach out for Thursday’s screening, and its cultural resources.
“The thing that you guys have is a thing that can’t be taught,” he said.
(Reporting by Donna Bryson. Editing by Kat Stafford and Lincoln Feast.)
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