Member-only story
Some People Are Too Sensitive to Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
That doesn’t mean they can’t learn about slavery or racism.
A few years ago I found a movie on Netflix that I thought would be good for my husband and I to watch together. It was called Mudbound and it was about the Jim Crow South of the 1930s.
Mudbound was well done and absorbing for both of us for the first hour or so. We both identified with the main character, a nice, agreeable white woman married to a toxic, abusive racist White man. We both loved it when she defies her husband by paying for a doctor for a Black sharecropper who had broken his leg.
The movie gets darker. The son of the sharecropper couple, Ronsel, in a horrifying scene, is lynched by the ku klux klan. He isn’t killed, but he is hung up and tortured by the klan abusers. His friend Jamie, the brother of the racist husband, is forced to watch the abuse and is also forced to choose which body part will be cut off of Ronsel: his eyes, his tongue, or his testicles. He reluctantly chooses a body part which is only revealed at the end of the film.
In the middle of this scene we quickly turned off the TV and went to bed. My husband was up most of the night because he was unable to get the vivid, horrifying imagery from the film out of his head. Some people…
