What The Hell America!

This article contains light spoilers for Sinners.

Sinners is a symphony of vampire bites, gunshot wounds, people being staked in the heart and left to burn alive. Ryan Coogler’s film about twin gangsters trying to strike it rich in the Jim Crow South rapidly swerves toward supernatural horror when an ancient vampire seeks a way into the juke joint the twins have set up with their ill-gotten gains. But the true horror in the film is the economics of Jim Crow, which drives every event in the plot, including the vampire bloodbath that ultimately cuts the musical revelry—and the twins’ dreams—short.

Coogler’s films tend to incorporate deep historical research that gets revealed subtly through brief, easy-to-miss moments and story details. Sinners is almost two movies in one: a vampire slaughterhouse film that’s also a period piece about the near-impossibility of upward mobility in the segregation economy. The sawmill the twins convert into their juke joint becomes a bloody trap from which there is no escape, much like the system they are born into and seek to transcend.

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The movie’s protagonists, the Smokestack Twins, known as Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are flamboyant entrepreneurs and World War I veterans returning  from Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a city long associated with the blues, in the 1930s. One of the twins remarks that Chicago is merely “Mississippi with tall buildings,” and the viewer is left to speculate why, but history offers at least one possible explanation. In 1919, just after the end of World War I, Black veterans in Chicago would have witnessed one of the worst race riots of that “Red Summer” of lynchings, sparked by the death of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, who drowned after a white man threw rocks at him while he was swimming in Lake Michigan. Williams had apparently drifted across an invisible whites-only line that the man who killed him was enforcing. The police refused to arrest the perpetrator, and dozens of Black and white people were killed in the ensuing violence, which saw white mobs rampaging through Black neighborhoods.

Black World War I veterans, some of whom defended their communities during the riot, were themselves frequently targeted for racial violence rather than admired for their service, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes; segregationist legislators feared they would return and expect to be treated as equals. The Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that, for the Black soldier, military service was “but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” The historian Chad Williams writes in Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era that “conflict in the South and the major urban race riots of the postwar era reflected the conscious determination of many black veterans, emboldened and politicized by their army experience, to resist continued subjugation.”

That context helps explain the twins’ cavalier attitude toward the white man they purchase the juke joint from in the film. When Smoke and Stack tell him they’ll kill any KKK member who trespasses on their property, the seller, secretly a Klan leader, falsely insists the KKK no longer exists. In actuality, the second incarnation of the Klan remained influential, but Klan denial was a common propaganda strategy. We later learn that the capital the twins use to buy the property was stolen from the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, for whom the twins worked before returning to Mississippi. It would have been very difficult for them to acquire that seed capital otherwise; as the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has noted in her study of the racial wealth gap, white banks at the time generally would not extend credit to Black borrowers.

The strict separations of the Jim Crow economy are illustrated in perhaps the most striking shot in the movie, when a young Chinese American woman, Lisa Chow, crosses the street to speak with her mother in their whites-only shop. Until that point, we have been shown only the Black side of town, where the Chows also maintain a store. The sweeping shot reveals that the town’s white residents are mere feet away, but they might as well be on a different planet. Part of a group of immigrants to Mississippi known as the Delta Chinese, the Chows are neither Black nor white and are allowed to sell to both customer bases at the same time.

The twins soon discover, however, that the same segregated economy that deprives them of seed money means that their clientele cannot afford to pay for their products in cash. “The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1907. “If by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob.” This century-old observation is almost a summary of the film’s setting, just without the vampires.

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The film conveys two forms of peonage prominent in the 1930s South—labor arrangements not far removed from slavery. One is convict leasing, which we see as Stack, his cousin Sammie, and a veteran bluesman called Delta Slim pass by a chain gang on their drive to the juke joint. Because the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime,” many southern states passed laws that, in practice, allowed authorities to arrest Black people for minor crimes such as “loitering” or “vagrancy” and then coerce them to work for free under heinous conditions.

The other is sharecropping, the details of which are the catalyst for the eventual vampire massacre. Early on in the film, we see Sammie, an aspiring musician and preacher’s son, picking cotton in the morning so that he can fill his quota and spend the rest of the day playing his guitar. Under the sharecropping system, Black people and poor whites were kept in an interminable cycle of debt by landlords, no matter how hard they worked, and so were bound to continue—Du Bois described it as a form of serfdom. Landlords would pay sharecroppers in “scrip,” paper or wooden tokens that could be used to purchase only highly marked-up goods from the landlords’ own stores. As the writer Michael Harriott notes, the Chows’ shop would have been one of the few places in town where Black residents could expect fair prices.

The twins successfully pack the juke joint with customers who are intoxicated by Sammie’s supernatural skills with a guitar—Delta Slim describes Black music as a kind of magic, and in another striking scene, Sammie’s playing summons the spirits of the revelers’ ancestors and descendants. But the twins soon discover that much of their clientele can purchase drinks only with scrip—which means breaking even on their investment will be impossible. Their business faces other barriers: A plot point that sees the twins stealing electricity for the juke joint recalls the fact that most of the South, kept poor and underdeveloped by the demands of the segregated economy, didn’t have electricity until the New Deal, under FDR.

Elsewhere in the film, the Irish vampire Remmick, pursued by Choctaw vampire hunters, tricks his way into the protection of a pair of Klan members living near Clarksdale and turns them into creatures of the night. Shortly after Stack realizes that the juke joint isn’t making enough money, Remmick shows up with his progeny. Attracted by Sammie’s virtuoso playing, they ask to be invited in but are rejected because they are white; another aspect of the era was that white businesses could sell to Black customers, but Black businesses were limited to Black clientele. As vampires, they are forced to wait outside. When Mary, Stack’s old flame and, in the parlance of the time, an octoroon who is passing for white, learns from Stack that the juke joint is unprofitable, she offers to go see if Remmick and the others have U.S. currency.

Mary becomes the vampires’ first juke-joint victim and is then invited inside, where she promptly seduces and kills Stack, who later rises again as a vampire. But the entire reason any of this happens is that running a profitable business as a Black person in the Jim Crow economy is nearly impossible. If the Smokestack twins could borrow capital from white banks, they wouldn’t have needed to rob the mob and leave Chicago. If the sharecroppers were paid with actual money, the juke joint would have been profitable. And if the juke joint were profitable, then Mary would never have walked outside and been turned by the vampires. The economic constraints imposed by segregation are what, in the end, expose the twins and their customers to the supernatural horror Remmick represents.

Interestingly, Coogler treats Remmick sympathetically, offering hints about Remmick’s own experience of oppression and his doomed quest to seek out his loved ones, who are long dead. Remmick is a monster, but his homeland was colonized by some of the same rapacious forces that brought the twins’ ancestors to America. The tragedy of persecuted people brought into bloody conflict with one another by forces beyond their control is a consistent theme in Coogler’s films, including his two Black Panther movies.

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The only unadulterated monsters in the film are the Ku Klux Klan, who show up at the juke joint the next morning to kill the twins and take back the property the Klan leader sold to them, thus pocketing the money. This outcome is foreshadowed earlier in the film, during a story Delta Slim tells as they are passing the chain gang. Slim recalls a friend who was lynched for carrying too much cash, which a group of white men assumed he had stolen. Slim’s tale illustrates a deadly catch-22 of Jim Crow economics: Whatever Black people acquired, white people could take by force.

The final conflict between Smoke and the Klan ends in a satisfying Western-style shoot-out, but it also shows that the twins were always doomed. The powers that be in Clarksdale were never going to allow them to prosper. That’s a different kind of horror story, one that is all the more terrifying because it lacks any supernatural element. Unlike vampires, the Jim Crow economy was real, and it shapes America to this day.

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