Eve’s Bayou is one of the few -if not only- southern gothic movies to feature an all-Black cast. It is a great movie focused on complex characters and family dynamics, brimming with stellar performances and memorable moments that make it fun on the surface. However, it is also writer-director Kasi Lemmons’ love letter to Black girls who have to grow up too fast. It is a beacon for Black girl rage. It is also the first time I ever truly saw myself in the genre.
As a child, I saw the surface similarities between myself and Eve (Jurnee Smollett). We both had similar complexions, and we were about the same age. As a kid, I thought it was cool, but the parallels stopped there. I was drawn to her rage, and I envied her drive to fix her father issues. As someone who had a lot of anger that I was never allowed to express, I was mesmerized. I fought really hard to categorize this movie as a drama for most of my life. I think this was my subconscious shielding me from what I had not fully processed about my past. As someone who had spent years joking about what I thought were the main problems from my formative years, I did not have the space to deal with anything else.
I made the mistake of watching this movie a few times last year. Each viewing left me feeling sadder than the last, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Just like the fragments of truth Eve gets with her special sight, I was starting to remember. These little moments of hanging out in a strange woman’s house with my younger siblings on my father’s days off. I had not thought of this woman, or her home, since the last time I saw her. Yet, here I was having a moment as I watched Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) take his daughter on his house call to one of his mistresses. Watching him send Eve to go play as he closes the door jogged my memory.
The violence and sex scenes in the film are told in fragments, signifying that they carry equal weight. These are all events that leave a lasting impression on Eve. It was not until recently that I connected the shards of my childhood memories. The co-worker we visited was also the woman that would call and hang up at our house. Eventually, we got a caller ID allowing me to attach a name to this rude person. I called the number back one day and immediately slammed the phone down when she answered. Like Eve, I was a kid trying to play adult games without a rule book. This woman called back and spoke to my mother. When my mother asked us who called the other woman, I confessed. However, I did not know how to answer when she asked me why I had called this supposed stranger.
Shortly after that, my mother started sticking up for herself. There was a very short-lived but glorious time when I thought she might leave. It was the only time that I was almost proud of her. I thought if she just left, we would all finally live our best lives. I was too young to understand that she was a broken woman who would never allow herself to be happy under any circumstances. Because I was a kid, I also wasn’t clocking how her damage would be passed down to my siblings and me — just as it was passed on to my parents from their parents, and so forth. I did not have the vocabulary, or bandwidth, to understand intergenerational trauma. As a child, this was a clear case of her failing me yet again. As an adult, I’m struggling to make space for the messiness of the situation. I keep trying to separate it from the many valid issues I have with the adults who were supposed to take care of us. However, pulling that one string is risky because the whole tapestry might unravel.
Eve’s Bayou has many tense interactions between family members as their world slowly falls apart. After all, what is family if not a series of interactions and moments that try to break you? During a stressful breakfast scene, Eve’s sister Cisely (Meagen Good) says, “You’re looking right at us momma. Nothing ever happens behind your back.” While that line is as ambiguous as the movie’s ending, it can only be understood as an indictment. Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is being called out by her eldest daughter. While their relationship is murky because Cisely is a child treading adult waters and is also angry, we see Roz try to process what is happening in real-time. Perhaps her kids are judging her for more than her share of the blame. Or maybe they’re just lashing out at the parent who is the easiest target.
The more I revisit this movie, the more I can empathize with Roz in a way that I have never been able to with my own mother. Maybe the period in which it’s set makes it easy to rationalize that it would be hard for her to leave her husband. Perhaps it’s because I take my miserable childhood personally and am now fixated on this mistress who only played her insignificant part. I have all of these parenting fails that I cannot forget, and now these recovered memories of hanging out in the home of my dad’s mistress are attacking me from a new angle. I think I needed to remember this affair to release these feelings of guilt I didn’t know I was carrying with me. Unlike Eve I didn’t take matters into my own hands, turning to magic to rid us of my father. Instead, I refused to unpack that I knew more about the affair than I thought. I sat around feeling guilty on some level for being an accessory to something that was not my fault.
Much like Eve’s own plight, my father, the adulterer, threw this burden on me and kept going. This burden became part of my anger and resentment towards my mother. The two emotions are so intertwined that I almost lost sight of the pity I still have for the woman. Emotions are hard for children, and especially hard on adults who opt to shove those emotions to the back of their minds to deal with later. I wonder how many other Black girls see themselves in the character of Eve. I see her as the patron saint of angry Black girls and think that number is larger than I will ever know. Kasi Lemmons realized that her script was about her. She says it is not autobiographical, but that it is about processing her childhood and fixing things that happened. If all of us other angry Black girls are lucky, maybe we all get the chance to write something that will help us process our childhoods and help others start healing.
