On Queen & Slim: 3 Lessons on Liberation
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got about life came after I held a faculty meeting after yet another cop shooting.
I needed our staff to be aware how kids would demonstrate their trauma, and I needed a safe space for adults to process their own. Mine included.
I searched for the words to articulate the depths of sorrow and fear, hurt and anger that many of our Black and Brown children would feel, that I felt. I needed my staff to know that these emotions were visceral and real.
One Black male teacher gave me the strength that I would carry, not only in that moment, but for the rest of my life.
He said, “I have no fear because if I were to die today, it would be on my feet. I choose to live until I die.”
I was catapulted to the words I inscribed on my senior yearbook page from “Freedom,” the title song of the movie, Panther:
We will not bow down to, uh huh, racism.
We will not bow down to, injustice.
We will not bow down to, exploitation.
I’m gon’ stand.
I’m gon’ stand.
I recall these words as I witnessed the beauty and sorrow of Queen & Slim.
At first, I wanted to avoid this movie because I couldn’t bear to see another Black body slain in the streets. I’m exhausted of our lives being reduced to a hashtag or another unsolved mystery. I’ve known too many beautiful brown bodies lost to violence, and murder stopped being casual entertainment for me long ago. When one of us falls, I feel it deep in my soul, and I’m soul tired.
Yet I felt compelled to see this film. I needed to see a film where we fight back, where we dare to be free. I needed to see us shirking respectability and the thought that our politeness, education, skin color, or connection with Jesus would render us safe from being cut down at the knees. And if truth be told, a part of me was embarrassed at my own ability to “tune out” violence because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient to me.
Had I come so far from cowering on my bedroom floor when a crazed neighbor shot at our house? Or when the police waved his long gun in my face when I was hiding under blankets in my mother’s room? Or when I counted the number and caliber of gunshots as if they were thunder, gauging how far and how dangerous they were?
My spirit beckoned me to see the film Queen & Slim myself and not rely on others’ experience of the movie.
It was hard. It was ugly. It was beautiful. It was complicated. It was triggering.
And I’m glad I saw it.
What I gained was affirmation far beyond the controversies of what types of Black movies Hollywood will green light, if Lena Waithe is “woke” enough, whether the intentions of the film harms or hurts us.
What I gained were lessons on liberation.
Liberation Lesson 1: Liberation can’t be earned.
In the film, we see Slim (Ernest) and Queen (Angela) do everything “right,” yet they are still slain in the literal and proverbial street. They were educated. They were calm. They were drug free. And that didn’t save them. Through their journey, they connected with the parts of themselves that they had suppressed on the road to being acceptable Blacks. The down home parts. The “hood” parts. The free parts. We saw them shed respectability as they danced to the blues in the juke joints, consorted with sex workers, feasted on fried catfish. We saw that as they shed respectability, they were conversely seen, honored, and loved.
Through Queen & Slim, the audience learns that freedom isn’t about seeking acceptance. It’s reaching into the Blackest parts of you. It’s reaching into the broken parts of you. It’s reaching into the beautiful parts of you. It’s stringing all of those parts together in a slow grind in a country juke joint. It’s rolling all of those melodies in a wild, funky bounce song. It’s chopping and screwing all of those pieces together into a grove that vibrates with the ancestors and the ones yet unborn.
When was the last time you were free? When was the last time that you realized your clothes, your car, your career, your manners, your respectability won’t save you? When was the last time you stopped running and decided to bathe into the deepest parts of you?
Liberation Lesson 2: Titles and demographics aren’t enough to describe who is for and who is against you.
In the film, we witness a myriad of people come to the aid of Slim and Queen, often different than to be expected. We see brown police officers — literal agents of the state and “blue brothers” of the crooked cop who set the whole movie into motion — orchestrate Slim and Queen’s escape from the safe house and beseech Junior to leave the protest. We see society’s cast offs — pimps in outdated Sean Jean suits, fat kids playing unsupervised outside, Black women with gold teeth serving hard liquor, scarred veterans with bitter wives — come to the aid of our protagonists. At the same time, the ones who would be typically called kinfolk are the ones who admonish and sell Slim and Queen out.
This very lesson is Black America’s dirty little secret. We know the enemy “out there,” systematic racism and patriarchy. We know the obvious agents and overt ways that we are silenced and held back from our full potential. What we never count on and what steals our breath is our very skinfolk who bring irreversible psychological and physical harm. The uncles, cousins, and family friends who rape. The church folk who scorn and vilify. The Black soccer mom who pretends to not see you. The online coach who steals your money.
So what’s the lesson here? It’s the old adage that actions speak louder than words. Skin color isn’t enough to call someone your brother or sister. Beyond shared heritage, kin are those willing to exist and behave beyond their own trauma so as to not cause more harm. We see that in the film through the allies hiding in plain sight. In the uniform. Under the counter.
Is this all simplistic? Maybe. Easy? Not at all.
Liberation Lesson 3: The stories of our elders code the truth to our liberation.
When I was a pre-teen, I had the honor of being a member of Sisters of Tomorrow, a pan-African cadre of young women undergoing traditional rites of passage. Through our process, I was introduced to Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly. It’s the re-telling of Black folklore describing how our enslaved ancestors took flight back to Africa, a parallel version of our ancestor’s escape at Igbo Landing as recounted in Julie Dash’s Daughters of Dust.
In Queen & Slim, we see this story brought to life and to truth, both in the way the title characters die and in the way they journeyed. The goal of flying to Cuba was homage to how Sister Assata “flew” in escape, and how we theorize the way Tupac absconded there by a fictitious death. Perhaps at the end, Slim and Queen did take flight. Just like our ancestors took flight from the plantations. Just rose up and flew back to Africa, they say.
It’s no accident that Slim and Queen return through the south in order to get free. They journeyed back to our home in this country, and I wept as the scene opened to the Tremé neighborhood in New Orleans. I thought of how many of us were lynched in those woods and drowned in those bayous and gunned down in the streets and broken down in the slow murder of time. Slim and Queen needed to return to the South to reclaim their past and subsequently their liberation- Sankofa- representing how the Great Migration is now reversing as so many of us are now seeking connection and freedom.
What’s the point of these liberation lessons? They are a reminder that art imitates life — complicated and problematic, affirming and liberating — all depending on your place in your personal journey. Queen & Slim is a movie I recommend, even if you need to eat the meat to spit out the bones.
Article originally appears on Medium
