What Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ Was Really About – No, It Wasn’t Just Vampires

Mississippi Blues legend Robert Johnson once told the story of selling his soul to the devil on a dark road in exchange for his amazing skill in the song “Cross Road Blues.” But as the tale goes, after all the fame and fortune he had gained in his deal, his philandering caught up with him, and a jealous man poisoned his drink, killing him. It is one of many tales of Black people in the American South that have been part of our culture for generations.

When it comes to southern storytelling like Ryan Coogler’s new film “Sinners,” there will be thinkpieces on more blogs, YouTube channels, and TikTok accounts than I care to imagine. I’m already seeing all kinds of social media threads from performative activists to grab those hyper-valuable clicks and likes.

'...And the Cotton is High'

But none of them are talking about what to me was the most important, an overlooked theme of the film: land and cotton, and how they figure into our history. I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you’ve already dropped the $20 on a ticket – plus another $20 for popcorn and drinks – you know what it’s about. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan are a pair of World War I veterans and also Chicago hustlers who return to their Mississippi home to open up a juke joint, the 1932 equivalent of an after-hours spot where you can party whichever way you like, and they certainly did.

In the midst of this is a musically powered history lesson taking us on a trip through the years of culture as people and people as culture. It’s erotic, political, nuanced, and fascinating. Coogler is at his best when he’s cooking with a lot of ingredients and making them all agree with each other.

There’s also a lot of graphic violence, gratuitous sex, creative license, clog dancing, and women in the theater fawning over Jordan. Writers will likely go into long screeds about the various Easter eggs in the plot, the nuances about racism and racial ambiguity, or even relations between African Americans and Asian Americans.

But as I was saying, the most missed takeaway was land and cotton.

If you noticed, although they were clearly CGI, many of the scenes depicted an endless sea of cotton in all directions. As we know that crop, for many years prior to the setting of “Sinners,” was the infrastructure, the basis, and the blood of the Southern economy from southeastern Texas to southern Virginia, known as the “Cotton Belt.” By 1850, the South grew 80 percent of the world’s cotton.

The primary labor for the harvesting of cotton was Black people, pre- and post slavery.  On the eve of the Civil War, three-quarters of all enslaved African Americans were held in bondage on cotton plantations. As many as 1.8 million of the 3.2 million of them worked cotton fields.  Mississippi was in the center of it all, and cotton represented so much to its economy that it never developed much of an infrastructure outside of it, which has a negative impact to this day.

Don't Take No Wooden Nickels

Now, to grow cotton, you need land, and for most of America’s history, land was wealth. By the turn of the 20th century, Black people owned 15 million acres of land and 925,000 farms, representing 14 percent of farming in the country. But as terrifying as “Sinners” was supposed to be, the real horror story is how Black people, like the ones in the movie, were torn from that land and generations of Black wealth and economic infrastructure creation.

Over the course of the early decades of the 20th century, land was wrested from Black owners through legal means like speculators using partition sales of heirs property that did not have much documentation. This was a means to grab land from Black families that had held it for generations. In other cases, the federal government dispossessed Black landowners by denying them access to Department of Agriculture loans, information, and subjecting them to discrimination. Something that lasted into the 21st century and for which some were recently awarded a $2.8 billion settlement.

In the most extreme and all too common cases, Black people were violently torn from their land by white supremacists, including those in law enforcement. One of the methods they used was lynching to drive farmers and their families off their land. Through these and other methods, by 1997 Black people had lost 90 percent of the land they owned in 1910.

Meanwhile, the number of Black people who had no land of their own and were forced to be tenant farmers was vast. As many as 3 million of us worked in sharecropping by the 1930s. In fact, cotton sharecropping was so prevalent that it is still within living memory. Even my girlfriend tells stories of her own parents having picked cotton during childhood.

Think of all the wealth that could have been built by Black people in America if we were left alone to develop our own agrarian enterprises off land we owned. So the cotton fields depicted in “Sinners,” while a backdrop of the actual plot, they were also the most important part of it. As we worked, much was taken from us and we made America rich in the process. What did they get for it? Not much more than wooden nickels.

A Lived Experience

The very Blues music that scored the film had its origins in the Mississippi Delta, and it was played by the Black people born there, creating art the only way they knew how as a response to the hardship of being subjugated and exploited. Robert Johnson was one voice that grew famous and is still known today, out of thousands that we will never hear.

Many tales like this come from the American South and are rich with the Souls of Black Folk, most of whom have long since passed away. We keep them alive when young filmmakers like Coogler tell them to new audiences, thereby keeping our history alive. But as he does it, he tells a backstory about why we were there in the first place.

It is a complex legacy. The stories are not pretty, and in real life, they are as violent and bloody as anything in the film. But it is necessary to look at the vast cotton fields and wonder about the stories they could tell, forever lost but still experienced by the millions of our ancestors who worked them.

If you're so inspired, you can listen to one of the stories below:

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.