Hollywood’s obsession with superhero reboots shows no sign of letting up. By this time next year, “The Batman” will have brought the origin story of the caped crusader to the screen for the umpteenth time. Now comes the news that revered scribe Ta-Nehisi Coates is taking a crack at a new “Superman” screenplay, with DC eying a Black actor to play the lead.
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With his critically acclaimed nonfiction work, Between The World And Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates laid himself bare. Writing the book as a letter to his then 15-year-old son, Coates unearthed memories from his boyhood in West Baltimore, then moved to his son’s birth and into the present day. Between The World And Me was published in 2015, just before Trump gave new life to the United States’ rotten core. In the years since, social media and the ubiquity of cameraphones has amplified Black death in the media. Police brutality, unyielding anti-Blackness, and an exhausting presidential election cycle have dominated our day-to-day lives. With history at his back and the events of his own Black life embedded in his memory, the journalist could not have predicted our current state when he first published his manuscript. Still, the author ended up pretty spot-on. Coates was brutally realistic about Black life, even then. In HBO’s film adaptation of the New York Times best-seller, his words echo across the screen, burrowing into our past and leaving hints about the future of Black America and this country.
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What does it mean to be born Black in America? In the 20th century, writer and cultural critic James Baldwin examined this question through his words and experiences. Today, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates is grappling with the very same subject. While Baldwin and Coates have managed to articulate the beauty and pain of being Black men in this country —Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins has succeeded in depicting the majesty and fullness of Black life on screen. In his latest work —an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins explores trauma, family, love, and survival in 1970s Harlem, a microcosm of Black America, that still powerfully resonates today. After all, the souls of Black folk still whisper to each other across generations; the specifics of our stories may differ, but the experiences are the same. Jenkins opens his film with Baldwin's quote, "Every Black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the Black neighborhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy."
Shadow And Act attended the Baltimore premiere of If Beale Street Could Talk, where Jenkins sat down to chat with Ta-Nehisi Coates —a Baltimore native, and the man he says inspired him to tell this story.
"I’ve never seen anybody shoot Black people the way Barry shoots Black people," Coates marveled. "There's a kind of lushness, a beauty that he bestows on Black people, that we are really not used to seeing."
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