Tyler Perry’s latest movie, A Jazzman’s Blues, on Netflix, is a smorgasbord of white supremacist violence and pro-colorist anti-Blackness wrapped around a doomed romance, steeped in toxic family secrets, and seasoned with multi-generational abuse that would make even Lee Daniels and Precious wince.
While anyone familiar with Perry’s work knows how fond he is of these themes, his latest offering stands out not only for its relentlessly racist trauma porn, but the sheer number of tropes he has crammed into a single story in an age when more empowering Black content is increasingly available.
A Jazzman’s Blues is reportedly the very first screenplay that Perry wrote back in 1995. He told the Associated Press that he was inspired to write it as a struggling young man after the iconic playwright August Wilson encouraged him to create without shame.
The story is set in rural Georgia from 1937 to 1987. Having grown up in New Orleans with family in rural Louisiana, Perry said he “knew this world very well.” Like many African Americans, he had kinfolk who passed for white. When asked why he was tackling this story now, he said, “I’ve been watching so many politicians and powers that be trying to downplay and whitewash the experience of Black people in America. I think it’s up to us as storytellers to bring those real stories to the forefront because of this assault on history.”
While the topics that Perry explores are indeed part of African American history, the question is why he chose to write characters and storylines that assault Black humanity by promoting such problematic racial politics. Most of the light-skinned Black characters exist mainly to harm their darker-skinned loved ones who are written as powerless to do anything other than serve the masters of colorism, and fall victim to the menacing white supremacists who control them all. And most of the dark-skinned characters are either running after or cleaning up the messes of their light-skinned counterparts.
I wonder why The Jazzman’s Blues is hitting our screens spewing unrelenting anti-Black tragedy at the same time that Viola Davis’ magnum opus, The Woman King, is inspiring, uplifting, and empowering Black folks with a beautifully written story featuring an array of deeply melaninated Black women characters in the Kingdom of Dahomey. These women are badass warriors with brains, heart, and complex personalities, written with depth, dimension, and a complexity that satisfies the soul and leaves audiences cheering for more.
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Even more ironic is the fact that while Perry wrote, directed and produced The Jazzman’s Blues, white women wrote The Woman King. Yes, Black women including Davis and her husband, produced the film and Gina Prince-Bythewood directed it, but this film presents fully-developed characters and rich storylines that counter the dearth of such images and stories in a satisfying way. Meanwhile, Perry’s latest pummels viewers with unrelenting Black pain without any insights or solutions to the ways that racism and trauma intersect to destroy Black lives, families and communities.
Here’s a quick synopsis of The Jazzman’s Blues complete with spoilers and problematic terms that, unfortunately, Perry forces us to use:
The film opens with a proudly racist white-looking and sounding Jonathan who is running for office, seen on the television screen trumpeting his commitment to white supremacy and raging against his opponent–a Black man he sneeringly describes as an affirmative action candidate from Atlanta.
His rant drives an elderly white-haired Black woman, Hattie Mae, to trudge down railroad tracks and through their small rural Georgia town to see Johnathan in person. After being ignored for hours, she forces her way into his office to deliver a stack of letters and instructs him to take charge of the murder of her son 40 years earlier. Preparing to toss the letters aside, Johnathan notices his mother’s name on the envelope, and sits down to learn his unknown family history.
Flashback to 50 years earlier in the same rural Georgia setting during Jim Crow.
Hattie Mae is the young, vibrant mother of two sons: Willie Earl who is light-skinned, arrogant, and favored by his father, Butch for no apparent reason; and Bayou who is dark-skinned, good-natured, and the constant target of his brother’s and father’s insults and abuse.
Bayou is captivated by the sight of light-skinned, long-haired Leanne and soon the teens are nurturing a sweet friendship-turned-clandestine romance—when Leanne can escape the grandfather (also light-skinned) who is raping her. After she and Bayou profess their love, Leanne’s white-passing mother Ethel, returns to her abusive father’s house to force her sobbing daughter up north to Boston so she can secure her future by having Leanne pass and marry a white man. A desperate Bayou proposes to Leanne, who responds that if she doesn’t comply, her mother will falsely claim that Bayou raped her and have his mother’s house burned down.
Meanwhile, Bayou and Willie Earl’s abusive father, who plays guitar and the harmonica and sings the Blues, is convinced that Willie Earl has a bright future as a trumpet player and singer. Never mind that Bayou has a much better voice. Butch steals the money that his wife Hattie Mae has saved up and abandons his family to chase his musical dreams in Chicago. Soon Willie Earl follows him to do the same.
Hattie Mae flourishes in their absence, supplementing her job washing white folks’ laundry (with Bayou’s help) and part-time midwifery duties by opening a juke joint where she and Bayou sing and entertain their friends. Then Willie Earl returns with a heroin addiction, news of Butch’s death, and a wan Jewish European Holocaust survivor named Ian who is guiding his musical career.
Leanne and her mom Ethel return—both passing for white—with Leanne married to the racist sheriff’s brother. While Leanne is terrified that they’ll be outed by the Black folks who know them, Ethel demands that her daughter shut up and maintain the charade.
Of course, Leanne and Bayou can’t stay away from each other, and they have sex. Ethel spies on them, tells her daughter that she saw her let “that monkey” lay on top of her. She then tips off the racist white sheriff (Leanne’s brother-in-law) and his cronies by stealing a line out of Carolyn Bryant Donham’s racist playbook and accusing Bayou of whistling at her daughter. The good ole boys set off to defend faux white womanhood and kill Bayou and burn down Hattie Mae’s house. Bayou narrowly escapes by joining Willie Earl and Ian as they head to Chicago. As Leanne pines for Bayou, her white husband casually says that if she tries to leave him, he’ll drown her in the local river.
Between Willie Earl’s lesser musical talents and drug addiction, Bayou unexpectedly becomes a singing sensation performing for upscale white audiences in a ritzy Chicago venue. Despite being surrounded by a bevy of dark and light-skinned beauties, Bayou remains fixated on Leanne, writing letters that she never receives. Willie Earl’s jealousy grows, and he rewards Bayou’s unwavering co-dependent love by threatening him with a gun and repeatedly saying how much he hates his brother’s Black ass.
A miserable Leanne gives birth to a baby boy who, while he is Bayou’s, looks whiter than ArchieMountbatten-Windsor. As she obsesses over him getting darker, Bayou is riding high and sending money back home to his mother, but the white postmaster is stealing the cash. With her juke joint closed and other businesses failing, the formerly dynamic, glamourous Hattie Mae is reduced to dire poverty and near starvation. When Bayou finds out, he defies Ira’s warnings and rushes home to resurrect his mother’s juke joint with a surprise performance.
Willie Earl, who for some reason never dies of a heroin overdose, accompanies Bayou. Hattie is thrilled to see her beloved sons, and the juke joint springs to life.
While Bayou is charming the crowd, Willie Earl alerts the white sheriff that his brother’s in town. Bayou, who has sent a message for Leanne to meet him so they can finally run away together, defies all warnings and common sense to lay eyes on his longtime love. As she introduces Bayou to their son, the sheriff and his minions shoot and lynch Bayou while Leanne sits in the back of the bus muffling her own screams. Willie Earl, despite crying on the juke joint stage during his trumpet solo, views his brother’s swinging corpse with a satisfied smirk.
Flash forward to 1987 where the racist politician Johnathan visits a very old, decrepit Leanne in a senior facility.
She is listening obsessively to the song that Bayou wrote and sang for her and recalling their romance. Johnathan, who has just learned that his mom and grandma are Black, gives her the letters that Hattie Mae brought him and walks out with a look of disgust on his face. Then he sits on the porch of the senior home as a confederate flag proudly waves above.
Despite decent music and a few minutes of fun choreography by Debbie Allen, A Jazzman’s Blues unfolds as if Perry had a checklist of disempowering Black traumas and tropes that he was determined to shoehorn into a single story. On that front, he succeeded: Leanne’s massive sexual trauma from her rapey grandfather, Ethel as the Tragic Mulatto mother, Leanne as the Tragic Quadroon daughter, and Johnathan as the Tragic Octoroon grandson, all passing for white while attacking and destroying unambiguously Black people.
Perry even threw in the trope of the Jewish comrade in Ian, whose moving recollection of his wife and daughter’s murder in a Nazi concentration camp became a pep talk to inspire Bayou to believe in himself and go for his dreams. Ian functioned as a white-esque savior though he lacked the energy and passion to do more than offer gentle warnings and look on mournfully as the Black folks destroyed themselves and each other despite his advice. There he stood under that lynching tree, a silent and complicit partner to murder.
The Jazzman’s Blues has the passing characters weaponizing their privilege to cushion their own existence and service white supremacy at the expense of Blackness. This stereotypical portrayal obscures the true stories of Black people who passed either to escape racism (especially during segregation) or to pretend to be white for jobs and other opportunities, but use their privilege to serve their Black families and communities.
While it’s healthy and important that we’re now talking publicly about and examining colorism, we gain nothing by these portrayals of light-skinned Black folks living only to destroy their more melaninated counterparts, and the darker-skinned Black people portrayed as too weak and downtrodden to stand up for themselves or try to survive. Perry simultaneously demonized these light-skinned characters while having them drive the Black trauma and tragedy, and emerge victorious in the face of white supremacy.
Like all aspects of Blackness, both passing and colorism are deeply complex, multi-layered, and nuanced. We gain nothing by reducing them to one-dimensional stereotypes that dehumanize us all and keep us pitted against each other rather than working together to overcome internalized and structural racism.
The portrayal of Bayou’s lynching was also problematic.
I’ve spent years in the archives researching this topic for my current book on Black child lynchings. Perry’s narrative was not part of the story. There were many motivations driving the lynchings of Black men, women and children. Some were economic, religious, political, and many were tied to the alleged or real rapes of women. I have never come across a single article, book, or citation where light-skinned or even white-passing people were setting up other Black folks to be lynched for no reason.
My question is: WHY do we need this foolishness in 2022?
It is tragic that in these days, when we have so many voices, perspectives, and stories that represent Black pride, power, and multi-dimensional humanity that a Black man as wildly successful and powerful as Perry, chooses to use his platform and influence in such negative and downtrodden ways.
Why do tales of Black despondency, defeat, and unrelenting dysfunctional remain so popular with Black audiences? What does this tell us about the folks who find this kind of thing entertaining?
According to Rotten Tomatoes, A Jazzman’s Blues has an 86% audience score and a 70% tomatometer score. It’s very sad that there is such a huge and enthusiastic Black audience for Perry’s tsunami of Black suffering and servitude. Is there any explanation other than deeply internalized white supremacist self-hatred that makes so many of us find these tortuous tales of defeat and hopelessness so entertaining?
The other thing that really disturbed me is how the movie ends with a white-haired wrinkled Leanne sitting in a cushy white senior facility having lived her best passing life and raising her racist son as she gorges on memories of the Black man whose life she deliberately destroyed. This is too close to the real-life example of the white woman Carolyn Bryant Donham, who has admitted to lying about the incident that led to Emmett Till’s horrific slaughter.
Despite the recent discovery of a still-valid warrant for her arrest, this lying racist gets to live out her last days knowing she will never face justice on this earth. How many women—white or passing for white—are allowed to live their lives after having lured young Black men to gruesome deaths? I can’t stand the fact that there will never be justice for any of these boys and men. There is no remorse and there will be no retribution or restitution.
Just as we can simultaneously bemoan Perry’s problematic, trope-laden storytelling and admire his success, influence, and power as a Black filmmaker. I wish he’d use his incredible resources and power for good and nuanced storytelling. There is nothing stopping him from creating more empowering stories except for his own unresolved trauma and internalized white supremacist perspective.
The biggest issue with the story in A Jazzman’s Blues is that Perry doesn’t balance the trauma tropes with any resolution, redemption, or an emotionally satisfying dramatic resolution. Each note and plot point is morbid and morose, with absolutely no hope or uplift to offset the dreary trauma. The only character who could be said to “win” at the end is evil Willie Earl. His victory, destroying his brother for no discernable reason.
While I don’t expect Perry to abandon his tropes for more evolved storytelling, I do hope that other writers and creators are inspired to produce works that decode, decolonize, and help us disrupt racism rather than promoting it by pimping Black pain.
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