[The I Am Not Your Negro director’s adaptation of a 2019
ProPublica investigation effectively connects one family’s story
with the larger scourge of legal Black land theft.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SILVER DOLLAR ROAD REVIEW – ANOTHER RAOUL PECK DOCUMENTARY TRIUMPH
 
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Adrian Horton
September 8, 2023
The Guardian
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_ The 'I Am Not Your Negro' director’s adaptation of a 2019
ProPublica investigation effectively connects one family’s story
with the larger scourge of legal Black land theft. _

Silver Dollar Road, Silver Dollar Road

 

In swift succession, the documentarian Raoul Peck has built a
reputation as a connoisseur of the visual essay. His Oscar-nominated
2017 film I Am Not Your Negro
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the astonishing legacy of essayist and critic James Baldwin through a
dramatization of notes on his relationships with such civil rights
luminaries as Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. The
2021 series Exterminate All the Brutes
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an impressive bricolage of historical documents, archival footage,
personal history, cultural ephemera, scripted scenes, animation and
infographics to illuminate nothing less than the genocidal origins and
cascading impacts of European colonialism.

Silver Dollar Road, Peck’s latest film, focuses on one Black
family’s decades-long legal fight to maintain ownership of their
coastal property in North Carolina, but its scope is by no means
narrow. The 100-minute film opens with a title card nodding to the
unfulfilled promises of Reconstruction: in January 1865, just before
emancipation, the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman met with 20
Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, and asked what they needed.
“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and
turn it and till it by our own labor,” answered the ministers’
representative, Rev Garrison Frazier.

Peck evokes this legacy of Black land ownership – its ideological
priority for newly freed people, its elusiveness in the years
following Reconstruction, its meaning for generations of descendants
– throughout Silver Dollar Road, an expansive family portrait that
is at once gentle and wry, proud and infuriating. As with his two most
recent releases, Silver Dollar Road again asserts Peck’s mastery of
the essay-film. Or, more accurately in this case, a screen translation
of a 2019 ProPublica long-form article
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the brothers Melvin and Licurtis Reels, who spent eight years in jail
for refusing to leave the land on which they were raised, and the
pernicious issue of legally sanctioned Black land theft. (As a title
card points out, Black farmers lost 90% of their land during the 20th
century.)

The film’s success hinges on Peck’s ability to convey, via legal
documents, family photos, interviews and an illustrated family tree,
both the emotional significance of the Reelses’ land to the larger
Black community and a dense thicket of legalese. Yet for all its
generations of Reelses and court documents, the film is neither arcane
nor opaque. On the contrary, Peck’s portrait teems with life. Old
photos and home videos attest to the vitality of Silver Dollar Road, a
Black beach haven in a largely white county. The family details their
living made from the land and brackish inland waters; Melvin waxes
about his Fantasy Island nightclub and lifelong work as a shrimper.
The illustrations – proud faces on the roots and vines of lineage
– restore a sense of dignity to a beleaguered family and
successfully delineate a bevy of a nieces, nephews, greats and
great-greats, many of whom attest to the land’s spiritual and
emotional significance.

Peck appears to have embedded with the Reelses for several years, up
through the matriarch Gertrude’s 95th birthday in 2021. Gertrude
inherited the property from her father, Mitchell Reels, who purchased
the land just a generation removed from slavery. Distrustful of a
legal system that had disenfranchised and abused many a Black man,
Mitchell never composed a will, instead bequeathing the land into a
complicated legal limbo known as heirs’ property, in which each
descendant inherits an interest, as in a holding stock company.
Unbeknown to Gertrude and her eight children, including Melvin and
Licurtis, one of Mitchell’s out-of-state siblings ignored a court
order and sold his share to a developer keen on waterfront real estate
– not an unusual occurrence for heirs’ property, which is
disproportionately owned by Black Americans. After years of tending to
their land, Melvin and Licurtis were informed that, at least in the
eyes of the law, they did not actually own it, and could be jailed for
trespassing by remaining in their homes.

Peck slow rolls the fact that the Reels brothers spent eight years in
jail for contempt of court – not prison, because they were never
convicted of a crime – and the effect is jaw-dropping, the legal
justification effectively portrayed as flimsy and galling. There’s
Melvin, furious and defiant. There’s Licurtis, befuddled yet
steadfast. There’s their sister Mamie, unflappable and determined,
and their many relatives and friends, who see through a legal system
that seems to favor the cutthroat and greedy, one still used to
dispossess Black families for profit. As one lawyer put it: “It
defies logic that any of that constitutes justice.”

Silver Dollar Road persistently and effectively favors the
psychological toll of all this – the emotional truth so callously
disregarded by the law – without sacrificing clarity, though I do
wish it provided more of the context supplied by the original article
or grounded the Reelses case even further in historical precedent.
Still, it is a triumph of personal, sensitive film-making that sheds
light on a shadowy vestige of Jim Crow, an argument that’s
infuriating and informative without ever tipping into sensationalism.
It’s not quite justice but, given the many times the Reelses say
their story was exploited by lawyers for pay without reprieve, still a
restoration of some kind.

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Silver Dollar Road was screened at the Toronto film festival
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in cinemas on 13 October and on Amazon Prime on 21 October.

* Film
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* Documentary Film
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* 'Silver Dollar Road'
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* Raoul Peck
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* Black land theft
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* ProPublica
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