Sinners, The Blues, and Boots on the Ground

It’s been nearly three months since Sinners took over the entertainment news cycle, social media feeds, and the box office. It was a welcome breath of fresh air in a world of remakes, reboots, and franchises. The film was inspired by Ryan Coogler’s uncle with Mississippi roots who often played the blues around him as a child. The cinematic homage to Mississippi Delta blues is a mixture of hoodoo, Black love, history lessons, and vampire movie rules 101 – like vampires can’t enter unless you invite them. There’s hope, pain, pleasure, and joy.

The lead characters, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to Clarksdale, Mississippi to set up a juke joint to rival all juke joints. They boast of Italian wine, Irish beer, and the best Blues players in the land. Just as the night gets going, the revelers are undertaken by vampires and spend the rest of the night fighting for their eternal souls.

There’s a scene in Sinners where one of the juke joint’s patrons buys a drink with wooden nickels. It is revealed that he is a sharecropper, and they are sometimes paid in wooden nickels or currency that can only be spent with his landlord. Ain’t that some bullshit. Smoke, the budding capitalist of the twins, wants to deny him the drink. Annie and Stack appeal to Smoke by recognizing that most of the people in the juke joint are overworked sharecroppers living under constant racial terror – they need a reprieve and a reason to come back.

What Sinners highlighted during that moment, is that even in the worst of times, we all need a break. We need to sweat out our hair, get tipsy, drunk even and forget that we have to work in the morning. The idea for this post came to me as I was catching my breath and sipping on something cold at a line dancing party where one of the many songs the DJ spun was “Boots on the Ground”.

I’m sure you’ve seen the videos of Black folks in their cowboy boots and hats, tatted thick thighs in short denim shorts, cooly dancing in sync to country soul songs and R&B classics.  When I first heard “Boots on the Ground”, I was living in North Carolina, and my bestie pushed the coffee table out the way to teach me the line dance. At that point, it was only a staple at trail rides. We had no idea it would grow as fast and as wide as it did.

Black people have been line dancing for ages, it’s what we do. “Boots on the Ground” took hold like the “Electric Slide” – it doesn’t matter the city or the function, when you hear “Before I Let Go” we all know what to do. But this, this feels different. Videos of Black people having a good time and letting their fans clap have been turned into memes about Black people dancing while the world burns. Driving home the point, that the 92% has done their job, and now you’re on your own.

But is that really the case? What I find particularly interesting about this assessment is that because Black people aren’t using their bodies as physical barriers to fascism, folks are assuming that we’re disengaged. Yes, there were people on social media saying they were sitting things out after the disappointing Presidential election’s results, and that’s their prerogative. But don’t allow the algorithm and memes to flatten who we are as a people.

This moment that feels unprecedented for some, but actually has several things in common with what our ancestors were experiencing during the era Coogler depicted in Sinners when Blues music was popular – an effective othering of people to rationalize kidnapping and sending them to prison camps for profit, lynchings and vigilante justice, and a widening gap between the haves and have-nots.

Ooooh, oooh I got my boots on the ground…

Joy can exist in spite of struggle. In fact, we need joy to keep us energized, hopeful, and open. Dancing and free movement are great for your mental health, anxiety, stress, and trauma. Plus, the spread of line dancing is building community. Black people all over the country are running to the dance floor for a song sung by a native South Carolinian, 803Fresh. It’s bringing us back home and rekindling connection across the country in the way that social media can’t, even if you first learned about the dance and the song from social media. During these precedented times – we need a return to community, to joy – to all of the things that remind us of our humanity.