Some of you are fucking boring.
It had to be said. Pearline is 100% a sinner but the nuance is going right over some of your heads! She is a flapper! Aka, a woman with some privilege in early 20th century America who defies societal expectations of modesty, fashion and femininity. She is meant to surprise you. She is meant to leave you clutching your pearls.
Tell me why I am minding my own business and I come across this pick-me ass, holier than thou shit on Threads.
The problem I have with this comment is the lack of irony. On this blog I will call Pearline many things. Lying ass heffa, OG city girl, dishonourable, messy, wicked, adulterous and much, much more. Bear in mind I say this with love. She is absolutely wrong and I adore her.
In a story with literal demonic creatures, a Black woman dancing freely is devilish?
Fuck your dull, prescriptive, puritanical world view.
This movie is not meant to represent angels vs devils, good vs evil. For any viewer to watch this shit and create their own binary of Madonna vs Whore is deeply disappointing. I am begging you to read bell hooks anything, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde anything. Black women have never been protected by imitating white, middle class, evangelical gender norms. I can promise you, if Pearline went straight home from Clarksdale station to her NPC ass husband, minded her own business she would still be at the mercy of the clan in Mississipi and the constitution of a country where she can barely vote. Her shaking some tail is an expression of joy! And freedom! Things she might rarely experience in this social and political context! Fuck.
This woman howls, tap dances, grinds and moans on stage. She crawls across the floor boards like a lion watching a herd of gazelles. She is wild. She is uninhibited.
Do you know who else had their style of dance described as possessed? Devilish? Animalistic? Primitive? Josephine Baker.
One of the most talented, celebrated Black women of the early 20th Century. She understood how she was viewed by society and she lived unapologetically. I read a very interesting book by Alicja Sowinska that explored how white critics discussed Josephine Baker. They found her exotic, strange and utterly captivating. They couldn't understand how a Black woman in 1920/30 could be so sexually deviant and bold. How unladylike!
Josephine Baker was not a devil nor a whore. She was an artist with a political consciousness that served her career very well. Their ignorance and obsession with her body was not lost on her, she took their stereotypes of wild women and savage Africans and inverted them. She made them her own; and in doing so, became a trail blazer.
No one is expecting you to praise her infidelity. I am asking you to engage with social context! Do you really think she chose her husband? Do you truly believe she has access to all the rights and opportunities available to white men at the time? Do you really think she wants her only taste of freedom to be in sweaty juke joint she had to walk to?
Pearline is a three-dimensional Black female character, clearly inspired by the likes of Josphine Baker and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Black women that challenged America's notions of sexuality, artistry and genius.
This woman is nurturing her artistic abilities, living life on her own terms and saying 'fuck you' to polite society.
She is a married woman who openly flirts with a younger man she has just met. She swings her hips in broad daylight, and looks back to make sure he's watching. She gets ate off the bone in the back room of an illegal juke joint. She wears her wedding ring as she gets head from a preacher's son.
In conclusion, I love her.
