My first taste of True Horror
I love scary movies, always have. Even as a child I’d squeal with glee in the face of the spookiest cinema. The classic horror structure of suspenseful build & climactic release would flood my little body with a rush of adrenaline that I just couldn’t get enough of. My parents didn’t mind because, to their surprise, I’d finish a movie relatively unfazed. Unlike my older brother, I was never plagued by nightmares of evil clowns or spinning heads. I was always able to understand that movies are fiction and what happens on screen isn’t reality — the monsters were trapped in the TV.
I guess it was this level of maturity that led my father to believe that I was ready to watch my first historical drama at age six. He sat my brother and me down and told us the movie was “a very important film for our people.” At that point, I barely had a concept of what “our people” even meant, but I nodded along and settled into the sofa as the opening credits of Amistad ran across our giant box TV. The next two hours are burned in my memory as my first real experience of fear.
The violence begins immediately. The opening scene is a successful slave revolt lead by Cinqué, the main character played by Djimon Hounsou. The slaves escape from their shackles below deck and manage to arm themselves, much to the shock & dismay of the Portuguese slavers. The fight is swift but brutal — throats are slit and limbs are dismembered. In a particularly gruesome moment, Cinqué wrestles the captain to the deck floor and thrusts a sword clean through his body and into the hull below.
It was graphic, but I wasn’t bothered by the bloodshed and the following hour or so is comparatively sedate. The Africans unexpectedly make landfall in America, and are thrust back into captivity to be charged as murderous runaways. A pair of abolitionists and a well-intentioned lawyer take on their case, and a legal battle unfolds.
Now remember, I’m six years old. Much of the dialogue is lost on me, especially the subtitle translations since I’ve basically just started reading, though I am able to pull together basic plot pieces. I understood what a court room was and how it functioned because my father was a practicing lawyer. I’d occasionally glance over to him as we watched, and he seemed enthralled. So as his biggest fan I attempted to model the same interest.
The attempt was going well until Cinqué’s lawyer asks him to recount his journey from Africa. The film flashes back through his memory and transports the viewer to his village in the West African region now known as Sierra Leone. We see him stripped from his family and forcibly boarded onto a Portuguese ship.
In my short life, I had never witnessed such horrors as those that take place aboard the Amistad. Scores of men and women are corralled like cattle below deck. Their naked bodies are whipped and beaten into submission and chained in human piles stacked like bales of hay. In the damp darkness of the hull, desperate hands beg for gruel to feed their starving bellies only to throw it up as the ocean mercilessly tosses the ship. The harrowing montage continues with images of death-by-sea: dying bodies are thrown overboard, groups of “excess cargo” are chained to an anchor weight and drowned, and those who sought a swift death leapt into the water to end their suffering on their own terms.
My mind was racing and my heart was pounding, but the rest of my body was frozen. I sat there with locked eyes, as a pair of men were being viscously whipped. Their screams turn to wails and their eyes roll back as blood runs down the deck. Their blood splatters on Cinqué’s face and in that moment, it’s almost as if his face were my own — the impact broke my shock and a wave of fear washed over me. For the first time I was faced with monsters that seemed very, very real.
I started to whimper then outright cry as my mother rushed to comfort me. Dad stopped the film with a guilty haste and assured me that this was history, safely situated in the past and there was no chance that anything I’d just seen would happen to me. But as I laid in bed that night, I was still haunted by the cruelty. That marked the beginning of a fear that lives with me, and many black Americans, every day. I’ve never forgotten my first glimpse of hate and am now grateful to have learned its face so early on. As I now navigate Trump’s America, my fear keeps me vigilant and mindful of the specter of our not-so-distant past.
