Homecoming

Most of us raised on a diet of mainstream history textbooks were given little more than a fuzzy, attenuated notion of the struggle for African-American self-determination and land ownership after Reconstruction...something to do with "forty acres and a mule." Filmmaker Charlene Gilbert attempts to set that neglected story straight by documenting the rise and fall of black farmers in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War to the present. And a remarkable (and sorrowful) story it is: a tale of how masses of ex-slaves, formerly denied literacy, the vote, or the slimmest shred of social or economic power, struggled in the face of continuing discrimination to secure their piece of the American soil. The film traces black land ownership from it's pinnacle in 1910 (over 200,000 farm owners), through the hard times and sharecropping of the Depression years, to the present near-extinction of African-American-owned farms. Intertwined with the historical saga (painted with the expectable Ken Burns-archival-photos-talking-heads-poetic-voice-over-narration brush) is a loving portrait of the filmmaker's family. Gilbert focuses on both her immediate family, who migrated to Philadelphia when she was young, and her cousins, who remained to work the land in Montezuma, Georgia. Unfortunately, there are simply too many narrative balls in the air for Ms. Gilbert to juggle effectively; what seems intended to be a meditation on both the broad sweep of history and on the personal impact of these events, ultimately comes across as episodic and unfocused. There's also something slightly disingenuous about discussing black farmers in the last half of the 20th century out of the context of larger agrarian history in the U.S. It is, after all, fairly obvious that small farm owners in this country have been progressively going down in flames since mid-century, regardless of color (see The Farmer's Wife, reviewed in VL-5/99). Despite its failings, Homecoming still presents a unique view of African-American history, and would be a useful, although not essential, addition to most library collections. Aud: C, P. (G. Handman)