“Eve’s Bayou” is an excellent film. It is passionate, beautiful, and realistic. It is unusually intense. As usual, it is also colorist.

It is set in New Orleans. Colorism is a legendary reality in this historically Creole capital of America. But, that fact does not lessen the painful visual impact of the eurocentric depictions of the characters on film.

Sam Jackson appears more black skinned than ever before as the villainous letch. (Might one of the members of the make-up crew be moonlighting from the staff of Time magazine?) His masochistic and virtuous spouse is a yellow martyr. His whore is dark. Her weak and naive husband is yellow. A drop-dead-gorgeous Debi Morgan is the gifted, dark sister-in-law who is also cursed, spooky, and slandered as a lunatic by the undeserving brother she loyally and blindly defends. The charming and moral daughter is “red”. The bratty, evil and incestuous daughter is dark. In an admirably unflattering role, the lovely Diahnn Carroll plays an evil voodoo witch. But her face is confusingly painted white. Could it be that, as a sinister savior, she had to be whitened? Did she not act as a surrogate white hope to save all from the black monster?

I am so sick and tired of seeing dark skinned characters trashed in movies made by Black directors!!! It seems that Caucasians have trained us so well that they can afford to vacation from white supremacist imagery. They know that our intraracism will pick up the pathological slack.

The director of “Eve’s Bayou” is a yellow woman. She is also married to the dark actor who plays a drifter in this film. I wonder if he is abusive like Sam. I wonder if he or his spouse are as colorist as this film.

What I love most about this film is how it delves into the mind of a male whore. All married whores are uniquely selfish. The villain in this film displays that special brand of carnal selfishness ruthlessly and expertly.

Whores hurt everyone, including themselves. I can not recall another film which so completely examines the emotional fallout of adultery. We see precisely how each family member is affected by it’s patriarch’s pathological passions.

This film also uniquely exposes the selective natures of memory and perception. Every member experiences the same incidents, but no member deals with them or remembers them in the same fashion. We are all ruled by our individuality, no matter who we are or what we experience collectively.

Africans are still shackled by many mental chains of slavery. Far too many Black men are still acting as breeder studs and mimicking the sexual pathologies of white slave masters. In “Eve’s Bayou”, the villain treats his wife like “Miss Anne” and his patients like a stable of Nubian sex slaves.

He places his wife on a luxurious pedestal of chaste idolatry, where she is tortured by her loneliness and sexual frustration. He enjoys swimming through a constant sexual pool of women as his wife drowns in his sewer of rejection and disrespect.

The questionable conclusion falls just short of making an evil, dark man a bit less evil. Simultaneously, it makes an evil, dark daughter seem even more evil. And, it absolves the angelic little “red” girl of a single black mark on her precious little yellow soul. The dark sister-in-law continues to be as whorish and selfish as her brother until the end, and vows to curse yet another man, even as she hopes he will be her final victim.

Like the film “Rosewood”, “Eve’s Bayou” is very entertaining in spite of its colorism. It is undeniably one of the best films ever made on the subject of adultery. And Debi Morgan’s stunning beauty is not to be missed. I urge you to see it.

On another note, I adore the film “Love Jones”. It is a realistic love story directed, in my hometown of Chicago, by a light skinned man. It is chock full of positive dark skinned people. It is a rare gem. I think I will buy that video today....

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