Eve’s Bayou: The Gift of Sight

The very first frames of Eve’s Bayou announce the presence of an extraordinary perspective. The soundtrack begins over a black screen. The viewer can hear sounds of the night. An owl? (In retrospect, I wonder whether this is the same owl that later appears in the bayou home of the fortune-teller Elzora, played by Carroll?) The rustle of the wind and movement in the grass nearby? It is difficult to know whether these sounds belong to the world of the film, because, at this point, that world has yet to become perceptible as anything other than the promise that the black screen portends. As the sequence continues, black-and-white images appear, move, and blur, and the opening credits appear over them.

The black-and-white forms are revealed to be two living beings, now recognizably human, in an active sexual embrace. On the soundtrack, a woman exhales into the other sounds of the night. The film, edited by Terilyn A. Shropshire, cuts to an extreme close-up of a pair of eyes, indicating that these images are from their point of view. A feminine voice-over says, “Memory is a selection of images, some elusive . . .” And there is a cut to another extreme close-up, of the iris of one of the eyes. In this iris, the forms are clear. The woman’s face becomes clear. She is facing the iris; her hands brace her in position where she sits on a countertop. She is wearing a skirt that is raised to just below her waist. The man between her legs wears a suit. The voice-over continues, “. . . others printed indelibly on the brain.” Fade to black as the title of the film appears in the frame.

Here, in the earliest moments of her first feature, Lemmons is already alerting us to the difference between what is visible and audible and what is recognizable. We cannot recognize all the images and sounds presented at the beginning of the film. We cannot place them in time or space. But it is soon revealed that the eyes and the iris belong to the film’s protagonist, Eve, named for her forebear and narrating as an adult, though she was a ten-year-old girl when these images were recorded into her memory and could not properly make sense of them then. Sitting in the dark theater in 1997, I found Eve’s Bayou remarkable precisely because of the way it plunges us into the interior life of a young Black girl, asserting, with neither justification nor apology, that such a perspective belongs at the center of the frame, that it should demand our attention. Through the use of black and white, the slowed-down and muffled sound, and the manipulation of the frame rate to further abstract the images, the film forges a space and time in which the existence of Black girls is valued.

Eve’s burgeoning ability to use and appreciate what she refers to as “the gift of sight,” which has been passed down to her through the women along her paternal line, is lent to us as spectators. Unlike the images in which we see what happens in 1962, the sequences in which we witness, through Eve and Mozelle, past and future events are in black and white, and, as in the opening, often slowed down, presented with muffled and/or heightened sound, and blurred. In granting the viewer access to Eve’s and Mozelle’s psychic experiences, these moments also provide an intimate immersion in their ways of knowing and perceiving; in this world and in this family, such ways are posited as feminine and dismissed as “crazy.” Theirs is a mode of knowledge production contrary to the official knowledge that Louis carries as the town’s medical doctor. Each of these sequences calls attention to what exists and persists outside the frame—putting insistent pressure on what can become visible and knowable about the world created in the film—and points toward the significance of what cannot be seen or known through conventional ways of seeing and knowing images.

Narratively, Eve’s Bayou addresses particularly thorny, if universal, themes—marital infidelity, Oedipal attachments, the status of memory (especially that of a child), and the specter of incest among them. These are conveyed within the context of the Batiste family’s specific history, related as folklore in the continuation of the voice-over at the beginning of the film:

The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old. My brother Poe was nine, and my sister Cisely had just turned fourteen. The town we lived in was named after a slave. It is said that when General Jean Paul Batiste was stricken with cholera, his life was saved by the powerful medicine of an African slave woman called Eve. In return for his life, he freed her and gave her this piece of land by the bayou. Perhaps in gratitude, she bore him sixteen children. We are the descendants of Eve and Jean Paul Batiste. I was named for her.

This story of the genesis of the Batiste family and its plot of land, like the question of whether young Eve actually killed her father, rests on several unresolvable issues. For example, the phrase “perhaps in gratitude” alerts us to the uncertainty animating the family’s past; the framing of that part of the story with the phrase “It is said” also encourages speculation about the narrative’s empirical validity. The opening voice-over weaves the consequential events of the Batistes’ summer into the “tapestry” (to invoke a metaphor used at the end of the film) of American history. While the themes explored in Eve’s Bayou may be widely relatable, the story it tells is particularly African American. The film draws on the history of chattel slavery in Louisiana, and Eve’s memories are contextualized within the experiences of descendants of enslaved people in the middle of the twentieth century. Her narrating presence as an adult, though unseen, also tethers the film to the moment of its making.

Eve’s Bayou ends, as it began, by honoring the perspective of the Black women and girls at its center. Though Mozelle claims that she and Louis, her brother, are “the same,” the film has provided insight into Louis’s motivations primarily through a letter he wrote about a kiss between him and Cisely. After Eve confronts Cisely with their father’s written account of the kiss, Cisely allows her younger sister to hold her hands in order to gain access to her memories. We see the night of the kiss in the black and white of Eve’s vision. Cisely explains tearfully that she doesn’t know what happened but that he hurt her. The two sisters embrace. Then Eve and Cisely destroy their father’s letter by putting it in the bayou. The presentation of the parts of the story available to them opens the film’s linear narrative up to a future in which an adult Eve can tell her version of the story.

Just as the family lore leaves the nature of the relationship between the original Eve and General Batiste unresolved, the final sequence of Eve’s Bayou does not resolve the question of the kiss between father and daughter. Instead, it underscores that the trauma the event has caused, for Cisely in particular and the family in general, is undeniable. The voice of the adult Eve returns only at the end of the film, after Eve and Cisely have destroyed the written words of their father. Louis’s modes of expression and conventional knowledge have been supplanted by the feminine: images, feelings, and insights. Young Eve chooses to believe the truth of her sister’s pain. The adult Eve explains, “Like others before me, I have the gift of sight. But the truth changes color, depending on the light. And tomorrow can be clearer than yesterday.”

As Eve and Cisely hold hands at the edge of the bayou, the camera tracks out, revealing a part of the film’s world along with its mirror image, in the still water of the bayou. All that can be seen on the surface of the bayou is what already exists. Yet, as I watched the ending of Eve’s Bayou in that theater outside Pittsburgh in 1997, I felt the outlines of a different set of relations, a different order of things—one in which, among other possibilities, Black girls can grow up to be women who can tell their own stories and be believed—becoming newly perceptible beyond the confines of the screen, on the shoreline between the visible and the invisible.