by Juahl Ganaway

In a scene ripped from The Sugar Shack, the character Pearline (played by the stunning Jayme Lawson) stalks across the stage purring the lyrics to “Pale, Pale, Moon,” the Brittany Howard-penned song that feels more like an invocation than a performance. 

“I wanna sing

Like I hear the crickets do

I wanna hoo, yeah

Like the owls do (Oh)

I wanna howl

To the moon (Oh)

Scream

Scream like the wild cats do

I wanna be

I wanna be naturally free (Pale moon)

That’s what l’m gon’ do”

It’s an ode to sorrow, solace, and sensuality. Three themes running throughout Sinners, the now sixteen-time Oscar-nominated film, which follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) and their younger cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), as they prepare to open a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. Sammie is so gifted a blues musician that his music literally ruptures the boundaries between space and time, summoning vampires eager to siphon his sound for their own gain and setting off a night of terror. Yet, beneath its horror, Sinners is unmistakably a love letter to Southern Black culture and the practices woven into the very fabric of our being: the blues, hoodoo, and the magic created from the love of community.

Sammie is the film’s most obvious conduit for that communal magic. His music transforms the juke into a liminal space where the living, the dead, and the not-yet-earthside brush against one another, dancing to the same rhythm across generations. Watching Miles Caton’s performance of the film’s central song, “I Lied to You,” it’s easy to see how audiences readily accept the power and pleasure of his performance. But Sammie is not the only conduit. Pearline is too, albeit differently. Her rendition of “Pale, Pale, Moon” isn’t just background music for the action of the juke; it’s a call, a longing for a kind of freedom older than anyone can name. It’s something instinctual that thrums through the space as bodies are pulled to the dance floor and desire circulates freely about the room. Pearline’s pleasure serves as the driving erotic force that propels the narrative into its third act. As surely as Sammie’s music calls to the vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), Pearline’s call unites the juke in rhythm, momentarily covering the violence at the fringes. 

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Yet, shortly after the film’s release, I began to see online comments misconceptualizing the intensity of her performance, the potency of her lyrics, and the power of her character, with many users calling her a “Jezebel” and a “Ho”. Are viewers fully to blame for this blatant mischaracterization, though? Not really, they are merely regurgitating centuries of rhetoric that has rendered (and continues to render) Black women’s pleasure illegible outside of the extremes of the asexual (Mammy) and hypersexual (Jezebel). When Pearline coos onstage, emboldened and nurtured in her post-coital bliss, they reflexively invoke the Jezebel stereotype and collapse the expansiveness of Black female pleasure into something containable. In the instance of Pearline, the Jezebel is not an accurate stereotype to be deployed; it’s just become a cultural shorthand to express distaste at the perceived deviance of Black women’s sexuality. 

What’s telling, though, is how selectively that reflex operates. Sammie, who shares the same affiliations of music, desire, and the longing for freedom, is never subject to the same scrutiny. His longing is read as a developmental part of his passage from boyhood into manhood, while Pearline’s longing is litigated. Sinners is a deeply pleasurable film, reminding viewers that in all aspects, whether it be musical, spiritual, or sexual, Black pleasure is sacred. But to society, Black women’s pleasure is untenable. So, audiences must return to trite stereotypes to describe Black women: Annie is recontextualized as a Mammy, and Pearline is rebranded as a Jezebel. 

What this reflexive jezebel-ing reveals is the fear and misunderstanding of Black women’s erotic power. In her 1978 essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Black feminist poet Audre Lorde describes the erotic as  “…a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” and claims that, “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women.” Oppressive cultures flatten the erotic into something pornographic so that it can be dismissed because, when feeling is reduced to mere sensation, power disappears.” Pearline refuses that reduction; she moves, sings, and claims her space, inviting the audience to do the same. When she crawls on stage, she is not just titillating the crowd; she’s communing. Her body is a site of shared rhythm, a reminder that pleasure moves through a room the same way music does. 

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What Sinners understands – and what audience discourse often overlooks – is that erotic pleasure has long functioned as a practice of freedom in Black cultural life. In the years after emancipation, newly freed Black Americans experienced a myriad of changes in their personal lives, most notably, they were now free to choose their own sexual and romantic relationships. Radical Black feminist scholar Angela Davis notes in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism that this transformation reshaped Black American life and became a central theme in blues music. As Davis writes, “…the blues registered sexuality as a tangible expression of freedom…” In the blues, desire became a way to articulate a life beyond bondage. Granting the newly emancipated, particularly Black women, the ability to wield their sexuality, imbuing them with a sense of autonomy.

The blues were also heavily shaped by hoodoo traditions, where the body, desire, and the spirit were understood as interconnected sources of power. In her essay, “Work The Root: Black Feminism, Hoodoo Love Rituals and Practices of Freedom”, philosopher and author Lindsey Stewart reminds us that hoodoo cosmology is inseparable from the blues, and in hoodoo (and the blues), erotic intimacy functioned as a source of embodied autonomy. Stewart writes, “Under hoodoo, freedom becomes flesh, and sexual love becomes the source of new (positive) valuation of the body.” Intimacy is a tool of survival, where sensuality and pleasure carry spiritual weight. The magic imbued in the blues is restorative and healing, affirming the body and spirit in a world that was constantly seeking to diminish both. 

Sinners draws from this lineage, using Pearline’s performance to continue the relationship between blues, hoodoo, and the erotic. Her presence transforms the juke, the same way that Sammie’s music does, tearing open space and allowing pleasure to flow as a shared force in the room. She shows the spiritual power of the blues and how the pleasure of feeling can be a way to reclaim the body and assert independence. 

 Sinners articulates the power and history present in Black community, allowing the musical, the spiritual and the erotic to commune to bring about freedom. Yet audiences refuse to accept these connections as it relates to Black women. They may demand better, more nuanced representation of Black women, but when presented with a character like Pearline – who embraces her erotic power, audiences retreat to their safety nets, grasping for familiar terminology to categorize Black women. And in doing so, flatten the very depth they claim to want. Ultimately, Sinners offers possibility. By highlighting Black women’s pleasure as powerful, connective, and sacred, the film is opening new doors to broader, more expansive portrayals of Black female sexuality. But as always, the question remains whether audiences are capable of embracing that future.

Juahl A. Ganaway is a (burgeoning) film critic and archivist-in-training pursuing an M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University. They have previously written for outlets like Film Daze and The Film Magazine and have a love of all things Black, Queer, and Southern.

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