There is a piece of home video filmed by Gertrude Reels in “Silver Dollar Road” that director Raoul Peck holds onto long enough to serve a purpose greater than what Reels initially intended it as, showing police on her property in North Carolina as her son Kevin attempts to ask what they’re doing on the family’s property, pleading from behind the camera that it’s not worth it. As an argument ensues, what’s happening in the footage may be indiscernible when the camera being swung around creates a blur, but the scene itself becomes even crisper, no longer merely evidence of the confrontation but an expression of a legal system in which there’s no way out for people of color and deference to authority is expected under any circumstance, if only to see straight again.
“Silver Dollar Road,” an absorbing, methodical and damning indictment of how selective enforcement of laws have adversely impacted Black home ownership, opens at Gertrude’s 95th birthday party, an occasion where she’s praised by generations of her family for providing a life for them, though she appears to be the last who’d want to celebrate it herself. She is rightfully feted for looking out for her family since inheriting the parcel of land along the Carolina coastline that her father-in-law Elijah obtained in 1911, swampy terrain that few white farmers could see the use in, but where the Reels created a haven for not only themselves but others in the Black community when there was a profitable business in fishing just off their property and the property itself could be used as a beach open to all. Although Elijah lost the title to it at one time due to back taxes, his son Mitchell, Gertrude’s husband, reclaimed it and made his wife and daughter Mamie promise that they’d never let it leave their family again. Surely if it was dependent on their will alone, it wouldn’t have, but quite literally, Mitchell’s lack of a proper will when he passed led his brother Shedrick to claim 13.5 acres of the 65 total owned by the Reels based on specious evidence, which he then sold to Adams Creek Associates, a real estate investment company that could benefit from the beachfront property the Reels had made so attractive.
As one of the great chroniclers of colonialism, it’s easy to see why Lizzie Presser’s piece for ProPublica about the Reels’ plight caught Peck’s attention and the director of “I Am Not Your Negro” ably fleshes out a story that is insidious when so much of it takes unfolds in paperwork, yet its effects bring incalculable pain to the Reels. Peck is wise enough ask members of the family less about what happened than what it felt like as they endured a wrenching trial that barely saw the inside of a courtroom, with Adams Creek tipping every lever of power in their favor over the questionable title to the land they obtained, then getting local police to enforce eviction notices for Gertrude’s grandsons Melvin Davis and LiCurtis Reels and arresting them when they wouldn’t leave land they had no reason to believe wasn’t theirs.
One needs only to see the toll this takes on Gertrude, who says few words in her nineties, no longer seeing much use in them when speaking up about injustice doesn’t seem to do much good, to understand how one of the most brutal effects of systemic racism is the ability to quell challenges of it when it’s seemingly imperceptible. However, “Silver Dollar Road” clearly lays out both the importance that the land has taken on over generations for the Reels and how easily the legal system can be manipulated by those with money and privilege to push a case that would be dismissed if anybody actually evaluated the evidence at hand. Adams Creek largely exists as an abstract entity in the film — in fact, when a Fox TV affiliate reporter tries to get them on the phone, their number has notably been disconnected — but that’s also how they exist to the Reels, elusive and impervious to what they’re going through as a result of their legal claims and as he’s done so often before, Peck makes the invisible tolls of racism undeniable. However, in “Silver Dollar Road,” one doesn’t only see what’s been wiped away, but what could’ve been had the Reels simply been left alone to live in the way they saw fit and in putting history within reach, Peck makes a brighter future seem as if it’s in play as well.
“Silver Dollar Road” will screen at the Toronto Film Festival on September 9th at 12:15 pm at the Scotiabank 10.
