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Film Review: The Harder They Fall, Directed by Jeymes Samuel

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In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind.

The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers. Not only was the real “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (as several writers have noted) much taller, darker, and heavier than she is depicted in the film, she was probably much queerer as well.[i]

Stagecoach Mary poses for a photo holding a shotgun — *Stagecoach Mary Fields. Source: Unknown author*

Born in captivity around 1832, Mary Fields spent the early part of her life enslaved by Judge Edmund Dunne of Tennessee. During this time, she reportedly grew very close to Dunne’s sister Sarah, who later became a nun and went by the name Mother Amadeus. After being freed at the end of the Civil War, Fields worked a series of odd jobs before eventually relocating to Toledo to rejoin Mother Amadeus at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she worked as a groundskeeper. When Mother Amadeus moved to the Montana Territory in the early 1880s to establish a mission and a small “Indian School,” Fields followed soon after, braving a harsh Montana winter in order to nurse Amadeus through a life-threatening case of pneumonia.

This decision, which one biographer describes as “an act of love,” indicated that the two women’s relationship likely represented something deeper and more complicated than a childhood friendship.[ii] Mary remained at the mission long after Mother Amadeus had recovered from her illness, transporting supplies to the nuns and even personally building Amadeus a hennery, all the while refusing to accept pay for her work. After getting into a shoot-out with a fellow employee who objected to taking orders from a Black woman, Mary was expelled from the mission in 1894, nearly a decade after her arrival. The incident prompted the mission’s male leadership, who already disapproved of Fields’ hard-drinking, “gun-toting”[iii] ways, to directly order Mother Amadeus to send Mary away. Instead, Amadeus helped Fields set up a business – a short-lived restaurant that is mentioned briefly in The Harder They Fall – in the nearby town of Cascade. Later, Amadeus helped Fields secure a star route contract, a position that propelled Mary to fame as the first Black woman mail carrier in the United States.[iv]

Drawing of Cathay Williams — *Cathay Williams. Source: U.S. Army*

For all their closeness, however, the two women’s relationship existed in a social and racial context no amount of loyalty or affection could negate. In tying Mary’s potential queerness to another Black woman (Cuffee) rather than the sister of the man who enslaved her, The Harder They Fall offers a glimpse of Black queerness uncomplicated by these same questions of power. Unfortunately, though, it is only a glimpse. The charged moment between Mary and Cuffee, a character based on Cathay Williams, who famously disguised herself as a man to enlist in the U.S. Army, passes as quickly as it begins, a loose end to be tied up before Mary can have her happy ending with Nat.[v]

Though The Harder They Fall’s director Jeymes Samuel has stressed that the film is not an attempt at historical accuracy so much as a way to honor the often-forgotten story of the Black West,[vi] it is telling that this is the version of that story that ultimately made it to the screen. To depict a woman who in life was never once romantically linked with a man as the ingenue to Nat Love’s swaggering anti-hero was a choice. How much richer could this reimagining have been if different choices had been made—if queerness existed as more than a hint, a shared look, or a fleeting scene of unrealized potential? Samuel’s deeply compelling, cinematically stunning take on the classic Western works in large part because it treats Blackness as something complex and unambiguous. What if it treated queerness the same way?

Candice Lyons is a Ph.D. candidate in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and a 2021-2022 Black Studies Dissertation Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent pieces “A (Queer) Rebel Wife in Texas” (2020) and “Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation” (2020) can be found on Not Even Past. Lyons’ writing can also be found in the 2021 E3W Review of Books, for which she served as special section editor. Her 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 FS Graduate Student Award.

[i] Ineye Komonibo, “Colorism Clouds The Rich Imagination Of The Harder They Fall,” Refinery 29, November 5, 2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/11/10701439/netflix-the-harder-they-fall-stagecoach-mary-casting-controversy.

[ii] Miantae Metcalf McConnell, “Mary Fields’ Road to Freedom,” Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, Behind the Badge, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud, Michael N. Searles, and Albert S. Broussard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

[iii] Gary Cooper, “Stagecoach Mary: A Gun-Toting Black Woman Delivered the U.S. Mail in Montana,” Ebony (1977).

[iv] McConnell, “Mary Fields’ Road to Freedom.”

[v] DeAnne Blanton, “Cathay Williams: Black Woman Soldier 1866-1868,” Buffalo Soldier, Originally Published 1992, https://www.buffalosoldier.net/CathayWilliamsFemaleBuffaloSoldierWithDocuments.htm.

[vi] Andrew R. Chow, “The Real Black Cowboys That Inspired Netflix’s The Harder They Fall,” Time, November 3, 2021, https://time.com/6111612/the-harder-they-fall-true-story/.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Queering Postwar Marriage in the U.S.

By Lauren Gutterman

At first look, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of the 1950s wife and mother. In 1947, at age eighteen, Barbara met and married a sailor who had recently returned home from the war. The couple bought a house in suburban Norwalk, California and had two daughters. While her husband financially supported the family, Barbara joined the local Democratic club and the PTA. Yet beneath the surface, Barbara’s picture-perfect life was more complicated. Soon after marrying, Barbara realized she had made a mistake. She called her mother asking to return home, but was told, “You’ve made your bed. Lie in it.” Divorce was not an option, so Barbara persevered. Eventually, through the PTA she met Pearl, another wife and mother who lived only a few blocks away. Though Barbara had never before been conscious of same-sex desires, she thought Pearl “the most gorgeous woman in the world” and fell madly in love. In an oral history interview recorded years later, Barbara could not recall exactly how it happened, but somehow she was able to tell Pearl that she loved her and the women began an affair that continued for more than a decade.

Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage centers on women like Barbara who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desires in the second half of the twentieth century. Many—if not most—women who experienced lesbian desires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were married at some point, yet this population has been neglected in histories of gay and lesbian life, as well as histories of marriage and the family. Focusing on the period between 1945 and 1989, Her Neighbor’s Wife is the first historical study to focus on the personal experiences and public representation of wives who sexually desired women. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs and letters, the book documents the lives of more than three hundred wives of different races, classes, and geographic regions. These women serve as a unique lens through which to view changes in marriage, heterosexuality, and homosexuality in the post-World War II United States.

To a remarkable degree, the wives in this study were able to create space for their same-sex desires within marriage. Historians have typically categorized men or women who passed as straight while secretly carrying on gay or lesbian relationships as leading “double lives.” This concept may describe the experiences of married men who had anonymous homosexual encounters far from home, but it fails to capture the unique experiences of married women who tended to engage in affairs with other wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: at church, at work, or in their local neighborhood. Barbara and Pearl, for instance, lived mere blocks away from each other. They socialized together with their husbands and children, went on trips together, and even ran a business together for many years. While LGBT history has focused on queer bars in urban spaces, many wives who desired other women found ample opportunity to engage in sexual relationships with other women in their own homes in their husbands’ absence. Some of these men remained unaware of their wives’ same-sex relationships, but others chose to turn a blind eye to their wives’ affairs and waited for them to pass.

Alma Routsong and her family in a press photo for her novel Round Shape, 1959. Routsong carried on a relationship with another woman for a year in Champaign, Illinois, in the early 1960s before divorcing her husband. Curt Beamer for the News-Gazette. (From the Isabel Miller Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries.)

Lesbian history has highlighted the politically radical implications of love and sex between women, but married women’s same-sex affairs did not always function as a type of resistance to or protest against the institutions of heterosexuality and marriage. In some cases, engaging in same-sex relationships within marriage propelled women to identify as lesbians and to leave their marriages. This was a path, and a choice, that became increasingly available to (and expected of) women across this book’s time period as divorce became more common, and gay and lesbian activists challenged the stigmatization of homosexuality. However, many wives’ ambivalence about labeling themselves or their affairs as lesbian, and their refusal to divorce well into the 1980s and beyond, challenge a simplistic interpretation of such wives’ desires and identities. While the emergence of no-fault divorce, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism made it possible for many wives to leave unhappy marriages and build new lives with other women, others experienced the growing division between married and lesbian worlds as constraining, as forcing a choice they did not have to make before.

Della Sofronski dressed for a neighborhood Halloween party in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which she and her lover attended in costume as husband and wife, ca. 1945. (From the private collection of Kenneth Sofronski.)

Barbara and Pearl’s story reveals how women responded differently to the social and cultural transformations of the 1970s. During their many years together, Barbara and Pearl had secretly planned to leave their marriages once their children were grown. Around 1970, when Barbara was forty and her daughters were in high school, she decided she was ready to leave her marriage and begin her life with Pearl. But Pearl did not want to divorce. She was ill at the time and worried about losing health insurance if she left her husband, a man Barbara described as “a sweet guy.” So Pearl remained married, and Barbara divorced. “I went to Chuck Kalish and said, ‘I’m going.’ And I went,” she recalled. By this time Barbara had discovered the Star Room, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles. In fact, Barbara invested some of her own money in the bar, making her a part owner, and when she left her marriage she moved into a house directly behind the bar where she easily embarked on a new lesbian life. “I was in hog heaven,” Barbara later said.

Like Barbara and Pearl, the wives described in Her Neighbor’s Wife made a range of choices over the course of their lives. Some ended their lesbian relationships and remained married for good. Some experimented with “open” or “bisexual” marriages in the era of the sexual revolution. Yet others divorced their husbands in order to pursue openly lesbian lives. Whatever paths they took, however, the wives in this study suggest that marriage in the postwar period was not nearly as straight as it seemed.

Turbo-folk: Pop Music in the Crucible of Balkan History

Kicking off our new series on digital history projects, Dr. Vladislav Beronja, a professor in the UT Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, tells us about a class project to build a website on Balkan pop music.

By Vladislav Beronja

Turbo-folk—a mixture of pounding electronic beats and trilled vocals—can be heard blasting from cafés, taxis, and dance clubs across the former Yugoslavia. Despite its ubiquity in the region, this Balkan pop phenomenon has been a hotspot of political and cultural controversy due to historical associations with Slobodan Milosevic’s nationalist regime in Serbia of the 1990s. The genre has been accused of valorizing patriarchal values, crass materialism, gangster lifestyle, and—more seriously—war crimes. A closer look at turbo-folk, however, reveals that it has undergone significant transformations in the last few decades.

This spring my students examined turbo-folk as well as the accompanying controversies in the context of an undergraduate seminar, “Punks and Divas in Southeastern Europe: Popular Music and Cultural Identity in the Balkans.” The result is a website titled Old Beats, New Verses: 21 Newly Composed Essays on Turbo-folk, which the class collectively created with help from the European Studies Librarian, Ian Goodale.

Old Beats, New Verses: 21 Newly Composed Essays on Turbo-Folk (via Old Beats, New Verses)

In many ways, “Old Beats, New Verses” is a companion piece to a similar website on punk music, “Yugoslav Punk,” the soundtrack of the last Yugoslav generation characterized by playful rebellion, liberal orientation, and irony typical of late socialism. Turbo-folk, on the other hand, represents for many the soundtrack to Serbian militant nationalism, which stoked the flames of war that ultimately engulfed and destroyed multiethnic Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Drawing on recent scholarship and the wealth of materials available on the Internet, the student essays address different aspects of turbo-folk, from its most prominent divas to representations of gender and national identity to global influences. Many if not all of the contributions challenge the assumptions and stereotypes connected to turbo-folk while still maintaining a critical outlook.

Turbo-folk stands at the complex intersection of the various highly politicized identities in the former Yugoslavia, such as nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. This complex cultural location has been the case from the genre’s inception in newly composed folk or neofolk music. Emerging in 1960s Yugoslavia, neofolk coincided with rapid industrialization and expansion of the urban working class in the fledgling socialist state. The new-fangled genre combined elements of Balkan folk music, strongly inflected by Ottoman colonial legacy in the region, with western pop structures and modern electric instruments. Like its primary audience of recently urbanized peasants, neofolk was almost immediately received with ridicule and scorn by the Yugoslav cultural establishment, even as the communist authorities continued to strategically utilize the genre’s wide appeal. Frequently derided as overly crass, kitschy, and even foreign, neofolk nevertheless occupied a dominant position in Yugoslav socialist culture as its unacknowledged pleasure-filled underbelly.

Tanja Savić-Prostakuša (Bad Woman), 2017 (via Old Beats, New Verses)

Reflecting on this history, many student contributions examine the afterlife of neofolk—and of Yugoslavia—in contemporary turbo-folk. The career of Lepa Brena, the neofolk singer who rose to spectacular fame in the early 1980s, is especially interesting in this respect. Several students examine Brena’s music as a vehicle of contemporary Yugonostalgia—a collective longing for the former socialist homeland that is often mediated through music, cinema, and other products of pop culture. Born into a Bosnian Muslim family, but a longtime resident of Belgrade and married to a Serb, Brena in many ways breaks the stereotype of both the neofolk/turbo-folk performers and audiences as overly nationalistic. Moreover, positive references to socialist Yugoslavia in contemporary turbo-folk, as well as the genre’s popularity across national lines have arguably made it an expression of “identity beyond borders,” as one student essay puts it.

If neofolk is representative of socialist Yugoslavia (and its contradictions), then turbo-folk has become symbolic of its violent dissolution. In the 1990s, turbo-folk became an extension of Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarian regime in Serbia, when the genre flooded the airwaves, pushing out any oppositional musical voices and subcultures. In this vein, the category of “kitsch” has been widely applied to turbo-folk to describe its aesthetically and politically regressive qualities. Offering a creative reading of Viki Miljković’s 1994 hit “Coca Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki,” an essay by Luis Martinez shows how the kitschy, commodity-filled surfaces of turbo-folk music videos should not be seen as mere escapism, but as unwitting mediators of traumatic and perplexing historical changes in the region.

Since the 1990s, the genre has become largely autonomous from regime politics, although the controversies around turbo-folk divas and their fans continue to linger. Many essays demonstrate that turbo-folk has significantly evolved in the 21^st century by reflecting more socially progressive themes. For instance, the genre has started incorporating proto-feminist values and queer aesthetics. An essay by McKenna Gessner argues that contemporary turbo-folk divas challenge normative ideas of femininity and female sexuality. The essay draws examples from Jelena Karleuša and Nikolija’s music videos, featuring dramatic reversals of gendered power dynamics and outrageous “femme” looks. Other contributions are less celebratory, such as Gabriella Velasco’s essay on queer embodiment (or the lack thereof) in turbo-folk. All the essays, however, acknowledge that the nods and winks of turbo-folk divas to their female and queer audiences have become more open and explicit, despite the continued presence of patriarchal and homophobic attitudes in Balkan societies.

Lepa Brena. “Jugoslovenka.”1989 (via YouTube)

The section on turbo-folk and cultural and national identity is the most extensive, and for good reason. Like identity in the Balkans, turbo-folk has always been full of ambiguities and contradictions, which makes it a fascinating object of study. For instance, the influence of Ottoman colonial legacy on contemporary Balkan popular music still remains largely unacknowledged even when it is playfully evoked. Turbo-folk not only adopts Orientalist melodies and themes, but it blatantly copies pop songs from Turkey and the Middle East, simply translating the original texts to bring them closer to former Yugoslav audiences. As Milena Đorđević-Kisačanin’s essay shows, Serbian turbo-folk singers will frequently borrow from Greek pop music to escape charges of “Turkishness.” The same is true of the wider appropriations of Romani music. Roma culture is used to symbolize the unfettered spirit of the Balkans as a whole, even as the Roma themselves remain one of the most marginalized and oppressed group in the region.

The student enthusiasm and the consistently high quality of research during this project have convinced me of the advantages of doing a collective assignment with a strong digital and public-facing component. Together these student essays show the value of intercultural contact, original research, and guided on-line engagement in an undergraduate seminar setting. They also successfully break the surface of the stereotypes of Balkan popular culture to reveal a more complex, layered, and historical image of the region. In this sense, the project can perform the critical work of scholarship beyond the university classroom.

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