Spoilers

Sometimes a series reaches perfection early and you wonder where it can go from there. Has it peaked? Will what comes after be a decline compared to what came before?

Very occasionally it moves forwards and reaches a kind of maturity both unexpected (by us the viewer) and also nearly impossible to achieve. Like a perfect bud which then blooms into the most perfect flower.

Barry Jenkins achieves it with episode 9. There is so much happiness in this episode that at times you cannot see the characters because of the brightness of the sun against which they’re stood. Their joy and peace is something so precious because of what has come before, because of what they’ve escaped from, that the mundane is elevated to the sublime.

To call Valentine Farm a bucolic paradise is to miss the depth here. Bucolic comes with the idea of sleepiness (at least in my mind), of some kind of restful state because of the environment. Valentine Farm is a paradise because it exists at all – a location in which a community, against all hope, can exist and flourish on its own terms. The environment is as much a creation of its community as their freedom, not a cause of their joy but a result.

Poetry, oratory, love and kindness mix with the business of living and it is glorious.

Cora too has finally worked out who she aims to be and knows she must give witness both to this but also, as a part of becoming, to the road she has travelled to get here.

She gives this testimony – a pent up dam ready to break – the challenge of letting it go after pressing it down for so long, all the hope and fear and hurt and loneliness of suffering turns to something else in her speech.

There are long lingering shots on the community at peace, of people enjoying life and I cannot tell you how tinged with melancholy they were because the context of this show is anything but joy.

And Cora. Cora who has found a new home. Somewhere she discovers she can be vulnerable, can show who she might be on the inside.

Yet it is not all peace. The community is on the verge of a large decision – they must choose how they interact with the White town a few miles down the road. Will they refuse the concessions around runaways being demanded by the White township for continued favour or will they accede and become a community that forgets its past in order to move to the future.

Cora is the focal point for this discussion because they know she killed to be free.

Imagine the feeling of the community – former slaves now finding they can live as equals but that equality is contingent not only on denying their history of suffering at the hands of White people but also denying others the same freedom they have managed to obtain for themselves. In many ways this episode is a metaphor for the Black experience of America right now, this very hour.

The community knows it is in a bind. Can it truly trust White people to leave them alone, to welcome their flourishing? Can it trust White people to do what they say? The trouble is – as with all communities, some White people can be trusted and some can’t but the difference is – because White people as a class have power Black people don’t there is an understandable fear that one bad actor can destroy everything they’ve worked towards.

This isn’t a tragedy of the commons or even a bad apple spoils the barrel (although it does and people need to reflect not on the bad apple but the spoiling of the whole crop aspect of this more I think). It is the case that however much Valentine Farm wants to dictate its own future it is at the mercy of those who, in their own (White) community, may have little or no power at all. The least of them can destroy everything Valentine Farm has built.

Fear about Cora and what she represents is difficult to watch because Jenkins puts us, the viewer, in the seat where we care about her but can also see the danger coiling around her like a snake ready to bite anyone who comes too close.

So, fear is understandable

Squeezing yourself to fit with the space others give you is understandable. In this context equality only works when it’s out of sight of those who regard it as anathema.

Valentine Farm has two leaders – John Valentine, played with humility by Peter de Jersey and Mingo, played with ferocity by Chukwudi Iwiji. They embody two sides of the same coin regarding freedom.

Mingo managed to buy his freedom – and from that comes the successful immigrant story of excluding others who can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This is because the delusion this kind of person tells themselves is that it was their moral fastness, their character, which pulled them out of the muck. They refuse to acknowledge their owners and persecutors permitted their emancipation because to do so would be to admit they have never really grasped freedom for themselves. It must be the fault of those suffering that they continue to suffer because ‘look at me – I worked hard and now I’m successful’.

John Valentine sees the counter to this truth uttered by Cora: how can I celebrate my freedom while my brothers and sisters remain in chains?

Valentine sees that our colour cannot be undone, that it must not be undone. Our colour must do.

We see the town meeting in which these two deliver prose that flies and sings and soars, never more than when they take one another’s words and use them to their own strengths.

Yet, Mingo’s fears are well founded – not because of Cora but because of the deeper underlying terror he refuses to give voice to – that being seen will lead to oppression. He worries Cora will get them seen. What he fails to realise is that being happy is enough for our abusers to decide to harm us, to remind us we live at their sufferance not our own. They cannot bear it if we are carefree.

While the town hall meeting happens and the community debates their future the White town, using Ridgeway as a sop for their heinous action, surround them and start a massacre.

I shouted at the screen in rage and I’m not ashamed to say I cried angry, angry tears at this ending of Valentine Farm. Was it objectively worse than everything that’s come before? I don’t know.

What I do know is that to have hope, to be told ‘you’re free,’ and then have it taken away because you live as such is the deepest insult and crassest humiliation.

For Cora to find a home, somewhere to heal and people to love and then have that taken away from her. Ugh. I wanted to scream and scream and scream because this is the history of BIPOC people in the United States on the screen. The giving and taking of hope, the making and breaking of promises and the hatred towards any who will flourish if they are remotely other than White. Writing this my teeth are clenched, my eyes are wet. I cannot think of a show which has reached into my chest and squeezed my heart so tight in all my life.

You can be free, but you may not prosper. You may be free, but you must suffer. Forget this and we will remind you with violence and take away all you have built while you watch.

In the end the message is this: you are not free. So many allies regard colonialism as past, regard the legacy of slavery and economic subjugation as history – something that happened but does not impact today. Yet the structures built around those very endeavours persists, not like an echo but like DNA woven into the fabric of our societies.

If we want to understand the deaths of Black men at the hands of police, the history of redlining, of ‘race norming’, of eugenics then we only have to look to slavery and the structure upon which the most significant democracy in the world was founded – White supremacy.

Verdict: This episode is not simply the work of a master in the field, Jenkins has tied us tightly to the mast of contemporary America and let the sirens sing their song unhindered. 10/10

Stewart Hotston