You get 10 women together, and nine of them will have a story to tell about how a man has done them wrong. Give the tenth one a little time, and she’ll have a story, too, says Anita Singleton-Prather over a dinner of bacon cheeseburgers, red beans and rice and crawfish etouffee at Que Sera Sera on N. State Street. Singleton-Prather—a large boisterous black woman who will tell you she loves her food—was in town Jan. 28 in all her glory showcasing her film, “My Man Done Me Wrong‚” which screened at Millsaps College as part of the Southern Film Circuit. It is a story of Singleton-Prather and six other black women recounting tales of cheating men—and of how those men got their due.
Hilarious details of retribution probably had the few men in the audience cringing, at least a little. The women (why not?) were laughing. The film takes place in a restaurant in Beaufort, S.C. In it, the women surround a table and regale each other with tales of pulling guns on men (while he’s on the toilet), making bombs and pinning men to trailers with cars. The movie begins and ends with a gospel choir inside a small church, recognizing that life is for living, and loving.
We didn’t tell stories of men at our dinner (although it would have been fun). We learned much about the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Gullah is a language and culture that originated with the combination of West African slaves, European slavemasters and Native Americans. An isolated community, with no bridges to the mainlands until the ’50s, this patois language (think Caribbean) and way of living has continued (see http://www.knowitall.org) Fascinated and full and a bit smarter, we left the restaurant and went to watch the movie. Everyone’s got a story to tell, but none quite as funny as these. Hopefully this film will come to town again, if only on video. It would be handy around the house when men get to acting up.
— J. Bingo Holman
