The sound of chirping cicadas, calling to their mates. The feel of the scales on a freshly caught fish. The way the late afternoon light reflects off a backwoods creek, as a fishing bobber floats idly on the surface. You hear thunder crack in the distance; you can practically smell the ozone in the air that lingers before a lightning strike. A hand dips into the brackish water near the shore, the dark silt run between fingers causing it to muddy and cloud before slowly ebbing away….
It is admittedly a little ridiculous to try and describe the flurry of sensualist sound and vision that opens All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, writer-director Raven Jackson‘s first film, via an inventory — simply listing these things risks doing a disservice to the manner of presentation. Nor does attempting to explain their connection to each other, which is almost like doing a standard book report on a poem. (“And now I will tell you why so much really does depend on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens!”) Given that Jackson herself is a poet with a handful of shorts to her name, the impressionistic way that she lays this opening out isn’t surprising. There is a story she wants to tell, but first, Jackson has to get you accustomed to how she’s going to tell it, not with words but a camera.
So we see a young girl, who we soon learn is named Mackenzie (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) — everyone calls her Mack — sit next to her father (Chris Chalk) as the older man teaches her how to fish. Her sister Josie (Jayah Henry) is there as well, perched off to the side. Soon it begins to rain, and they head home, where Mack will also learn how to gut their catch of the day. But in the span of a few minutes, we manage to learn quite a lot. Dad is patient, nurturing, attuned to the task at hand. Mack is observant, curious, open. Josie seems more tentative, more comfortable in the background. The environment they’re in, rural Mississippi in the early 1970s, is teeming with Mother Nature’s blessings, all captured in a way by the movie’s 35mm images that make you feel as if you’ve stepped into a photograph, or maybe a dream. It announces right from the start that you are not just watching a movie. You’re experiencing an immersive portrait of a life and a landscape intertwined, and entering what feels like a feature-length sense memory.
And trust us when we say that All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is not just an extraordinary debut but an impeccable example of experiential cinema, a phrase that will likely have some folks immediately heading to the exits. There is a narrative, just not necessarily in the linear fashion most filmgoers are accustomed to. Mack will come of age (she’s played, wonderfully, in her later years by Charleen McClure), fall in love with a handsome young man named Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.), and have her heart shattered. She will give birth, and pass on lessons to her daughter. Mack’s sister will braid her older tween sibling’s hair in one moment, and it will have turned gray in the next. There will be fallouts, and forgiveness, and death. The girls’ mother, Evelyn (The Woman King‘s Sheila Atim), is a vision in her yellow dress and bright red lipstick and fingernails, dancing with dad in their living room on a Saturday night get-together. “Don’t speak until spoken to,” she scolds Mack — and then, in the cruelest cut of all to a church service, Mom’s gone. Yet Evelyn reappears throughout, sometimes cradling the newborn Mack in a bath or their backyard as dusk approaches. Because when someone exists in your memory, are they ever really gone?
Sheila Atim in ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.’
Jaclyn Martinez
There are touchstones here, from Julie Dash’s similarly tactile and tender Daughters of the Dust to the novels of Toni Morrison, the later stream-of-consciousness works of Terrence Malick, and — in its acute, empathetic way of presenting Black life over several decades — Moonlight. It should not surprise you that Barry Jenkins signed on as a producer after coming across Jackson’s script during the development stage, and that he likely saw a kindred filmmaking spirit in her sensibility, her sensitivity, and her ability to conjure up vast depths of feeling by focusing on the smallest of details.
But this is Raven Jackson’s movie, and hers alone — and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt feels like a personal testament from someone who may have transitioned from the written word to the moving image, yet hasn’t sacrificed her lyrical voice in the translation. It’s not just that the film plays like a flood of remembrances of things past, with various timeframes, life stages, and formative flotsam weaving and tumbling into each other. What strikes you is how Jackson interprets everything that Mack, her family, and her community go through as one vast mosaic of American beauty, specific in its region but universal in its agony and ecstasy. (The title refers to a Southern ritual of sorts that involves the consumption of clay dirt.)
There’s a straightforward way to chronicle Mack’s journey into adulthood, for sure. What you lose in momentum, however, is made up by the gaining of moment-to-moment sensations. In a way, this is the only format in which Jackson can truly do her tale justice. The good, bad, and ugly that dots all of our paths, whether paved with dirt or not, is filled with all sort of detours. To appreciate not just the big steps along the way but the smaller ones — the feel of those fish scales — is to live. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and its creator know this to be true. By the end of this magnificent look at Mack’s world, so do you.
