A Binding Truth (Woehrle, 2023)
It’s not so much that those who forget the past repeat it; it’s that those who never foreground the past forget what they already know.
In America, we know — or claim that we do — that slavery has cast a lengthy shadow over our history, with repercussions that reverberate to this day. Yet too often we claim in the present that slavery is ancient history, a relic of our past that has no tangible impact on the ways we live in the present moment.
A Binding Truth disabuses us of that notion.
It is the story of two high school students, one black, and one white, who share the same last name. Jimmy Lee Kirkpatrick was the first prep star to integrate the racially divided high school football teams in Charlotte during the civil rights era. De Kirkpatrick was the descendant of dairy farmers (so he was told) who thought nothing of the fact that he and his school’s star athlete were next to one another in every alphabetical roster or program. “Hey cuz,” they would say, passing one another in the hallway, an ironic joke about their shared name.
In retrospect, it may seem odd that neither of the young men thought of the most obvious reason why they might share a surname. Jimmy Lee knew that Kirkpatrick was hardly an African name, but didn’t think much about how Africans received European surnames. De knew his family’s roots in Southern agriculture went back for generations, but he never saw black people, even at the fringes, of family photos.
Director Louise Woehrle’s best achievement may be that she crafts a film that maintains most of its interest after its not-really-hiding-in-plain-sight twist is revealed. She is fortunate that both Jimmy Lee and De are reflective and articulate interviewees, which allows the film to be about the psychological impact of their discovery rather than just the discovery itself.
A Binding Truth is currently on the festival circuit, and it is the kind of documentary that one could easily see becoming an attraction on PBS or the History Channel and used in schools to put a personal face on an issue that sadly remains an abstraction for many Americans.
