"Shadrach" is one of those small movies that not enough people have seen, especially since it forces us to confront our past as a nation. Portraying an ex-slave (John Franklin Sawyer) reuniting with the descendants of his former owners in 1935 so that they may bury him in the area where he was born, it puts a humanizing face on what could otherwise be a very ugly story. We not learn about the issue of slavery, but about how a number of slave-owning families got impoverished after the Civil War, as they lost their livelihood.
Harvey Keitel, as the patriarch, gives one a sense of the frustrated Old South: he's not a racist, but he is uncertain about bringing a black man along. But still, we understand that , for all his faults, he wants to keep his family together. Andie MacDowell is equally good as the matriarch, a hopeful woman wondering how to make her way in the Great Depression. And of course, we see the ubiquitous reminders of the Jim Crow South: separate seating for blacks and whites in the movie theater, and white churches won't bury Shadrach.
All in all, I really recommend this movie. I did in fact go to see it the same day in October, 1998, that I went to see "Beloved", also dealing with slavery.
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