For One Family, Silver Dollar Road Is Worth More Than The Currency In Its Title

Raoul Peck does his audience a great kindness with a simple, unassuming gesture: The introduction of and recurring visits to the Reels’ family tree. Peck’s new documentary, Silver Dollar Road, draws on the Reels’ years-long real estate saga as its source, and Lizzie Presser’s jaw-dropping 2019 ProPublica article as its basis; he justifies his own interrogation of the family’s legal travails through variations on his usual sociopolitical filmmaking lens. Some documentaries would be better off as written journalism. Silver Dollar Road complements Presser’s work with Peck’s erudition and humane touch. 

The former comes up in his detangling of America’s longstanding, fundamentally racist real estate laws. The latter surfaces through his proximity to the Reels, best demonstrated by the presentation of that tree: Its textured background of rich, green tree branches, its burgeoning series of roots connecting Elijah, the Reels’ progenitor, to his children (notably Mitchell and Shedrick), and they to their own children, and so on, an ever-growing line of beneficiaries to Elijah’s wise decision to purchase land parallel to Silver Dollar Road in North Carolina, about a century ago and some change.

Associating the Reels with verdancy feels as much like an artistic flourish as an honest signal of how the land has nourished their line, and how their line has in turn honored the land. “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it,” writes botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass. Peck doesn’t invoke her words in Silver Dollar Road, but they nonetheless apply. What the Reels have cultivated in several generations is something worth more than money, more meaningful than status. They have cultivated a home, a safe haven, a sort of magical realm separate from the harsh realities of Black American life beyond its borders. 

That’s how the interviewed Reels make the place sound: The Shire, but without all the bumbling hobbits. Peck centers the film on the quiet outrage of how this splendor is co-opted or outright stolen from Black people in the United States. The legal jabber is tiresome, but if you are tired after mere minutes of listening to it then you must sit with yourself and imagine how exhausted the Reels are after dealing with it since about the 1980s, when Shedrick, invoking a legal procedure called “adverse possession,” first planted his flag on the most valuable slice of land in the Reels’ 65 acres, then sold it off to developers after somehow convincing the courts that he had a point despite not having lived there for almost 30 years. 

Despite the miscarriage of justice that doubles as an example of what the American system seems designed to do, Peck doesn’t turn Silver Dollar Road into a mold for the Reels’ molten fury. The film is gentle, in keeping with his character as a filmmaker and as a person, yet still raw through its frank interviews with, and candid footage of, various Reels going about their day – most of all Melvin, out on the water shrimping and fishing as he’s done his whole life, and Licurtis, a brick mason. Silver Dollar Road opens with the celebration of their mother (and family matriarch) Gertrude’s 95th birthday, and all the love, joy and familial duty such a milestone commands. 

Nobody has fought this battle longer than Gertrude, though it’s Licurtis and Melvin who wind up paying the steepest price for defying the white developers participating in the great American tradition of disenfranchising minorities: Eight years in prison from 2011 to 2019, for the crime of “civil contempt.” There’s an enormous amount of anger that could be spoken to, but mostly goes unspoken. Peck’s works, like I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate the Brutes, are primed to enrage empathetic audiences because they are matter-of-fact, not because they’re passionate. In fact, the moment when Peck fully allows that spark of righteous indignation comes about halfway through the film via camera phone footage shot by Mamie, Melvin and Licurtis’ sister.

It’s daytime and Billy, Mamie’s other brother, is out on the property, watching a horde of white men survey land that isn’t theirs and yet somehow, by the ill graces of the courts, legally belongs to them. Billy is furious. It is his right to confront these robbers. There should be no reason for him to turn the other cheek. “Billy, don’t go down there,” Mamie urges him from the other side of the lens. She knows there are plenty of good reasons to leave the thieves alone. When things take an ugly turn, as is only inevitable, she chastises Billy as she shoos him away: “They been lying all they life. That’s how they get what they get, by lying. This is just how white people do.” 

Not long after Peck presents this incident, James Hairston, Melvin and Licurtis’ lawyer, cites race as the “elephant in the room” in their case. Given what we’ve just witnessed, his use of the idiom feels generous to the point of conciliatory, but part of what Peck shows us through Silver Dollar Road is Black America’s history of concessions to white America. The Reels aren’t the first Black American family to lose what is theirs to white supremacist chicanery. They won’t be the last. But the notes of triumph the film ends on, as Licurtis and Melvin return home in their due glory after staring down America’s penal system, suggest that the tricks, and misdirections, and prejudicial advantages written into our laws to benefit whites and kneecap minorities, can be defeated by those of unyielding spirit. Resolve like that comes at a high cost. As Silver Dollar Road draws to a close, with drone footage rising from the street itself to the high heavens, surveying the land the Reels fought so hard for, and still do, we’re left with the certainty that it’s a cost worth paying.

Director: Raoul Peck
Writers: Raoul Peck, Lizzie Presser
Release Date: October 20, 2023

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.