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Actor-activist Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor has graced the silver and small screens on a number of iconic period projects, from The Color Purple to Origin, and most recently Nickel Boys, the Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel. In this week's episode, Lale sits down with Ellis-Taylor to talk about fighting for roles, keeping history alive, and what it's like going back home to Mississippi as a civil rights activist.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu and on today's Women Who Travel just before the Academy Awards on Sunday, I'm talking to actor and activist Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays Hattie in Nickel Boys, nominated for best screenplay and best movie. We are chatting about the role she intentionally chooses about her Mississippi upbringing, and finally her recommendations for road trips in the South. Aunjanue, welcome to the show. You grew up in Mississippi, and just before we started taping, we were talking about getting coffee when you get to go home. Where is home now?
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Well, home is always Mississippi.
LA: Where in Mississippi?
AET: I'm 80 miles south of Jackson, Mississippi and about 90 miles north of New Orleans, Louisiana. But I'm spending most of my time in Atlanta, Georgia right now. I'm there because my family is there. I have a bunch of cousins and it's a big city, and it's close enough that I can get back to Mississippi pretty quickly because it's not far, relatively.
LA: I haven't been to Atlanta, but I think by the sounds of it, quite a nice compromise because there's a lot going on there right now.
AET: What I like about Atlanta, it is a place where it keeps history very much alive with King and all of these freedom rights or civil rights, particularly, stalwarts. Every street is named after someone who is active and active in the movement. I think people have a really terrible concept of history. I think the way that we understand history is really unhelpful, if that makes any sense. We think of history as artifact. We think of history as this fossilized thing, and that's not what history is. And history is alive. And we know that because we are essentially adjudicating things now that we thought we'd never have to deal with again. You know what I mean? We thought Roe versus Wade was a dead matter and now we're having to deal with the consequences. So you cannot go through your day without calling the name of someone who fought for you to have a better life. And I love that about the city.
LA: Echoes of history wherever you go, it sounds like. And it takes me into my next question quite seamlessly, which is we'll talk more about family history and wider Southern history and American history later, but you've been acting in television series and movies for several decades now in your career. There's been The Color Purple, there's been Origin, there's been King Richard, Birth of a Nation. History definitely is present in all of them from different periods, but how do you choose your roles?
AET: Some of these films that you mentioned, I didn't necessarily choose them. They kind of chose me. But within that, there have been films that I had to fight for hard. I think that's the better question is, not necessarily how do I choose, but what do I fight for?
And so the things that I have fought for, Origin being one of them, is because I felt like I knew who Ms. Wilkerson was, not only by reputation, but I was aware of her scholarship and I just felt like this woman is our present-day James Baldwin. Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Her writing is passionate, it is transparent, it is intimate. And then she wrote a book called Caste, and it came out in pretty much the beginning of lockdown. And really what Caste is, it is about the hierarchy of, social hierarchy that exists in this country. And it started in the 1600s. And essentially she says that race is random, that you had some people who wanted to be in power. They knew they had to put a hierarchy in place, so what could they use to maintain that hierarchy? And they chose race.
LA: She traveled all over to research these caste systems, Germany, the US, and to India, correct?
AET: Yeah. She went to Germany and she went to India, spent extensive time in both of those places, and she made the connections between the civil rights movement here in this country and the fight against the caste system in India. This idea of the untouchable, the lowest caste in the hierarchy. I had heard that Ava, Ms. Duvernay, had security rights to the book Caste, which is what Origin is based on, and I just remember thinking, "That's going to be incredible, and I wish I could be in something like that." So I looked at a picture of Ms. Wilkerson and I said, "I could make myself look like her." She has this iconic picture in pearls and this wine, Merlot-colored shift dress. Her hair is long. I showed the picture to my sister. I said, "Sasha," I said, "Don't you think we can make me look like that?" And she said, "Yeah, I think we could do that." So we ordered a dress similar to the dress that Ms. Wilkerson wears in this photo. We ordered the pearls, the faux pearls.
LA: I love this.
AET: The fake pearls. And then we went to this local wig store, and I was in Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and we got a wig, and we just took pictures of me looking like her, and we put them side by side and we sent them to the casting director. And from that, Ava wanted to talk to me.
LA: She was like, "Okay, I see it."
AET: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
LA: Another film that you've very recently starred in, Nickel Boys, which also looks at the oppression of Black Americans. It's the author Colson Whitehead. I love the novel Nickel Boys. I love all of Colson's writing. Tell me about the character you play in Nickel Boys.
AET: Yeah. Hattie is the grandmother of Elwood, who was the young man who has been taken to the Nickel Academy, essentially kidnapped, and she's trying to get him out. Can't see him. And it really is about this grandmother who has just tremendous hope in and for her grandson, and then has all of that taken away when her grandson is kidnapped. And then she becomes hope for him on the outside when he's in this school that is brutalizing young children.
LA: By the end of filming, what had the character of Hattie become to you? Had she evolved? What did she end up meaning?
AET: I wanted the world to see what it was like, what was being lost here, which was an adoring relationship that this boy had with his grandmother. So that meant for me conveying and being loving towards this child. So that was something that I was conscious about, but what I was not conscious about at the time is that was my grandmother. Just practical, "These are the things that I'm trying to do to get you out of here. This is how I have failed at that. I am sorry," and the heartbreak that comes from all of that. And yet this woman has to dress herself, present herself in a way that she doesn't come across or give any defeat in front of her grandchild. That was my grandmama.
LA: We are visiting the town of McComb, Mississippi, not far from Jackson, and where Aunjanue grew up, after this short pause. We're back with actor-activist, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor on Women Who Travel. Tell me a little bit more about your grandmother and your relationship with her growing up. This was in Mississippi, I assume?
AET: Yeah, I was in Mississippi. I was essentially raised by her up and to a point. I went to live with her when I was three. My mother was in and out. My grandmother had seven children who lived. One of them died when he was a baby. So I was essentially the eighth child that she raised in that house that I still live in in McComb, Mississippi. She was the wife of a minister who was a pastor of four different churches in Pike County, Mississippi. He was a man who was arrested for bombing a church, and that church happened to be his own church, and he was freed, thankfully, because of some intervention, probably by some folks related to the Kennedy administration. But my grandmother witnessed all of this, and she never told me any of it. There was a time in my town, my specific town of McComb, Mississippi, you can Google this, that was called the bombing capital of the world.
It is beatings, it is homes set on fire, it is home bombings, and this happened essentially in 1964 in McComb. I had a lot of reasons to have beef with Mississippi. Mississippi arrested my granddaddy, and he was one of the lucky people who came home, but a lot of people who got kidnapped in the middle of the night did not come home. 600 people, upwards of 600 people were lynched in Mississippi after they started taking a record of this at the top of the 20th century, and nobody was held responsible for that. Nobody.
LA: 600 people. Before you became aware of all that your grandmother was facing and protecting you from as a child, what were those early impressions of life in McComb, Mississippi? Describe it a little bit for me, even just the landscape.
AET: Yeah. Thank you for that question because I get to tell you about our trees.
LA: Tell me about the trees.
AET: So we had a farm, fields of green peas and corn and all kinds of greens and tomatoes. We were very self-sustaining. My grandmother would go out in her garden and get dinner for us. It was like that. So outside of one window, we had a fig tree. In the back, we had a pecan tree. We had a plum tree further in the back. We had a persimmon tree up the road to the right. We had an orchard of pear trees. I had a Whole Foods market at my house.
LA: I was going to say, just listing off every delicious fruit possible.
AET: We had cows and horses, and for a little while we had hogs and stuff like that. But what's interesting and what's crazy and horrific, and it mystifies me and my cousins, the fruit trees, the year my grandmama died, all of them stopped bearing fruit. All of them. Every one of the pecan trees, the pear. All of it's still there, but none of them bear fruit anymore. Of course, I could be like, we could get really mystical and about it and be like, "When she died, they died." I don't know. I guess it's maybe the thing that nourishes you, when it's gone, you leave.
LA: How would you say if someone was passing through McComb, what was the town then, the town of your childhood, and how has it changed? What is it like for those who visit now or pass through?
AET: Yeah. There's so many towns like that, like McComb. They're all over the country, but a lot in Mississippi. These towns that just were just flourishing and alive, and then some industry came in and it replaced human beings and the economics of the town decayed. And here we go. Walmart came in.
LA: A classic American story. I feel like I keep saying living history and I don't know if that's the right phrase, but the history that you grew up among is that, also the time we're living in now and that you commissioned a billboard in Mississippi as an act of activism and resistance, and I'd love it if you could just describe that billboard for me.
AET: Oh, yeah. Thank you for asking me about that. That was one of the most fun things I've done.
LA: Oh, I bet it was satisfying.
AET: It was. It was so satisfying because it made people mad.
LA: Oh, which is the goal. Describe it for me.
AET: It made people so mad. So I moved back to Mississippi and the Confederate flag or the flag of the KKK, that ‘X’ of stars, that was a part of the official flag of Mississippi. When you grow up with it and you're a kid, you don't think about it. But when you become a grown person like I became a grown person and I started living in Mississippi again, I was like, "This is unbearable. And it's unsustainable." Right? And so no one was talking about it. People were exhausted, had been fighting for generations to get rid of it, and they weren't successful. But I couldn't accept that. So at every turn I had to do something to fight it. Even if I couldn't do anything about it, I couldn't be quiet about it. So I was like, "Okay, what can I do to make people start talking about this again on the state level?"
So I started thinking about iconography. So the iconography of the Confederates and the Klan is that flag. I said, "Okay, what's an icon of Black folks?" One of those things is We Shall Overcome. So I said, "What would it be like if I merged that iconography?" So I had someone to do a mock-up for me of We Shall Overcome written in Confederate flags. And I liked the look of it, and I said, "You know what? I'm going to put that on a billboard in the middle of the Capitol of Mississippi," which is Jackson, Mississippi, "and put it on the side of the highway." And it made people really annoyed and very upset. It got a whole lot of attention. And it wasn't just white people that were mad at me calling me an agitator, which I felt was the biggest compliment in the world.
You could have told me I was the prettiest woman that lived, and I would not have felt more complimented. But yeah, and then it was Black people who were cursing me out because I did it because I essentially defiled something that was sacred to them and to us in that song, which could be called one of the anthems of Black folks. And anyway, yeah, that's what I did.
LA: How long was it up for?
AET: It was up for a while. I'm sure I purchased it for a month, but it ended up staying up for longer because the people who at the time who were a part of the billboard company, they loved the attention that they got. So they kept it up. They kept it up for a while.
So a couple summers ago, not last summer, but the summer before that, I put up another billboard and the billboard was saying, "My name is Aunjanue Ellis, and I had an abortion." This was in response to Roe v Wade being overturned. I originally did it in Atlanta, Georgia, and then I had it placed in a couple different towns in Florida. The billboard in Florida was a reaction to Roe v Wade being overturned. But also my family and I did a trip to Disney World summer before last, and every other billboard on the way along the highway was some billboard trying to shame women for having abortions.
LA: I've seen those billboards.
AET: Girl. Girl. So I said, "Okay, this is ridiculous." And then I saw one that the woman in the picture was clearly an African-American woman, and I said, "Okay, wait a minute. You going to harass Black women on..." You know what I'm saying? And use God to do that? The rhetoric of Jesus and Christ to do that? So no one responded in the way folks responded to the “We Shall Overcome” thing. But the reason why I kept doing it is because that if I have that billboard, that's one less place, that's one less billboard that they can buy to harass women for their reproductive choices.
LA: Zooming out from McComb, Anjanou devises a roadmap of the South. Coming up. Back with Women Who Travel and we're about to visit places on the ideal Southern road trip. What is Aunjanue tour of Mississippi?
AET: I would say, first of all, don't pass through. Mississippi is the birthplace of the blues. Every piece of music you listen to right now was created in Mississippi. Hands down. Period. Folks call Mississippi the Africa of the United States because it is. So everything that you are fascinated by and that moves you about Black art has roots in Mississippi, so don't pass through.
LA: Where are the places that draw you back?
AET: I'm not an advocate for necessarily tourism. You know what I'm saying? I think I just want to be honest about that.
LA: Wait, expand a little bit on that. Because that's interesting.
AET: Yeah. Because the things that excite me about the plays are not the things that I want somebody to just come and dip in and dip out of it, and one of those things is the church. You know what I mean? I used to live in Harlem, and every Sunday when I would go to church there, I forgot, it was at Abyssinia or something, they would have these buses that would come to experience the Black church experience. I don't think that's tourism. I think that's disrespectful.
LA: It's voyeurism.
AET: Yes. Yeah. Let me see how you worship. Oh, you should go to a Black church to see how Black people worship in the south. I think that it's important for folks to have a real understanding of what Mississippi is. I think that what they should do is they should look up figures like Fannie Lou Hamer. They should look up Philadelphia, Mississippi, when they were looking for Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, the three young men who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi. When they were looking for their bodies, they were finding other bodies in the water. And these were people. Those folks were never claimed. They didn't know who they were.
They were just people that were killed and tossed in the river. They should go to those places that they hear about and see that they're not just these entries into historical record. That people still live in these places. You know what I mean? I think that going into the forests. There are a lot of forests in Mississippi, a lot of beautiful lakes in Mississippi.
LA: Talking about the forests and the lakes and thinking about your grandparents' farm and all of the trees, and it's very evocative and very visual. What's the sound of your Mississippi in present day? What does it feel like to just be there right now?
AET: I remember I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and I think he said, "Can you turn that down? What is that? It's so loud." And it was the crickets. It was the crickets outside of my house. So the sound of Mississippi is the sound of the things that we cannot see. I think that makes sense. Whether that's crickets or ghosts, the things that we know are there, we hear them, but we can't see them. I live among the people who are responsible for arresting my grandfather, their grandchildren. It is the wind going through those trees. It is the music that is still so alive. Southern soul, we call it. It is the sound of my niece and my nephew laughing. It's the sound of our dogs barking outside. It's silence sitting outside with my sister looking at the stars in the middle of the summer.
LA: I'm going to force you to be tour guide again for a second. What are a few of your must-sees in the south? You talked about the music of Mississippi. There's obviously, the south has an extraordinary food, but what are your must-sees or experiences?
AET: Well, I think one of the experiences that I said, "Okay, you can go do this," is go to a HBCU football game. Have the experience of going to a historically Black college or university, HBCU, going to one of those games and experiencing the bands and the culture and the food. There's nothing like it. So I would say go to an HBCU game in the south, in Mississippi and Alabama and Texas, Florida. We do it big. So if you started from the Carolinas, I would say go to the Outer Banks, one of the most beautiful, extraordinary places in the world. Don't go to the towns. Go to the islands where it's nothing but sand and water and dunes. I just left there a couple weeks ago. It is extraordinary. You can go further south through Savannah.
Savannah is beautiful. It is a beautiful town. I favor Savannah over Charleston because I haven't spent a whole lot of time in Charleston, but I hear great things about Charleston. I just haven't spent time there. But I spent a lot of time... I shot Birth of a Nation in Savannah. I shot Origin in Savannah. And Savannah has really great, beautiful bookstores. It has a great museum in, I think it's called Telfair Museum. The High Museum in Atlanta is pretty good. Oh, and if you are... I skipped over Alabama. I don't particularly love Alabama, but Alabama has, the Equal Justice Initiative has a museum there. It's called the Lynching Museum. You have to see that. Every American or every person from all over the world, anywhere you are, you have to see that. And that's in Montgomery, in Montgomery, Alabama. Then Lord Jesus. Experience in Atlanta, the MLK Center, Jimmy Carter's library, all of that stuff.
I was talking about how Atlanta keeps the civil rights movement alive and says it is a movement that is now and present experience that in Atlanta... If you go to Alabama, go to an HBCU game. If you come to Mississippi, go to J State. Go to Jackson State Alcorns game. It's called the Soul Bowl. It happens at the end of November every year. And then you go to New Orleans, and you know I don't have to tell you about New Orleans. So I've got you from South Carolina on down all the way to Louisiana.
LA: That's a route.
AET: I think you should avoid going to a plantation house until the names are changed into what they are, which were labor camps. Plantation houses romanticize slavery. There's nothing romantic about it. You avoid them until they call them what they are. Labor camps. Mississippi, it's like the thing that oppresses me is also the thing that I love. The other thing that makes me a defender of the place is racial violence has happened all over this country. All over this country. So don't pass through. Stop. Mississippi is a microcosm of America. I got a reason to be angry with Mississippi, a reason to be angry with Mississippi, but also Mississippi, Black Mississippi put me on this phone call, put me on this podcast with you, and I cannot overstate that.
LA: This was fantastic. Thank you for that. Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi. And special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Ammar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio.
