Melissa Anderson
In 1900s and 1990s Chicago, parallel romances play out between two Black Chicagoans, one Deaf and one hearing.
John Earl Jelks as Arthur Jones and Michelle A. Banks as Malindy Brown in Compensation. Courtesy Janus Films.
Compensation, directed by Zeinabu irene Davis, now playing at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City
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Dense and ambitious, yet supple and buoyant, Zeinabu irene Davis’s marvelous Compensation recounts two parallel relationships in Chicago—one at the dawn of the twentieth century, the other at its twilight—between a Deaf woman and a hearing man. Each romance is undergirded by the historical particulars of its era, and every aspect of the film is conveyed through various modes of communication: speech, American Sign Language, intertitles, open captions. Premiering on the festival circuit in 1999, Compensation is only now receiving a proper theatrical release (in a new 4K restoration), its engagement at Film at Lincoln Center the first on a scheduled nationwide tour. Finally, a movie that has so much to express, in so many different vernaculars, can find an audience eager to receive its message.
Davis’s film, written by Marc Arthur Chéry, her husband and frequent collaborator, takes its title from the 1905 poem of the same name by Paul Laurence Dunbar; the mournful two-stanza work appears as the movie’s epigraph and, much later, is set to song. A photo of the Ohio-based writer, hailed in a title card as “America’s Negro Poet Laureate,” is the first of many archival stills that dominate Compensation’s prelude (and that will appear throughout the film)—images of Black Chicagoans in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the influx of migrants from the South, as another title card informs us, doubled the city’s African American population. More milestones from that ten-year span are highlighted: the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, the launching of the Chicago Defender in 1905.
Still from Compensation. Courtesy Janus Films.
This brisk compendium of facts and figures, accompanied by Reginald R. Robinson’s original ragtime score, smoothly segues into fiction, commencing with the introduction of Malindy Brown (Michelle A. Banks), identified, per an intertitle that drolly replicates the exalted language common in silent-film texts, as “a woman of much talent and ample learning.” A dressmaker, Malindy devotes her free time to welcoming the Dixie transplants, becoming close to twelve-year-old Tildy (Nirvana Cobb), whom the Deaf woman teaches how to sign. Privately, though, this dedicated volunteer worries about how these recent arrivals will adjust to their new surroundings. Seated at her desk, under framed photographs of Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, Malindy writes, “One is heartbroken to know that the harsh realities of discrimination and life in the North will soon shatter their most cherished dreams.”
The gruesome packinghouse labor assigned to Cotton Belt émigré Arthur Jones (John Earl Jelks) epitomizes that brutal reality. He’s first seen walking along a stretch of the Lake Michigan beach where Malindy can often be found engrossed in a book. Immediately besotted, Arthur offers her one of the fish he’s just caught. She writes on a small blackboard, “I do not speak like you,” but the words mean nothing to illiterate Arthur. Despite the communication impasse, they still find a way to connect. Using gestures, she signals for Arthur to play his mandolin, her hand resting on the body of the instrument so she can feel its vibrations—a modest, charming moment in a film abounding with them.
John Earl Jelks as Nico Jones and Michelle A. Banks as Malaika Brown in Compensation. Courtesy Janus Films.
That littoral spot is also the initial meeting place between the 1990s version of Malindy and Arthur, now called Malaika and Nico, and played by the same actors. Although Malaika and Nico are more aligned in terms of education and class—she is a printer and graphic designer; he is a children’s librarian—than their predecessors, their temperaments are more extreme than those of Malindy and Arthur. Practicing tai chi at the beach, steely Malaika refuses to acknowledge Nico’s increasingly desperate attempts to flirt with her whenever he passes by on his jogs. But even when she writes in the sand, “I don’t go out with hearing people,” he will not be dissuaded. Having enrolled in an ASL class, Nico signs his name to Malaika at their next encounter at the shore. She lets down her guard, and a romance blossoms.
Michelle A. Banks as Malaika Brown in Compensation. Courtesy Janus Films.
Compensation gracefully toggles between its two epochs. Davis, who edited the film with Dana Briscoe, deftly nests another layer of fiction in the earlier narrative strand by including a segment in which Malindy and Arthur sit rapt in a nickelodeon, taking in a motion picture: Davis’s re-creation/remix of 1913’s The Railroad Porter, by the groundbreaking Chicago-based Black director William D. Foster. Cleverly, the scene is mirrored when Malaika and Nico stare at a multiplex marquee, trying to decide the least-worst option among the big-studio offerings—all helmed by white filmmakers, a piquant irony that passes without comment. Malaika overrules Nico’s suggestion of Sleepless in Seattle—too dialogue-heavy—for The Last Action Hero, in which words are nearly superfluous.
Michelle A. Banks as Malindy Brown and John Earl Jelks as Arthur Jones in Compensation. Courtesy Janus Films.
All the titles on that marquee were released in 1993, the year that Compensation began production. That it took six more years for Davis’s movie to debut at the Atlanta Film Festival typifies the arduous stop-start process of micro-budgeted cinema. But however small on funds, Compensation is flush with ideas, chief among them the ways in which differences and abilities can be bridged—and the ways they cannot, even between those most ardently committed to understanding each other. These struggles are made all the more vivid and touching by the actors playing the central couple(s): Banks, whom Davis first encountered in a Black Deaf production of Waiting for Godot in Minnesota, and Jelks, who reteamed with the director after costarring in her mid-length film A Powerful Thang (1991). Both possess an easy charisma, their allure magnified when they share the screen.
Mortality hangs over Compensation; maladies specific to the eras depicted cause a rupture in each dyad. Yet even the most insurmountable of divides—that between the dead and the living—isn’t altogether final in Davis’s singular film. Now revived, it should enter the ranks of the immortal.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.