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Chains, Brains, and Blood Stains

VENTURE was hand-cuffed (Carretta 378).
I [Johnson Green] cleared myself of all my chains, and made an escape from the gaol (Carretta 137).
[T]hey put me in a close Dungeon, where I [Briton Hammon] was confind Four Years and seven months
(Carretta 22).

Quentin Tarantinos fantastical portrayal of the slave experience in his film Django
Unchained (2012) glorifies the violence and exaggerates the power struggles that existed during
the pre-Civil War era. While any historian could point out the blatant departures from historical
fact, some of the tone and messages found within Django Unchained pay homage to more subtle
truths about slavery during that period of American history. By comparing and contrasting
historical and stylistic elements of the film with actual accounts of the slave experience
transcribed in Vincent Carrettas Unchained Voices, audiences can see repeating motifs of
bondage and abuse of power that contributed to racial tensions in the early days of America.
Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), the leading protagonist of the film, is an oppressed slave
who is released from bondage and consequently seizes ultimate control over himself and others.
His character symbolizes freedom and wild force. Near the end of the film, just before Django is
about to save his wife (again) and blow up the Candyland planation home, Django removes the
saddle from the back of a white horse, jumps onto its bareback, and rides off majestically. This
removal of the saddle signifies Djangos rejection of harnesses and manmade constructs. The
fact that his stallion is white hearkens to the medieval conventions of white knights riding off on
their noble steeds (found in European fairytales), while also hinting that he is rising above white
oppression. He is more in touch with nature and all its roughness than he is with Euro-American
refinements.
The name Django also captures this ideology. According to Nameberry, the name
originates from Gypsy heritage and means I awake in Romani. Django sticks out, because he

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does not have one of the conservative English slave names that Africans were rechristened upon
entrance into slavery. The slaves noted in Unchained Voices are renamed things like Briton,
Benjamin, John, George, David, and Boston. Tarantinos choice to bestow his character with a
unique ethnic name distinguishes Django from the others. His name alones marks him as
different and beyond the control of his white oppressors. Gypsies are noted throughout history as
nomadic people who live outside the laws and customs of the land in favor for their own cultural
practices. Names denote individuality and cultural identity, so by renaming slaves, masters are
able to diminish their slaves connections with their African ancestry and claim them as their
property. Djangos wife, Broomhilda von Shaft, is a good example of how a German family
infects their slave womans unique identity with their own ethnocentrism. They give her a
German name and teach her their language, so their culture is enforced and her own is essentially
buried, or locked in metaphoric hot box beneath the earth. This naming and renaming of slaves is
historically accurate, and instances of it are found within Unchained Voices. Venture Smith is
dubbed so by Robertson Mumford, because he is Mumfords own private venture, but his birth
name is Broteer, son of Saungm Furro, Prince of the Tribe of Dukandarra (Carretta 370-374).
Djangos journey mirrors that of Venture Smiths in several ways. For being a slave,
Django has a quiet dignity and regal air of a man of importance. Jamie Foxxs character appears
positively and comically dapper in an ostentatious blue velvet suit. The character, Dr. Schultz,
says of Django that he has a flair of the dramatic (Waltz, Django Unchained).Venture Smith
has this same sense of dignity, being of royal line, though his pomp is not humorously mocked as
Djangos is. Like Django, Venture Smith is separated from his wife when his master pawns him
off with little concern for disrupting the family unit (Carretta 379). Like Django, Smith secures
his own freedom and then toils tirelessly to buy his wifes (and childrens) freedom. Smiths

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tenacity in his quest to free his family is echoed in Django. These men will move mountains and
slay any dragon to save their Broomhildas from distress.
Django is characterized by his craftiness and resilience. Venture Smith and Johnson
Green are both depicted in Unchained Voices as cunning and adept in garnering finances. While
Smith gains independence and financial means legally through manual labor and investing in
land, Johnson Green does so illegally by theft. Django toes the line somewhere between just
lawfulness and criminal lawlessness. As a bounty hunter, he makes a legal profit by committing
deviant deeds. Then, he kills for vengeance and blows up a white mans property, making him an
outlaw like Johnson Green by the end of the film, though he is depicted nobly and is reunited
with his wife, like Venture Smith. Django relies on his cunning and street smarts to survive in a
world that oppresses him. Smith and Green bury money in the woods like magpies. Django
recovers a substantial fortune when he returns to Candyland to collect and seek retribution. All
three of these figures challenge the notion that Africans have lesser capacities for wit and reason
that were propagated by white supremacists during that era.
There was an ongoing human/subhuman controversy about enslaved Africans that
prevailed during the pre-Civil War era. Some scholars argued there was a separate line of
human development and physiology for Africans and Europeans (Bankole 4). Django
Unchained strongly conveys this radical racist notion in the powerful scene where the
impassioned plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) bashes in the skull of his fathers late slave
to prove that submissiveness is intrinsic in Africans, on account of dimpled indentations found in
the skull. This pseudoscience was actually accepted in many parts of the world, although modern
science debunks any notions of mental capacity on the basis of skull shape. This backwards
thinking can be found in Thomas Jeffersons response to the ingenious Benjamin Banneker:

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[N]obody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition, both
of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as far as the imbecility of their present existence,
and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will admit (Carretta 322). Essentially,
Jefferson believes Banneker to be an exception, but not the rule in relation to African intellectual
capacity.
Black women were just as undervalued, if not more so, than their male counterparts.
Educated women like Phillis Wheatley from Unchained Voices and Broomhilda von Shaft from
Django Unchained are regarded as anomalies, like Benjamin Banneker, and their proficiencies
with languages inspire surprise and astonishment in others. Wheatley is so accomplished that
George Washington himself held her in high esteem (Carretta 69). Though Broomhilda does not
have quite the talent or brains of Wheatley, her understanding of German delights Dr. Schultz,
and Candies sister Lara Lee comments on how unusual it is for a black woman to have any
skills of that nature. Tarantino captures the underestimation of black womens mental powers
that is accurately attested to in Unchained Voices.
As stated in Professor Greens lecture, Jupiter Hammon, whose narrative appears in
Unchained Voices, has been labeled an Uncle Tom by certain critics. Samuel L. Jacksons
character, Stephen, is another representation of this type of slave who is complicit in the
institution of slavery, who does not speak out against it, who in some ways tries to justify its
existence (Green). Arguably, Stephen submits to his role as a house servant for white folk,
because he benefits from it. Stephen lords over all the other slaves in the house, for they are
under his dominion. This creates an interesting dichotomy between Stephen and Django, since
both exercise incredible power over those around them. By allowing himself to be subjugated
by Monsieur Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), he wields hidden influence over Candie. In contrast,

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Django uses brazenness and violence to display his clout. While Tarantinos depiction of slaves
has been lambasted by critics, his wide range of black characters with different perceptions and
roles establishes that the slave figures in Django Unchained are complex and ruled by
individualism as opposed to group influence.
Tarantinos films are notorious for gratuitous violence, and Django Unchained meets this
expectation with gusto. While Tarantino glorifies aspects of the slave experience through
obscenely gritty hyper-violence, he is commenting as an artist on the brutal atrocities committed
to enslaved Africans. Briton Hammon was beaten most terribly with a Cutlass and then
confined in a dungeon for four years and seven months (Carretta 21-22). Johnson Green faced
execution for crimes that would today result in nominal jail time (Carretta 134-141). Venture
Smith was struck in the head with a club and beaten repeatedly by his master and his brothers
(Carretta 377-378). While modern audiences may be offended by the fierce imagery of
Broomhilda getting her cheek branded or screaming in the hot box, the runaway D'artagnan
being torn apart by dogs, Django dangling upside down while a man threatens to castrate him, or
the Mandingo fighters battling to the death, these instances of violence are not complete makebelieve. The film exaggerates and embellishes for dramatic effect, but the suffering, both
physically and mentally, of black slaves was a harsh reality Tarantino did not have to invent.
Tarantino, heavily influenced by American Western and Blaxploitation genres, resurrects
the American hero as a righter of wrongs (Saint 308). In her essay, Response: Why Slavery
Now? Django Unchained as a History of the Present, Saint argues, American hero must be a
black hero, because what needs to be made right, or avenged, in the USA, is its history of slavery
and its ongoing anti-black racism (308). Saint includes justification for Tarantinos treatment of
slavery and depictions of violence by referencing avenues of thought that attest that certain

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types of violence are morally defensible in an oppressive, unjust world order, and that has been
the ethical bedrock of cowboy film ideology (309). Saint cites potentiality for healing past
injustice through retributive violence, but concludes that it does not work as social healing,
since Djangos rampage is the individualistic exploit and not the effort of a collective group
(310-311).
Django Unchained catalogs the revenge plot of a slave who broke free of his shackles.
Unchained Voices publishes the stories of people who were voiceless for so long. While Django
Unchained leans toward the hyper-violent fantasy genre, Djangos struggles and experiences as a
disenfranchised black man in a white mans world echo those of Smith, Green, and Hammon,
and themes of the film in general can be linked to other narratives as well.

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Work Cited
Bankole, Katherine. The Human/Subhuman Issue and Slave Medicine in Louisiana. Race,
Gender & Class 5.3 (1998): 3-11. Web. 23 March 2016.
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking
World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Print.
Django. Nameberry.com Nameberry, LLC. N.d. Web. 23 March 2016.
Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Jamie Foxx, Christopher Waltz, Leonardo
DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson. Weinstein Company., et al., 2012.
Film.
Green, Amy M. Slave Voices and the Civil War Lecture 1. Online video clip. YouTube.
YouTube, 25 Jan. 2014. Web. 23 March 2016.
Saint, Lily. Response: Why Slavery Now? Django Unchained as a History of the Present.
Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 16:3 (2015): 307-311, DOI:
10.1080/17533171.2015.1060674