“It was a piece of heaven,” Agnes Marshall Blackwell says about the house she grew up in, situated in Morganza, Maryland. She recalls a little white house, surrounded by trees, filled with love. Her parents, Alice and Wilson Marshall, were leaders in the St. Joseph’s housing project, an organization with the mission to help Black people become homeowners. The Marshalls raised their family in that house in Morganza, but they found themselves on the wrong end of a bad-faith business deal and burdened with a tax bill—and were forced to become renters in the home they’d owned for years. In the short film “Goodbye, Morganza,” the filmmaker Devon Blackwell, who is Agnes’s granddaughter, unpacks that family history.
“It broke my mom’s heart,” Agnes says, of losing the family property. “Of all the hurts I have in my life, that is probably the biggest one.” But Blackwell’s film does not linger on that suffering. Instead, it offers a portrait of a warm and deeply connected family. We see Agnes and her loved ones come together to pray, to cook and share a meal, to exercise, to sing and make music, and to sort through mementos from their family history. “While making this film, it was really important to me not to dwell on pain, specifically Black pain. That topic is prevalent within the documentary space, and I wanted to rather focus on healing—healing from grief, from discrimination, and from the past,” Blackwell told The New Yorker. The pain and unfairness that shaped Alice and Wilson’s experience is present, but so is the family’s pride in what Alice and Wilson were able to achieve, and their obvious joy in the life they have together now. “I’d like viewers to walk away from this film hopeful, especially during these scary times when the future feels uncertain. I hope that viewers remember that regardless of how long it takes we’ll make it out the other end, just like my grandmother did alongside her community.”
