Homegoings by Christine Turner (review)

“There was always people like me,” explains black undertaker Isaiah Owens of the generations before him who “took care of the dead.” Owens is the subject of Christine Turner’s Homegoings, a heartrending and humorous documentary that reflects on the history of African American funerals. “Home-going,” once a term used by slaves to describe death, was considered a final act of grace that enabled an individual’s soul to escape from bondage and return home—to Africa, to one’s ancestors, to heaven. Funerals were not only mourning rituals, but also opportunities to celebrate the passing of loved ones to the other world. “For the slaves, death meant freedom,” Owens explains, “even for us today, death brings us justice.”

Owens is a captivating figure. Raised in a family of sharecroppers in Branchville, South Carolina, he was already obsessed with funerals by the age of five. He staged elaborate burials for frogs, chickens, a mule, and the neighbor’s dog, Snowball. He even buried a matchstick, carefully arranging flowers on top of the soil. At seventeen, Owens was finally able to pursue his dreams of becoming an undertaker. He left for New York, where he worked at a plastics factory until he was able to attend mortuary school. Today, he owns two funeral homes, one in Branchville, and the other in Harlem.

Turner relies on Owens’s encyclopedic knowledge of black funerals to narrate the film. This is one of its most appealing aspects. Instead of talking head interviews with outside experts, Owens and the other subjects of Homegoingsare its historians, philosophers, and sometimes, even its spiritual guides. Owens, for example, describes undertakering as one of the first middle-class professions that enabled African Americans the chance to operate their own businesses. His mother, Willie Mae Owens-Ross, describes the legacy of segregation. “For all my lifetime, when a black person died, they go find the black undertaker,” she recalls. “They knew better than take them anywhere else; they knew they wouldn’t be served.” And the children of those Owens has buried speak of the enduring significance black funeral traditions have on their lives. Turner illustrates these interviews with a combination of iconic archival images, candid photographs, wedding pictures, and school photographs.

When Owens describes his dreams of the afterlife, or as he kneels in the sand and stages a mock funeral with twisted wires and bent nails as people, and a burned corncob as a hearse, he is presented as an almost mystical figure. In other moments, Owens’s self-described love affair with funerals and death makes the film reminiscent of a spate of recent documentaries, including David Gelb’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which feature patriarchs obsessed with their professions. “The business is his life,” says Owens’s son, Christopher Isaiah. “Twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five. Eats, drinks, sleeps—everything is just funerals.”

But at its heart, Homegoingsis much more: it is a tale of family and the bonds that enable its survival. As Turner’s film explores the tensions that once alienated Owens from his mother, the film’s title takes on a second meaning. Like the practical and spiritual needs that funerals fulfill, Owens’s funeral homes are sites of reconciliation for his family, and places where he can attend to his desire to serve the dead. Owens’s once skeptical mother, his wife Lilly, and children Shaniqua Princess and Isaiah Christopher all work with him in the family business. When describing this side of the operation, Owens talks about the future in terms of the world of the living. “I’m trying to create a business that can take care of my family for maybe the next hundred, two hundred years,” he tells us.

Turner intersperses Owens’s story with those of the individuals who pass, living or dead, through the doors of his funeral home. The belabored breath of a youthful-looking Linda Williams-Miller hints at the urgency of her desire to...