Plot
Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett), a ten year old girl, lives in a prosperous African American community in Louisiana with her younger brother by a year Poe, and her sister Cisely (Meagan Good) a pretty girl who is just entering puberty. Their parents are Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), a well respected doctor in Louisiana's "colored" community. One night after a raucous party, Eve accidentally witnesses her father having sex with family friend Matty Mereaux (Lisa Nicole Carson). However, Cisely, who has a very affectionate relationship with her father, convinces Eve that she misinterpreted an innocent moment. The unreliability of memory and observation remain important themes throughout the film.
The summer quickly becomes a chaotic and stressful one for the Batiste family. Eve's relationship with her parents becomes more strained as she discovers more evidence of her father's serial infidelity. Cisely comes into conflict with both her sister and her mother as she enters puberty and tries to navigate the difficult transition to adulthood, particularly with regards to her appearance and sexuality. Roz eventually begins to suspect her husband's infidelity, prompting conflict between the two as well.
During the chaotic summer, Eve often seeks refuge with her aunt Mozelle Batiste (Debbi Morgan), who works as a fortune teller and who has had a string of lovers who all died violently. After Eve has a confusing vision of something terrible happening, Mozelle informs her that the gift of second sight runs in their family. Meanwhile, Eve, angered by her father's infidelity, begins to tease Matty Mereaux's husband Lenny (Roger Guenveur Smith) with her knowledge about it.
One day Cisely confides in Eve the secret of why she's been so moody. One night, after their parents had a vicious argument, Cisely went to comfort her father and he, drunk, tried to molest her. Enraged, Eve seeks out a local witch, Elzora (Diahann Carroll), and commissions a voodoo spell to put a fatal curse on her father. The Baptiste's family life totally disintegrates as Cisely's accusations against her father become known. Concerned that her father might be innocent, Eve tries to undo the curse on him but discovers that this is impossible. She then rushes to bring her father home, finding him in a bar chatting with Matty Mereaux. At the same time, a drunken Lenny arrives to take Matty home and shoots and kills Louis after a confrontation. After her father's funeral, Eve soon finds a letter which her father wrote to Mozelle. In it he explains that Cisely had come to him that night and kissed him, first as a daughter and then as a lover. In his drunken state he reacted violently, slapping her and pushing her to the ground, which made her angry. The letter implies that Cisely made up her story. Eve confronts Cisely and uses her second sight to try and discover what really happened, but the two stories are so jumbled within Cisely's own mind that the truth is obscured.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)