Haunting Magic: On "Eve's Bayou," 20 Years Later | Far Flungers

The film is set in Louisiana during the early 1960s. In the opening scene, the narrator tells us about the origin of this swampy but beautiful little place. A long time ago, a slave woman named Eve saved her French master’s life through her powerful medicine, and she was rewarded with not only freedom but also a piece of land. She subsequently bore her master’s 16 children, and we are told that our young heroine and her family are this slave woman’s direct descendants. 

Named after her ancestor, Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) is the second child of the Batistes, and we observe their prominent social status in the town as a party is being held in their big, lovely mansion. While her father Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) is a successful doctor who is also pretty popular around the town, his wife Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is a fair lady with grace and class. Their three dear children have grown up in an affluent and sophisticated environment, as reflected when one of them quotes a line from a classic play by William Shakespeare. 

Looking around these characters and others at the party, the movie lets us sense how much Eve feels overlooked compared to her two siblings. While her younger brother Poe (Jake Smollett) is mommy’s little prince, her older sister Cisely (Meagan Good), who has just has turned 14, is daddy’s little princess, and Eve cannot help but feel envy and jealousy as watching Cisely dancing with their father in front of party guests. At least, Eve has Louis’ sister Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) and her sweet husband Harry (Branford Marsalis), but she is disappointed about her father not dancing with her, and she promptly goes outside the house then sneaks into the warehouse. 

Not long after she is asleep in the corner of the warehouse, Eve is awakened by some sound and happens to witness something very inappropriate between her father and a married woman she knows. Right after noticing her presence, Louis calms down his shocked daughter, and their relationship seems to remain intact on the surface as he promises to her that he will dance with her in next party. But Eve cannot possibly forget what she saw through her own eyes. When she later confides that to Cisely, Cisely says that she simply got a wrong impression at that time, and she even gives Eve a plausible alternative version of what happened in the warehouse.