MovieChat Forums > Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1973) Discussion > Can somebody please explain...

Can somebody please explain...

posted 19 years ago by KookyBadger
4 replies | jump to latest

The part where the older woman (who apparently takes care of old people) talked about how she never had a son named Leroy? That one bit of dialouge was looped about twenty times, and it was really awkward and a bit ominous. I looked up SSBBAS on Wikipedia before I watched the movie and I read that Sweetback's birth name was Leroy, but if I never read that I wouldn't have known who this person was, who Leroy was, or even what this creepy scene was supposed to mean. What I'm asking is this: Can somebody please tell me what indication was given to the viewer that Leroy was Sweetback's real name? Because it seems to me that this scene stands apart from the rest of the movie, and that no connection between Sweetback and this old woman was ever made.

[–] OptimumTaurus 19 years ago

Well, as far as I could tell, seeing Sweetback running around, and knowing that he wasn't raised by his birth mother, the woman who doesn't recall having a Leroy seemed to be implying that it was his mother.

From my perspective, that was about the only way that scene really meant anything. I suppose it was meant to give some background info on Sweetback.

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment. -Michael Corleone

[–] sleepyrobot 19 years ago

I took it to imply that she was a foster mother of sorts. No mother could reasonably say, "I can't remember if I had a Leroy." But if she was a foster mother who took care of dozens of children, that would explain it.

[–] OptimumTaurus 19 years ago

I disagree. While your explanation is plausible, there are instances where a mother could forget about a child she'd had. this woman could have been strung out on drugs, selling herself, and popping out kids only for them to run away, be taken away by the state for taking poor care of them, or for them to die because of disease or poor nutrition.

It's sad, but people do sometimes become so disconnected from reality that they cannot remember people who would be near and dear to them.

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment. -Michael Corleone

[–] winner55 18 years ago

Jeeze, what loss of cultural memory we suffer from!

"Lee-Roy!" was an intra-black joke name, a kind of moderate version of "Sambo". "Sambo" was what whites referred to you as, "Leroy" was how blacks mocked each other ("hey, Leroy, your mama's callin' you!").

The referenced is to the Haitian rebel who had himself crowned king (in French: "Le Roi"); during the '20s and '30s, a lot of young black men were named Leroy, especially in Harlem, and it became something of a joke to hear black mothers calling after their sons "Leroy!".

The joke was put to death during the late 1970s because "Roy" was a popular name among Jamaican pop-rappers of the time (e.g., U-Roy & I-Roy).

"A people without history are a people without culture" - Big Youth.