“Throw your lovin’ arms around me
So my enemies cannot harm me
Oh Lord, Oh Lord,
I’m in your hand, in your hand”*
Go back to that church in Mississippi.
See its open faces.
Hear its voices of peace.
Touch its simple walls.
Taste the dirt paths leading to its door.
Drink its memories like you taste the rain in spring.
Full. Seasoned. Nourished.
There will be plenty for you and for those who remain there.
Memory cannot be stolen but only shared.
Poet and filmmaker Raven Jackson feasted all of those senses in that church as she was making her 2023 film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. There is a scene in the film in which we can see her have all those experiences right before our eyes. These too become our own sensory delights as we watch the sequence.
In the scene, we begin hearing the opening words to the hymn “Lord, I’m in Your Hand” as the camera looks upwards through towering trees. As the song continues, we see individual glowing close-up shots of faces in that church. We hear the song continue, but those gathered here are not singing but looking forward intently. Then we see what the faces are watching so closely: a woman and man joining their own hands in marriage. The camera brings us close to those intertwined hands as it so often does in this film, then pans slowly over to an outdoor view through a window. In an unbroken shot, we then zoom back over to a simple inside wall of the church where we move past a velvet painting of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Christ’s hands are outstretched in the painting even as we hear the climax of the hymn : “I done died, done died, I’m in your hand, I’m in your hand.”
Interviews with writer-director Jackson give rich context to this scene. In Film Comment, interviewer Miriam Bale prefaces a question to the director by noting how the film is not only about its central young female character Mack. As Bale writes, it is also about “the family as a collective body – about the collective narrative, experience, emotion, and memory of a family.” She then asks Jackson how she found that focus. Jackson goes on to tell Bale how the prep for the film “became an organic conversation with my own family,” giving examples of drawing inspiration from her grandmas’ photo albums as well as real-life moments like a recent fishing trip with her parents.
Then we learn how the spark of the collective narrative moved from there to the community surrounding her family. Jackson tells of discovering Mississippi’s Rose Hill Church in a photography book by folklorist Bill Ferris. With a mother from that very state, she was drawn to search this church out even while still living in New York City. In that Film Comment article, she says, “I thought, there’s no way this church is still standing, but it was…It’s just an incredible location with such a rich history. In the wedding scene, you hear the voices of Mary and Amanda Gordon singing. They’re pillars of the church, which is still in operation, and they’re in several of Bill Ferris’s photographs.”
This collective narrative is one of many remarkable things about the film. Though it tells a very specific story about Mack and several other fictional characters, we never forget that this film is set in a family, in a community, and in a lived-in corner of the world. (This community and world echo our real world, and with the use of settings like the church and its voices we know the filmmaker is not afraid of using documentary elements.) We’re always aware that Mack, a strong young African American woman, is part of a family that loves her and a community that has shaped her. In one of the endless series of grace notes in this film, we see her digging for nuggets of clay with her mother and other women on a roadside incline. In an extraordinarily intimate later scene, her grandma sits with Mack and her sister Josie with one hand upturned. The girls hear about the old tradition of eating dirt that has been soaked with rain as they take pieces of this dirt out of their elder’s hands. “When it rain, it’s like it’s singin’ to you.”
The scene with the singing in the church (“I’m in your hand” as sung by the worshipers to God) makes the rest of the film ring out with spiritual significance. This is a film in which hands feature prominently in almost every scene. There are scenes in which hands do tenfold more work for characters expressing themselves to each other than words do in a typical film.
Watch the hands of a mother and a father play and embrace during a romantic dance as their child drops everything to watch.
Watch the hands of an elder that comfort and warm the hands of two children who are grieving.
Watch the hands of a young girl caressing her sister’s hair at the very moment the sister’s tears are quietly falling.
Watch the hands of a young woman caressing her pregnant tummy as she says “shhhh” and then later joins hands with her sister as both touch the newborn child together – united in generous blessing.
The lines to be drawn between God’s hand and the human hands in the film are many. We recall that the verses of the song in the church all come back to being in God’s hand, but each verse has its own story to tell about what is happening when the worshiper is in His hand. There is “I feel alright,” but there is also “I’m crying” and “I’m groaning.”
The film’s many shots of people’s hands reaching out to other people are so rich with suggestion. They can speak to us about God’s hand of love and the way the love of the characters for each other flows out of God’s love. This is made even more poignant when such love is being shared even in the midst of crying and groaning. Seeing the likeness of Jesus’s face in the painting brings to mind the cross itself. Crying, groaning, dying, and yet there is love in those outstretched hands just as there is in so many relationships in this film.
One of the deep fascinations of this film is that its events are not arranged chronologically. They come to us more in a free-associative pattern, one the director has linked in interviews to the poetic idea of slant rhymes. Just as with slant rhymes, one scene follows the next not because it rhymes perfectly with the one before it, but rather because it shares a similar “sound” to the scene before it. As Jackson said in a different interview for Reverse Shot, “Sometimes a slant rhyme is the same two characters at different moments, and other times it’s not the exact same characters, but it still rhymes.” Rain can rhyme with tears in this film, embrace can rhyme with embrace, and on and on. This film has no preconceived notion of the limits of such magnificent rhymes.
This slant rhyme arrangement of scenes is so poetically rich, but the richness goes beyond just that. This structure itself is yet another way the film is spiritually significant. It is spiritually meaningful because it calls out to the deepest mysteries about time. We watch this film and consider the way earthly time and God’s eternal time dance around each other. In St. Augustine’s Confessions, he writes, “Who will lay hold on the human heart to make it still, so that I can see how eternity, in which there is neither future nor past, stands still and dictates future and past times? Can my mind have the strength for this?” Just as Augustine wondered deeply about God’s eternity in relation to our earthly time, this movie seems to wonder about the mysterious workings of time. We can ask with our own wonder: who slants our everyday rhymes? Is it us, or is it One who exists outside of our own time?
This is the kind of film that, with its structure and expansive imagery of hands, breaks open the boundaries we’ve set for what a film can hold. Who has set those boundaries to begin with? They should really reach as far as the hands in this film.
How much does the breaking of these boundaries, and the sense that there are no boundaries that can hem this film in, have to do with the fact that this film is directed by a woman? How much does it have to do with Jackson’s identity as an African American woman? I cannot presume to know the answers, but I do know that the film’s treatment of and dwelling in this African American community is a very precious part of its identity. Not only that, but it seems to dwell at its most profound level in the spaces between African American women in that community. That seems like an incredible gift to us viewers, and one we should beg for more of as a moviegoing community.
This is a film that, even though it belongs to a tradition of contemplative cinema, inspired tears and joys and fast heartbeats for me. I remain captivated by its song. Of all the exciting films made by the wave of female directors arriving in this past decade, I think this one is my favorite.
This film is like finding a favorite poem and being delighted that it is in cinematic form. I can spend 92 minutes inside this poem, and I can invite a friend to spend those minutes right alongside me.
Come back to this church, these roads, these people.
Live for a while with their time, their loves, and their hands.
Taste and see what rhymes with all of it.
*Song lyrics sung by Mary and Amanda Gordon from “Lord, I’m in Your Hand” traditional hymn
— Brian Duignan (2026)
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