The Revolutionary Power of Pies in <em>Queen Sugar </em>
“I’m almost 60 years old,” Violet Bordelon tells her much younger beau, Hollywood, in a pivotal episode of OWN’s Queen Sugar. “And I will not be sidelined, sidetracked, or sidestepped, or put in a damn corner and told to wait my turn, not another day. It’s my time.” Violet (played by Tina Lifford) makes this bold declaration—all because of pies. Namely because of her own brand of “Vi’s Prized Pies,” which a white grocery-store owner named Jarrett Rawlings agreed to display prominently in his market. Instead, Violet and her family visit the store only to find her products stacked in a corner. An emotional Violet begins swapping her baked goods with the Ding Dongs and Suzy Q’s on the center table as her relatives assist. They understand why the placement of the pies matters so much to their Aunt Vi: The woman who has spent most of her life caring for them is finally allowing herself to dream big, even though dreaming can be a daunting and vulnerable act.
It is this key scene from early in ’s third season that sets, which debuted in 2016, is known for a lot of things: for being the first major TV project from Ava DuVernay, for the fact that every episode is , for featuring an all-black main cast. It’s also drawn praise for the way it uses everyday culture to tackle salient social issues, including anti-black violence and the rise of the carceral state. In the show’s phenomenal Season 3, which ends Wednesday, ’s writers use the pies to smartly explore the dangers of the trope of black exceptionalism, to critique the exploitation of black women’s labor, and to argue that communities win when black women are given space to dream.
