It is hard enough to lose a loved one, to wake up each morning and remember that you won’t ever see them again or hear their voice. That whatever distance there was between you, your relationship has no more opportunities to be mended. And when it comes to mothers and children, the relationship being grieved is rarely straightforward. But few periods of mourning are as emotionally difficult as what Byron (Ashley Thomas) and Benny Bennett (Adrienne Warren) face in Disney+’s latest miniseries, when they discover that not only did they not really know their mother Eleanor (Chipo Chung), but that’s not even her real name.
In the Oprah Winfrey-produced adaptation of Charmaine Wilkerson’s epic novel, the pair learn that their mother is not Eleanor, who grew up in an orphanage, but Covey, who was raised on the idyllic coast of the Caribbean with a Chinese father and a Black mother, but fled after a number of unfortunate events and faced further tragedy away from Jamaica’s shores. In the present, her high-achieving offspring are grieving her loss, but in a series of posthumous recordings they learn of their heritage (in a rare moment of humour, Benny delightedly exclaims: “We’re Chinese!”), and Eleanor’s darkest secrets. They hear their mother speak about her childhood as a champion swimmer and surfer and her love for the ocean that she would eventually pass down to them. Covey’s parents only passed down pain, her mother abandoned her at age 11 and she spent the rest of her childhood in the care of her gambling-addict father who drove her family to financial ruin.
