blessing and blood

With creating the season around a character’s memoir, Queen Sugar has focused on the traumas the memoir brought up for all the characters in the series. Wednesday’s episode emphasized those traumas and spurred an OWN Twitter chat.

Ahead of the episode, OWN held a three-hour Twitter chat under the hashtag #QueenSugarTalks to get viewers to discuss the issues of trauma and addiction. The episode starts with Nova (Rutina Wesley) and Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner) Bordelon going on a retreat in the woods. Feelings come out: Nova tells Charley she hates being invited on getaways she couldn’t afford. She feels small on Charley’s dime. They realize, as half-sisters, they still don’t know each other due to a lifelong level of competition and separation.

The addiction storyline comes in when Darla (Bianca Lawson), the former flame of Nova and Charley’s brother Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), meets up with an old friend from her partying days. Her friend acknowledges Darla’s sobriety at the restaurant but asks Darla if it’s fine she still has a drink. Then she goes on and on about one of the last parties they went to eight years ago. She says Darla was so high that she went up to a room at a house party with two guys.

The walk down memory lane appears to be the night when Darla’s son Blue (Ethan Hutchison) was conceived. Darla can barely recall those moments and the revelation of a second man throws her into a tailspin at a nearby bar. Violet (Tina Lifford), the Bordelon aunt, soon finds a disheveled Darla in a park and takes her home where Darla unveils why she lied about Blue’s paternity for years. She said she buried the rape because of the shame of being hooked on drugs and alcohol. Violet calls Ralph Angel to come to Darla’s house, and Darla shares the story.

Charley’s son Micah (Nicholas L. Ashe) takes Blue to a carnival, where they get split up in the bathroom area. While Micah’s back is turned looking at his smartphone, Blue dashes to the women’s restroom to avoid the line to the men’s restroom. Micah asks people in the area if they had seen Blue, and when he gets no answers, he ventures off. Blue comes out of the restroom and ends up with a police officer to wait for Micah to find him. Since last season, Micah has been dealing with the trauma of being arrested and jailed by a white cop over an alleged traffic violation.

The trauma between the sisters and Darla have been brought up by Nova’s memoir Blessing and Blood, the book that’s been tearing apart the family since the beginning of the season. Micah’s trauma is in the book also, but it became known when it happened. As the women’s trauma is amplified, so is the trauma for the men. Micah’s recurring trauma around police brings him to a mild panic attack while Ralph Angel is still absorbing how his son is not biologically his. With two episodes left in the season, viewers may see more evolution of the trauma stemming from the memoir.

The fallout from Nova’s (Rutina Wesley) memoir is still stirring up drama, but in this episode we get more insight on another family secret unbeknownst to most family members.

The episode starts with Nova’s nephew and her sister Charley’s (Dawn-Lyen Gardner) son Micah (Nicholas L. Ashe) going to stay with Nova with plans to attend her upcoming book-signing. Sitting with his mother, Micah wonders how long the silent treatment will stay enforced among the Bordelons.

The family matriarch and aunt Violet (Tina Lifford) can’t sleep, claiming recipes are running through her head, but Hollywood pushes for her to talk about the situation with Jimmy Dale (guest star David Alan Grier), her abusive ex-husband who reappeared after communicating with Nova on her book.

Nova creeps around Violet’s restaurant since she had been banned from being around her aunt, but is turned away by an employee. Nova then calls her brother Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), who doesn’t pick up. News comes about her getting a six-week book tour due to her glowing The New York Times review. That news, of course, moves her attention away from the family and back on her success.

Charley tries to team up with the other female shareholder to go against the Landrys, the sugar cane empire family that had once owned her ancestors. But the shareholder tells Charley to back off because the Landrys are too powerful. So Charley sashays into a country club to approach a Landry about a highway proposal that would gut Bordelon land. The woman tells Charley that she had read Nova’s book with Charley clapping back on the book with a comparison to “sentimental dribble.”

While Charley recovers from her business-heavy moves, she gets home only to meet her ex-husband’s daughter from an extramarital affair. These affairs are described in Nova’s book with Charley paying off another mistress, so that drama haunts her with the publicity from the book and now a breathing part of evidence from an affair is right in her home.

At the book-signing for Blessing and Blood, Nova reads from a recently added chapter called “Buried Memories” about her father being beaten by three white men at a fishing trip to protect his daughter. She read she would wander the sugarcane fields at night, and on one night, she saw her father bury something into the ground. This is an addition to the book. Her ex-girlfriend comes up to her during the book-signing session and asks about Nova’s family not being there, visible with the empty chairs in the front. She gives Nova a kiss on the lips.

Darla (Bianca Lawson), Ralph Angel’s ex-fiancee and mother of their son Blue (Ethan Hutchison), receives Nova’s book and reads the details of her drug-fueled prostituting nights with baby Blue sitting in the corner. In a flash, she bursts into Nova’s door describing her shock that her past life is in those pages. Nova tries to clean it up; Darla’s name and identifying marks have been changed. This doesn’t sit well with Darla, who keeps telling Nova that she didn’t think of Blue’s feelings since he will eventually read about his mother’s past life.

Charley tells Violet and Ralph Angel at the restaurant that Micah asked about the added chapter in Nova’s book. Violet said she doesn’t know what her brother did that night Nova recalled when she was younger, but he had been worried about Nova getting sexually assaulted by those three white men until that night. Vehemently, Violet defends her brother about him and everyone else having the right to keep a secret between themselves and God.

Darla is hysterically crying on her porch about having to tell Blue the truth while Violet is doing the same in her bathroom with Hollywood hearing the muffled cries as the bathwater runs. As the family falls apart, Nova carries her heavy suitcases out the door for her book tour.

The depth of the secrets are felt in this episode. And Nova switches from concern about the book’s aftermath on her family to excitement when she receives good news from her literary agent and publisher. She still looks bad for unveiling her family’s secrets for money and success, yet she’s torn on what to do about it since her family blocks her apologies. More secrets will be revealed, or at least, there will be more coming out of the secrets we know now.