There seems to be a connection between the name Odessa and the word Odyssey which means a long wandering but eventful journey, especially the one Greek epic poem described about. As the meaning suggests, perhaps Odessa herself is the personification of the long journal back to a land where everyone is equal.
Compared to 12 Years a Slave which has a black male perspective, this film could easily be translated as a narrative from a white female perspective. A white woman protested against the authority of racism by giving firstly her black maid then other black women rides to work, which is what the film is mainly about. However, male figures in this film are treated as the opposite of social progress like Mariam’s husband or pessimistic reformer like Odessa’s husband. They share a “common skepticism about connecting……with people of the other race”, as mentioned by Jacqueline Jones. The black woman Odessa, being a mother for three children and a maid for a white family, keeps an almost silent figure throughout the movie, except singing at the end where the protest reached its climax. On the other hand, Mariam, the white mother of a little girl who narrates the whole story, plays a more crucial role in the film: it is she who initiated to drive and carry black women, and the film focus more about how the Montgomery Boycott influenced her life, for instance, the ‘decline’ of her life from a status of innocent and domestic obedience to instability and dangerous protest. For Odessa, way this film depicts her is just a condensation of the whole black community, which is a faceless revolting power where the individual value is erased and only left the positive historical collective value for which the viewers in 1990s could not deny. For example, I find several times in the film the behavior of Odessa is just like what other black men or women do: enduring the heavy work, restraining themselves, walking silently. But at the same time, Mariam is a round person who stands out from her white community and behaves as an individual: stopping to obey her husband, stressing her independence, and making her own decision.
This diplomatic dealing with moralized individual white character and reasonablized collective “otherness” are common in the depiction of no matter African American or Native American, such as the film Glory or Dances with Wolves.
Though both the Long Walk Home and 12 Years a Slave have an open ending, the way they stop and where they stop are tremendously different. While 12 Years a Slave stops at the reunion of Salomon and his family where a stop means his memory and freedom revisited and the miserable past thrown into digested, the Long Walk Home stops at the climax of the boycott and the metamorphosis of the society. The former opens for viewers to ponder and anticipate Solomon’s future life and how he recollects his identity. The latter opens for audiences to recall the trial and tribulation of Mariam and the greatness of both her and Odessa’s manner in order to engrave them in viewers’ heart. But the reality did not stop here as idealized as supposed in this film: the Montgomery Advertiser, a contemporary local newspaper shows that, bombardment and rape still existed and caused resentment and misunderstood between races.
In short, personally I would say this film a safe one which moralizes all the elements it can in order to please the whole audience. “Politically correct” could be used to describe what McCrisken and Pepper mention about films “made by white directors and financed exclusively by the major film studios” of that time.
