LOS ANGELES, Dec. 17 (UPI) — Director Tyler Perry said his latest film, The Six Triple Eight, premiering Friday on Netflix, showcases a Black female World War II army unit that even the soldiers did not discuss after the war.
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the Women’s Army Corps’ only unit of color. Its job was to sort and deliver 17 million pieces of mail between servicemen and their loved ones accumulated over three years.
“A lot of them didn’t even talk about what had happened because there was a stigma about women in the military,” Perry told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “There was a lot of shame when a lot of the women came home, so they didn’t even talk about it.”
One source of shame that Perry did not include in the film, but acknowledged, was that the Black community believed Black women were only being deployed as concubines to Black soldiers.
“At the time, white soldiers were really angry that Black men were dating European women,” Perry said. “So they thought these 855 women were sent over there to basically be prostitutes for them, which was not the case at all.”
Perry met 6888th Cpl. Lena Derriecott King, whom Ebony Obsidian plays in the film, and incorporated many of her stories in the script. King died in January at age 100.
King told Perry about her boyfriend, Abram, whom she did not know died in the war until his dog tags were found in the mail. King’s post-Abram romance with a man she met abroad was also true.
“She and that man were married for 50 years,” Perry said.
Obsidian attended King’s 100th birthday party and observed that King still felt like part of a unit even in her final year of life.
“She never spoke of herself,” she said. “Whenever speaking of that time period, it was the battalion, all of us.”
The film shows King’s superior officer, Maj. Charity Adams (Kerry Washington), requesting deployment from the Army. Adams recognizes that the Army assigned them the mail task, expecting it cannot be done.
So, Adams mobilizes the effort to prove the military wrong and deliver news to both soldiers and families awaiting word. Adams gives a speech to Gen. Halt (Dean Norris) when he chastises them for not sorting three years’ worth of mail fast enough.
“In Charity Adams’ book, she talks about saying that to the general and being court-martialed,” Perry said, adding that Adams successfully defended herself for defying orders.
Halt is openly racist toward the Black soldiers, and Perry said he encouraged Norris to surrender to the nature of the role.
“What I tell all the actors who work with me is don’t judge the characters,” Perry said. “He just went in and did what was necessary to create this real-life moment.”
The film shows how the unit identified symbols on envelopes and even traced scents sprayed on paper.
“They had to bring in their skillset from their everyday life back home,” Obsidian said. “There’s perfumers. There’s people who knew a lot about stamps because they had maybe worked for the mail back home.”
Perry had the set for the mail warehouse built at his Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. The set was based on black and white photographs and King’s first-hand descriptions and employed hundreds of extras to sort mail behind the leads.
“It was really making these black-and-white photos come to life in living color,” Perry said. “I think the photos and the historical references themselves dictated how that all turned out.”
The historical scale of The Six Triple Eight also gave Perry an opportunity to apply a reignited passion for filmmaking. He said his 2022 film, A Jazzman’s Blues, reinvigorated his approach to filmmaking.
“I didn’t realize and understand the camera is there to not only tell the story, but draw the audience into these beautiful worlds,” Perry said. “It was Jazzman that really laid into that for me.”
Between meeting with King at 100 and listening to interviews she gave in her ’90s, Obsidian studied King’s dialect. She and her co-stars also learned military marching and posture.
“It was knowing how to hold yourself and how women held themselves during that time even outside of being a soldier,” she said. “You didn’t have room to slouch.”
