THE BLACK NARRATIVES, 1618- 2143—Jonathan Jackson’s Center supported work—are a series of short films that explore black life during the Antebellum South without relying on the traditional crutch of trauma. Partially based on the written accounts of ex-slaves and African American folklore, these stories are told through emotions and explore love, fear, pain, heartbreak, hope, acceptance, intelligence, survival, defiance, sexuality, ambition, desire, spirituality, and tradition. These 17 narratives are aimed to comprise an overall arch of black life from the inception of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to first contact, covering five centuries. The purpose of this exercise in cinema is to see if narratives surrounding enslaved Africans could be told with the replacing images of trauma with hope and nuance while also broadening the horizon of what the evolution of humanity could look like, for better or for worse.