Hauntings and Ecologies of Spirit

I do not experience the hauntings of a past that go beyond my personal regrets and repressions. I do not have that memory in the blood or a deep, abiding sense of place that hears the past in the sighing of the wind, the burbling of streams, or the moaning of trees, a place that is alive to spirits of place and time. My sense of the lasting presence of unseen spirits is tenuous at best. I don’t even go on ghost tours or seek out haunted buildings. Nor am I fascinated with terror or the zombie apocalypse. Instead, I was drawn to this project by a desire to read works by Southern Native Americans and discovered a common theme of haunting and ghostly appearances weaving through the novels I chose. I can read about history and ecology, but as well-educated as I am, I lack the emotional understanding of the legacies of possession and dispossession, of disappearance and return, of a world view that intuits the unities of time and spirit. This is the emotional intelligence that the Native American and African American characters in Southern novels by Tiya Miles, LeAnne Howe, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Jesmyn Ward, and Carson Faust possess.  The novels by these authors that I examine explore the ways that history intersects with the personal, particularly the ways that the disappearances of indigenous history and the heritage of slavery persist in memory and imagination. At the same time, they write stories in which ghosts or spirits not only appear but belong to personal, historical, and natural ecologies.  They are part of an integrative, holistic system that simultaneously joins the material and spiritual realms, the past and the present. In The Cherokee Rose the ghost of Mary Ann Battis beckons three young women to reckonings with the past and the present. In The Shell Shaker beings and events of eighteenth-century Mississippi are replayed and re-presented among twentieth-century Oklahoma Choctaw. In Even as We Breathe, Cowney Sequoyah discovers that “what is buried in the ground isn’t always what you think” (1). In Sing, Unburied, Sing, the ghosts of two young Black men appear to have their stories told, one to be sung home, the other to help his mother pass through death’s door. And in If the Dead Belong Here the Little People from the in-between place between life and death cross over to startle, save, and disappear people. Born of history, myth, and air, the stories of the dead in these novels exemplify the ways the past and the present haunt the lives of their Native American and African American characters, the South, and the nation.  As Tiya Miles avers, the South is “like a storehouse for the nation’s historical guilt, a sociocultural archive accessed through stories of haunting” (32). That is why reading and thinking about Southern ghost stories is important; they provide access to knowledge, much of it buried, that is important for understanding where we are today as a nation.

Set among landscapes of trees, forests, flowers, hills, and rivers where spirits, bodies, and memory reside, the novels follow geographic journeys across space and spiritual journeys through time as they explore the porousness and fluidity of time and place and reality.  Warned by her grandmother, “Never cross water,” author Tiya Miles explains in Tales from the Haunted South that “there is a line between the spirit realm and our realm. It is fluid. Beware” (1). Miles also explains that in ghost stories, ghosts pass through spiritual portals or wrinkles in time to make themselves seen or felt by the living characters and invite them to cross over into other realms to access what Patricia Yeager calls the “unregistered precincts of knowledge” (Haunting 92, 93; Yaeger 12).

“Transgressing temporal laws,” Miles explains, “ghosts emerge from the past to puncture the placidity of our present and to signal that ‘something is missing.’ These unquiet souls of the dead are historical entities, fragments of the remembered past spirited into our present time in order to disrupt the Now” (Haunting 13) “Ghosts are the things that we try to bury, but that refuse to stay buried” (Haunting 16). In the novels that I consider here, these “things” reveal the consequences of the possession, dispossession, and erasure of bodies and lands. As Miles summarizes about the haunted South, “While the red ghost keeps alive the memory of Indian removal in U. S. history, representing white ‘terror and lament,’ the black ghost marks the demonic spirit of possession through which Americans transformed people into things. These twin crimes against humanity—removal and slavery” are the specters that haunt the American imagination” (Haunting 17). These twin crimes, historian Ned Blackhawk recognizes in the clear link between Indigenous dispossession and the rise of a slave-holding republic: “Pervasive violence and dispossession are more than sidebars or parentheses in the story of American history. They call into question its central thesis” (3).

Similarly, the spectral appearances of ghosts and personal hauntings in Southern ghost stories call into question the nation’s central thesis that we are a nation that honors equality and freedom.  Ghosts may appear to individuals, but they represent the social, historical past. As Avery Gordon argues, “The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or apparition is one form by which something lost or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us . . .” (8). Not only do spectral ghosts appear in these novels, but living characters become ghosts of themselves as they disappear into the in-between spaces of alcohol, drugs, and the imagination as they play out or attempt to escape violence that is both historical/social and personal.

And yet, as much as these stories reveal a past and a present haunted by violence, dispossession, and possession, they also reveal acts of memory and healing, of resilience, knowledge, and community, often revealing unrecognized centers of female power. Ghosting can lead to a “transformative recognition” (Gordon 8) about the past, the present, and the self that is often facilitated by ceremony and ritual. As characters in these ghost stories confront spirits and their own hauntings, they transform, grow, understand themselves and their place in the world a little better, sometimes in spiritual bildungsroman for the younger characters who mature because of their interactions with the dead or disappeared. Like the protagonists of these stories, readers can also experience a kind of “transformative recognition” and “a concern for justice” (Derrida qtd in Gordon, 58) derived from knowledge of the “lost subjects of history” (Gordon 195) that the stories reveal and from sympathy, a “structure of feeling” (Williams qtd in Gordon 198) for characters who are haunted by the past.

More than entertaining ghost stories, these novels illustrate the ways that crimes of the past continue to haunt the American psyche. At a time when the present government is trying to erase the histories of Blacks, Natives, and women, it is ever more important to heed the ghosts, to listen to what they tell us, to heed their vanishings and search for solutions of justice.  As William Faulkner famously announced in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”; the past, like the ghosts of these stories, is part of our ecology and identity.

The Cherokee Rose

Introducing themes of spirit and memory and knowledge, of thresholds crossed and journeys summoned, Tiya Miles’s novel The Cherokee Rose begins: “She was a vision of ribbon and light standing before the attic window. Her spirit was unsettled. Her work was not yet done. Because she had failed to heed the warning when the digging first began, now she had to find a way to open the book of the past” (3). The ghost of Mary Ann Battis, the ribbon of light, determines to summon the descendants “home to a tainted house” (4) before the graves and stories of African Americans and Indians are displaced by the shovels of commercialism. Based on the historical figures of Cherokee entrepreneur, planter, and slave holder James Vann of northwest Georgia and Ann Rosa Gambold, a Moravian missionary and botanist, the novel bridges history and imagination and time. Deploying the characteristics of a ghost story as a “bridge of time” (4), the novel reveals the violence against women, African Americans, and Native Americans that occurred in the early days of the nineteenth century and that continue to trouble and haunt the present day.

Through the unseen manipulation of “coincidence” and a “strange undercurrent in the air” (17), the spirit of Mary Ann, an Afro-Creek girl attached to the early mission, moves Jinx Micco, a member and historian of the Muscogee Creek Nation from Oklahoma, Cheyenne Cotterell, a wealthy Black Atlantan with possible Indian heritage, and Ruth Mayes, a mixed-race writer for a Minneapolis-based shelter magazine to journey to the Hold House (aka Vann House) in Georgia. As the women enter the house, they feel chills and breezes, signs of the presence of a spectral being. The layers of dust made up of “dead skin cells” that shroud the interior of the house Cheyenne has just bought at auction form a fragile but resilient symbol of the imaginative journey into the past the women will take: “Did dust from a thousand lives settle into the crevices of an old house like this one, forming sediment as deep as an archaeological dig?” (81-82).  Prefiguring what they will find in the earthen floor of the old missionary cabin, the layers of dust suggest the archeological, genealogical dig into the past the novel will perform as it plumbs memory and the spirit of place.  As the three women will learn, “This plantation, or a spirit that animated it, was obsessed with emotions of the past. Hold Hill had a ghost” (123).

Ruth is the first to hear and see the ghost. Animating the natural world to call to the women, the spirit breathes, whispers, “Shh, shh. The river cane was whispering. Shh, shh. Come. Go back. Come. Go back. . . . And that’s when Ruth saw the girl” (115), the ghost of Mary Ann. Using the figure of the ghost to spirit the three women to hidden, forgotten, buried knowledge and memory, Miles leads readers to an exploration of the unseen memories that haunt time and place. And using the possessed body of the ghost, Miles reclaims histories of possession and dispossession that had been buried or forgotten as she writes of the ownership of enslaved bodies and the loss of Native land and home, the twin ghosts that haunt the soul of the South and the nation.   

Once she has assembled her cast of contemporary characters and brought them to Hold House, Miles begins to excavate the memories of place, first quite literally when the ghost leads the women to Anna Rosina’s buried diary. Although the diary is the most obvious and loaded location of memory, the novel also locates memory in the garden of Cherokee roses, the mud hut with the names of enslaved people embedded in its walls, the Strangers’ Graves, and the house itself, as well as non-physical sites of personal memory and national history.

Ruth tells her companions, “’I saw a girl, like a shimmer in the sunlight, and I heard a sound, a sort of voice, telling me to come back’” to the mission cabin, to history, and to personal memory (141). Remembering that the figure of the girl stood on the threshold of the cabin as if it were a spectral portal, Ruth feels a “subtle indenture” in the earth floor. Digging, she finds a “’ground safe, a keeping pit’” often used by enslaved people to “hide treasured items” (143). In it she finds a wooden box that contains a “sheath of manuscript pages” (143-44): the diary Anna Rosina Gamble began in 1815 when she first went to Hold House with her missionary husband to minister to and teach the Cherokee children. This is the diary that Anna Rosina had instructed Mary Ann to destroy: “I trust my dear Mary Ann to destroy this diary” (215).  Reading its pages out loud, the three women uncover the story of Anna Rosina, James Hold, and the women of the plantation: Peggy, Hold’s youngest wife; Faith, the maimed but faithful enslaved woman who serves the mission; Patience, the enslaved woman who is brutally raped by Hold and beaten to death by the overseer; and Mary Ann, the student who becomes the keeper of the diary, the truth of what happened, and surrogate mother to Patience’s baby. The diary tells stories of possession—of women by men, of enslaved people, of bodies maimed, killed, and discarded (“As her master and possessor, he had and took free reign” [171])—against a history of dispossession marked by the removal of Africans to America and of the Southern tribes to Indian Territory, to Oklahoma, and the loss of Hold House to entrepreneurs like Mason Allen.  After the women have read the diary and learned the histories of place and identity (that Cheyenne is descended from Anna Rosina and the Black minister Samuel Cotterell and not Chief James Hold, and that Adam Battis, the local caretaker, is descended from Hold through the enslaved Patience), the spirit of Mary Ann, “[f]loating in the old rose garden with a fan of incandescent pages dangling from her backlit fingers” releases the last pages of the diary to the air and fire as if “She was letting it go” (223), her spirit expended in the release of knowledge. In the end, the pages of the diary are scattered in the fire that Mary Ann, a fire spirt, caused and was.

Memory and knowledge are also inscribed in the walls of the round hut. A sacred, secret place, a feminine space, made of “mud or clay and crowned by a conical roof,” the round house could be a version of West African houses or Cherokee winter lodges or a hybrid space that honors both traditions (112-113). A site of spirit, memory, and kinship, where the intimate community of women had secretly gathered in the nineteenth century and to which the contemporary women are drawn by the ghostly figure of Mary Ann. Again, it is Ruth who sees her: “’She’s standing in the doorway of the round house’” (191). Curious, she asks, “’What did she want us to find here?’” (192). Later, just after they finished reading Rosina’s diary, the women are alerted by a fire in the weeds and cane stalks near the hut. Using her energy as fire, Mary Ann pulls them to the hut to discover more of the truths the plantation holds.

In the eerie light of the fire that sets the hut aglow, the women see that “White seashells were interspersed among the stone flecks, pressed into familiar linguistic patterns . . . a constellation of floating symbols.” Jinx declares, “’These are the names . . . The ones Mary Ann fixed to the wall” (219). Cheyenne had heard of “the list” from her grandmother thinking that it referred to the Cherokee Freedmen Rolls that listed freed slaves on tribal rolls that would prove that she was Black and Indigenous and hence an inheritor of Hold House. Instead, the list of names aglow in the mud hut is a secret cache of names of the enslaved people who escaped the Hold plantation, a palpable naming of the unnamed, the unremembered people who once had lived, worked, and fled. Anna Rosina had written in her diary, “At the urging of an elderly woman who speaks her native African tongue, Mary Ann has memorialized the ones who have left, casting the shape of their names in shells on the inside walls of the hut” (206). Memory, spirit, identity inscribed within the mud globe of the hut; like a constellation of stars in the night seen for the first time but always there, they were only awaiting the fire to illuminate them.

Embedded in another shaping of earth, in a “memory garden” (274), three mounds in the garden covered by Cherokee roses mark the remains of the dead. Anna Rosina writes in her diary, “We, the women of this mission, have planted a variety of roses around and about her [Patience] grave in remembrance” (204) after she had been beaten to death by Hold’s overseer. Tended at first by Anna Rosina and then left to grow wild, the garden and its white roses mark the unacknowledged lives of the dead, “like memories” (111) inscribed in a book of nature. As Ruth remembers, the wild Cherokee roses “grow in places people have occupied but left behind” (111), where the unbodied reside in peace. Led by Adam Battis, caretaker of the estate, who “could find where the bodies were buried” (233), the women pay homage to the dead and wish Mary Ann’s soul peace as they honor her with Adam’s prayer and the curative air of sweetgrass smoke.  

As Miles illustrates, memory can be inscribed in multiple locations--in the written word, hieroglyphic lists, and memory gardens. But hauntings are also personal and emotional, family misdeeds buried or repressed in the subconscious. Just as she has led the women to physical sites of memory, the spirit of Mary Ann enables Ruth to finally recognize her own truths.  Musing “’We both lost our mothers as girls. . . . because of someone’s criminal act’” (115), Ruth is “wrenched back in time, whether into her own lifeline, or the lifeline of the girl, she did not yet know” (138).  Through the agency of the ghost girl, Ruth crosses her own spectral portal as she finally accepts the truth that her own father, the white husband of her Black mother, is the criminal in her personal story.  Once she acknowledges that he had pushed her mother off the side of a cruise ship, Ruth is haunted no more by the unknown and is able to heal, to feel and accept love, the love of Jinx.

A novel that links historical and imaginative memory, the personal with the national, The Cherokee Rose demonstrates the ways that the past haunts the present. As Miles has said about ghosts, “These unquiet souls of the dead are historical entities, fragments of the remembered past spirited into our present time in order to disrupt the Now” (Haunting 13). Whether the personal trauma of a Ruth or the transgenerational trauma wrought by the “twin crimes against humanity—removal and slavery” that haunt the idea of itself (Haunting 17), this novel demonstrates the ways ghost stories are “grounded in social issues that nettle us” (Haunting 7).

 And yet, despite the horrific scenes of rape, cruelty, and murder that emerge from Anna Rosina’s diary and the backdrop of the removal of the Southern Indians that Jinx’s people had suffered, the novel ends with hope and kinship. In her introduction to the novel, Miles states, “I believe that even the most stained places on our national landscape . . . are features of our shared cultural heritage that can be renewed and reclaimed to tell new stories of resistance, love, and hope” (xxii). She represents that shared heritage through her cast of characters, past and present, men and women, women especially, who bridge racial and ethnic differences to form hybrid kinship communities that come from an understanding of the past and the release of repressed nightmares. Signaled by rituals, the Green Corn Ceremony “through which transgressions are atoned and crossed relations mended” (207), Jinx’s burning of the sweetgrass to purify the air, the informal marriage of Ruth and Jinx when they jump over the broom in the attic, and the partnership between Adam and Cheyenne as they set straight the Hold House, the novel ends with hope, with the “resplendent bloom” of the Cherokee rose (254). In these ways, the novel demonstrates not only the social nature of hauntings but the transformative recognition that comes from buried stories being told.

Shell Shaker

Set during the autumnal equinox, “When the earth shifts, and day and night are in perfect balance” (17), LeAnne Howe’s novel Shell Shaker thinks about transitions and the ways the past haunts and is replayed in the present. Positioned at the pivot point between seasons, the novel registers concurrent turning points of time, space, and identity. As it moves back and forth between events in the 18th and 20th centuries and the uneasy fusions of identity as ghosts or spirits of the past reappear in characters of the present, the novel imitates the mysterious possibilities of the equinox. Coming in with the autumnal change, strange events and visions charge the novel’s atmosphere. Although the narrative asserts that during the equinox “Indians have all the luck,” Auda Billy is nonetheless restless: “She’s been waiting for something to happen.” Then “Out of the nothingness a spirit emerges,” connecting her to Shakbatina, her Choctaw foremother, the shell shaker, and to memory, ancient and current, that will help Auda come to terms with her identity and responsibilities (17-18, 27). At the heart of this novel is the mystery of who killed Red McAlester, chief of the Oklahoma Choctaw Indians, during the equinox of 1991. To solve that mystery, Howe weaves together events and characters from two distant centuries and locations, the equinox of 1738, when Red Shoes betrayed the Mississippi Choctaw, prompting Shakbatina to give herself up to bring peace, and the equinox of 1991, when Red McAlester has been killed. Equinoctial moments that join seasons of memory are announced in the novel by means of dream, vision, and atmospheric disturbances, smoke and wind. Like the shift in the earth’s orientation, these ephemeral visitations unsettle and re-orient the past to reveal current and past betrayals and responsibilities. These techniques, Howe’s deus ex machina, pull readers into the in-between spaces of imagination where the unexplained happens.

Chapter 2, “The Will to Power,” set during the equinox of 1991 begins in the Billy home in Durant, Oklahoma, “warm as wool and peopled with relatives, rabbits and the ghosts of rabbits and relatives” but now threatened by a prairie fire. Signaling something ominous, that “They’ve come back to pick a fight” (17), the fire and equinox warn “what happens when Earth and spirit and story are reunited, and we pull stars down from the sky and cause a fifty-mile prairie fire” (138).  Out of the smoke and nothingness, out of ethereal transitions, “a spirit emerges. A Shell Shaker.”  Announced by the sound of the ceremonial tortoise shells, “Shoosh! Shoosh!” (18), the spirit “stirs an older memory coming to life inside [Auda]” (18), the memory of the historical, ancestral past and of her complicity in the murder of Red McAlester, for whom she worked and with whom she had been having an affair, both the work and the affair turned ugly by greed and a lust for power. “A time when things break open,” the equinox, or Girls’ Month (62), releases the past, memory, and collective identities from the interstices of time as the earth is balanced for a moment, when day and night are of equal length. As it gathers its forces, the equinox, the Girls’ Month, portends the role the women will take in breaking open and healing the wounds of time.

After the opening chapter that introduces Red Shoes, Skakbatina, and the conflicts over land and trade among 18th-century Choctaw, Chickasaw, and the Spanish, French, and English invaders, Howe moves between and intermingles the two time periods to show that the past is not past. Throughout the novel, the ancestors, the spirits of the past, mingle with the contemporary characters, warning them, helping them, and connecting them to history and memory. All of the major characters, Kirstin Squint alleges, are “linked across the centuries by spiritual aspects of themselves that transcend whatever material body they may inhabit” (Squint 196), making it seem that, as the spirit of Red Shoes tells Auda, “’It’s just the trappings of time that have changed’” (200). As novelist Carson Faust puts it in his own story of hauntings, “the dead belong here”; they are not relegated to some other space after death but continue to play a role  in the here and now (If the Dead Belong Here). The past is not just the foundation upon which the present rests, but is part of the now, repeating and reappearing until the issues they share are resolved. Family dramas and the national traumas of treachery, violence, and capitalist colonialism will continue to haunt and repeat themselves until they are laid to rest by ceremony, until in a reversal of the original journey on the Trail of Tears, Red’s body is taken east to Mississippi and Delores says the right words.

Among the devices that Howe uses to announce the presence of the spirits of the past, sound, itself an ephemeral sense, alerts characters and readers to the presence of the unseen. The ancient past speaks to her contemporary characters through the sounds of the turtle shells, the threatening voice Tema hears in the middle of her act, and the story Divine Sarah tells Isaac about Red Shoes. Hearing the Shell Shaker’s song, “Shoosh! Shoosh!” “Auda sees herself with hundreds of shell shakers around an ancient fire” grabbing a warrior and throwing him into the flames on Nanih Waiya, the sacred burial place (18). When she blinks herself back to the present and “her room returns to normal,” she remembers yesterday and the struggle in Red McAlester’s office (18-19).  

When Tema, an actress playing Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, stumbles and hears a threatening voice from the audience calling “’Hatak abi, Mankiller’” and “’Your hands killed Red Shoes!’” (32), she feels that she is being stalked by some shapeshifting creature. That night she determines that she must gather her adult son Hoppy and head to Oklahoma to see her mother, who has been jailed for the murder of Red McAlester. As she explains to her English husband, “’The past haunts us all’” (38).

When Isaac, Auda’s uncle, with Hoppy and his friend Nick, visits Divine Sarah, a psychic Indian who takes on/or is the persona of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, he is drawn into the past by the tobacco he smokes and the stories she tells. In his dream he hears a drum far away and follows it to an open field where warriors are hunting. At the same time, he hears Sarah’s voice reciting the story of Red Shoes who shot a porcupine, who was part Choctaw and part Chickasaw, who gained power by trading information for muskets, who lured Anoleta into loving him, and who caused the death of Shakbatina. In the fog of dream he hears Sarah explain, “’Red Shoes started the war that continues even now. . . . I’ve come to tell you—what is in the past has not passed.’” Here, she is referring not only to the tense liaison between Auda and McAlester, but the ongoing conflicts between Indians and capitalism in the form of twentieth-century casinos and money laundering. Calling on Hoppy or Prophet Boy or Nitakechi to fulfill his destiny and on Isaac to find the Imataha Chitto, the greatest giver, and marry her, and warning that the Osano (the horsefly) in the form of Redford McAlester continued to suck the blood of the tribe and demand sacrifice, Sarah bridges past and present (72-75).

Chapter 5 begins, “Smoke,” a medium like dream that reifies the porousness of boundaries, and takes readers into Auda’s dream of romance with Red Shoes, who will betray the Choctaw and his lover. Even as she is dreaming, she knows she is dreaming; when she hears gunshots and sees the dead man (Red McAlester) she has covered with red lipstick kisses, she is still spiraling in dream, conflating dreams about Red Shoes, who she had read about in her role as a historian of the Choctaw nation, with her nightmare about Red McAlester, the man she has had an affair with and possibly killed. When she explains that she gave Red McAlester “everything” and that she was dreaming about Red Shoes, her sister Adair replies, “’We’ve all been having weird dreams and hearing voices’” during this equinoctial period.  Adair, an avid smoker, understands that “smoke is a screen you can retreat behind” as well as a venue for transporting one to dream and memory, of blurring distinctions between past and present, fact and imagination (81-83).

In a later chapter that begins, “The room is a bed of wind,” Auda has an out-of-body experience in which she floats above her bed and then imagines Red McAlester explaining to her that he had a dream: “’We are ancient and still living together. Our children and families are all around us.’” Conflating Red McAlester with Red Shoes in her vision, she realizes that “Her first failure to kill Red Shoes was in Yanabi Town” and accuses him of his role in the mass killings of Western and Eastern Choctaws in his bid to engage in trade with the foreigners, the English and French, who had invaded indigenous lands. Red Shoes/McAlester explains to her, “’It was my dream to have all the advantages the foreigners brought into our nations . . . It was the same with the casino business” that McAlester built in collusion with the Italian Genovese family (200). That is when he/they tell her, “’It’s just the trappings of time that have changed” (200). Her confusions and conflations of time and history and memory, of the two Reds who betrayed their people, illustrate how “She sees it all happening again” (200).

Not content to leave these interstitial meetings to vision and dream, Howe devises a few instances in which the spirit world intervenes in uncanny ways with the physical present. She does this when Carl Tonica, McAlester’s ally in crime, is run over by an eighteen-wheeler and when the panther spirit of Adair’s father pounces on and kills her assailant, Hector D’Amato, the mafioso involved with McAlester, leaving claw marks on his face (205, 210). These instances give an aura of reality and physicality to the spiritual, waylaying accusations that the spiritual visitations were all figments of her characters’ imaginations.

Haunted throughout by a history of violence, greed, dispossession, and revenge, the novel ends with ceremony and healing: “Making peace with the dead is something we must do” (120). Delores, the Imataha Chitto, the prophesied leader, explains a vision she had: “I think it means we’ve got to bury McAlester in the soil of Mississippi, close to our Mother Mound. We can protect him by giving him everything he ever wanted, and placate his troubled spirit’” (160) even though he has raped Auda and “committed a hundred other crimes against Choctaw people” (160). Delores, the one who knows the codes to bury him, says, “Somehow I know it will reunite the two Choctaw communities: the ones in Oklahoma with the ones in Mississippi” (166). As in the past, however, peace comes with sacrifice, of Shakbatina in 1737 and Delores and Isaac in 1991, killed by the D’Amato brothers who had helped McAlester cheat his people. It is left to a woman, to Auda, to finish McAlester’s story (218). The novel ends with family gathered: “All around her are the family she loves.” Just as Auda is to take up the mantle of Red’s project to help the Choctaw nation, the younger generation is given the tasks and tokens of the people-- the black stone handed down from Tuscalusa to Isaac and then to Hoppi, the burden baskets the ancient sisters had carried, and the porcupine sash that Susan wraps around Auda. At the end “The house is suddenly warm as wool, and alive with the ghosts of aunts and uncles, and future relatives” (221). Concluding the novel, Shabatina says, “My story is an enormous undertaking. Hundreds of years in the making until past and present collide into a single moment. . . . Life everlasting.  Hekano, I am finished talking” (222).

This novel, which has spent so much time exploring the ways the past haunts the present and is continually replayed, how the past is part of the ecology of place, ends with hope that powerful women like Shakbatina, Divine Sarah, Delores, and Auda can disrupt the loop through proper ceremony, the gathering of family, and the combined energies of past and present to hold the gun that ends it all. Closing the loop, the novel begins and ends with Shakbatina, whose “name means Survivor!” (147). As in the other ghost stories, this one ends with hopes of regeneration, recognition, and transformation.

Even as We Breathe

Even when there are no ghosts or spectral visitations, the past is always present in novels like Even as We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle. Set during the Second World War in the mountains of North Carolina, this novel mingles themes of remembering, history, story, burial, bones, erasure, and place. The novel, told in first-person, is itself an act of remembering as it recounts the summer that nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah took a job at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn and Resort which was housing foreign nationals and diplomats (German, Japanese, Italian) and their families during the war. He experiences love, friendship, and betrayal as the mystery of the missing child of one of the “guests” aka prisoners unfolds and fingers are pointed at Cowney and the bone he found buried on the property.  

What is buried and what the bone represents haunt Cowney, the place he inhabits, and the past. Indigenous to the land, he knows that “what is buried in the ground isn’t always what you think” (2); that it includes buried lives, buried stories, buried history. He understands that the land belongs to the Cherokee because of “what is buried in the ground, not what words appear on a paper” (2), a history that treaties and maps do not record. Belonging to this place, even as it suffocates the young man because of its lack of opportunities for Indians, the recovered bones or remains of the past inform the plot of the novel. Replete with references to erasure, genocide, and betrayal, the novel connects historical events, what happened to the Cherokee under Andrew Jackson with what was happening to the Jews and Polish in Europe, and with the personal when Peter, one of the guards at the Inn, accidentally kills the daughter of one of the prisoners/guests and secretly buries her as if she were a “thrown-away person” (208). The legacy of “thrown-away” persons and the government’s complicity in making them invisible, as it does when it buried the story of the little girl, weighs heavily on Cowney as he tells her story in a “rite” of remembering (210).   

As Cowney learns, when you come from a culture whose history has been erased, and erased again in the climate of white supremacy, “you need the stories of this place” to keep the haunting at bay and to reveal “the complexities and injustices of history” (Miles, Haunted South 16). As his uncle Bud told him, “’You think anybody gives a shit about you? You think anybody gives a shit about Indians except other Indians? Hell, no, they don’t! They’ve been erasing us for two hundred years’” (177). That is why it is so important for Cowney to learn the story of the bone he found, to honor it by burying it inside the waterfall cave where he had seen a wounded bear, a sacred talisman, so that it could “renew this soil with memory” (229).   If “The bone had lost its story” (2) and the truth about his father who fought for the nation before he was a citizen had been purposefully lost, learning their stories and telling his own story get at unburying the past and learning to live with it, get at “transformative recognition” and evoke “’a concern for justice’” (Gordon, 8, 58) that resists the ease with which “White folks with money” (27) erase the unseemly sides of their history, manipulate knowledge and citizenship, and bulldoze the land and the memories it contains.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing set in the Black South of Mississippi circles around a family, a road trip, the visceral haunting of the past, and the ways the characters deal with their ghosts. Like the other ghost stories, this one is predicated on violent death and the unease of the dead and the history they lived, the need for the truth and for their stories to be heard. A story about a family, it is also about a place and the ways it is haunted by the past and by the on-going violence it endures. As sociologist Avery Gordon has observed, “’The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure’” that represents a society, a region, and a past that as Ward understands are “’inextricably woven” in the present and bear on the future (Ward qtd in Bone 12). To ward off the ghosts, the novel demonstrates, it is necessary to “’acknowledge the plantation’” and its heritage of policing in the histories and stories about the South (qtd in Bone 12). Not only do stories repair rifts with the past, bringing to light forgotten knowledges, but along with song, ceremony, and ritual they sustain and “respair” the living as they help carry the past with them (Bone 172).

The central plot device of the novel is the round-trip drive that the family takes to Parchman Penitentiary to bring home Michael, Leonie’s white partner. Known for its history of brutal work and policing practices, Parchman State Penitentiary, established in 1901, is known for its extensive farm operation as part of the convict lease system. Beset by temptations, violence, and visitations from the world of the dead, the trip is a modern-day Odyssey to bring the partner/father home. Reminiscent of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the journey reveals powers of clairvoyance as the adolescent Jojo converses with the ghost of Ritchie who joins them in the car. The road trip takes readers through the heart of darkness of contemporary Mississippi, one beset by poverty, racism, drugs, and violence where the lawyer Al, a representative of a corrupted aristocracy, feeds off the woes of prisoners and indulges in drug hazes with his clients’ wives in his dilapidated mansion. Although Michael and Leonie are reunited because of the journey, their emotional wounds are not healed and the racial divide that their interracial union should ameliorate is not blurred or healed. Rather, this novel, this trip through Mississippi, reveals the lasting, painful, violent history of racism and the slaveries that grew out of it, those of the plantation and the prison systems. The best this novel can do is to at last send the dead “home,” the last word of the novel, and to point to Jojo’s entrance into manhood. Near the end of the novel, after all that he has witnessed, his mother Leonie recognizes, “Jojo’s straight, straight as Pop, all the little boy gone from his eyes” (272).

Like other ghost stories, Sing, Unburied, Sing, recounts cycles of violence that wound body and soul of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses.  The violence against Black men rooted in racism and supported by systems of policing is most obvious. The novel tells of Given who was “accidentally” shot and killed by some white teens because he had bested them in killing a deer (48): “This fucking hothead shot the nigger for beating him” (49); of Ritchie who was on the verge of being lynched at Parchman when he ran after being brutally whipped (120); and the ubiquitous violence against the men at Parchman. Pop, who had been in Parchman as a young man, tells his grandson, Jojo, that the “trusty shooters, the inmate guards, was sent there because they like to kill, and because they done it in all kind of nasty ways” (22). So horrific is the violence against black men and prisoners, that to save Ritchie from the lynching, dismemberment, and burning of his fellow escapee, Pop/River takes a shank from his boot and stabs the boy once in the neck and then lets his dogs devour the body in an act of mercy (255-56). The ghosts the toddler Kayla sees in the tree at the end of the novel, waiting for her to sing them home, represent other varieties of violence against Black bodies--rape, starvation, hanging, eye gouging, beating, drowning (282-83). Emotional violence and the threat of physical wounding are played out in the threatening posture of the police officer who pulls a gun on Jojo and handcuffs him on the side of the road (162-63), demonstrating the perpetuation of violence against Black males, even the innocent.

It is not surprising that in such a culture of violence, supported as it is by systems and institutions that profit materially, politically, and emotionally, brutality seeps into other aspects of life beyond the penal and criminal. The novel is peppered with domestic scenes of generational and gender violence: the white woman who beats her son with a T-ball bat because he hit the TV (86-87); Michael’s father who still tries to beat him; Leonie and Michael who take out pent-up rage on their children, Michael smacking Kayla “hard on the thigh” (228; 272). It is as if violence is the automatic go-to for managing the dis-rule of childhood and the abundance of nature.  The violence of capitalism, which spawned slavery and penal farms shows up in the petro-chemical industry that supports coastal Mississippi and the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed marine life and men. The excuse the British Petroleum scientists gave for the dolphin deaths, “sometimes this is what happens,” and not the harmful effect of oil haunts Michael, reminding him of the official excuses for violence against humans, including the way people said that Given’s murder was a “hunting accident” (226). Of those who haunt the living, asking for help in going home, only those who have died violently, Mam explains, appear as ghosts: “’I think that only happens when the dying’s bad. Violent’” (236).

As the cancer-ridden Mam is dying, she explains to Jojo that she will be present in death, “on the other side of the door,” suggesting that dying is a passage from one room, one state, to another, not a disappearance, that the past and present, living and dead, exist together. She also hints at the porousness of time: “’Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once’” (236). This is how Given-not-Given can slip through time and materiality to appear to Leonie when she has slipped through the door of drugs and how he can help his mother pass over to death.  It is how Ritchie, the boy who died before he could become a man, appears in the car and around the house and the trees, seeking help from the living boy to learn the truth of his death so that he can find peace and go home. Inhabiting the in-between spaces of the spirit and material worlds, the troubled ghosts of Given and Ritchie illustrate the porousness of time and being—their consciousness both in the present and the past, their being both here and not here.

But it is not only the dead who slip in between realities, who warp time; it is also the drug addict. Haunted by grief over her brother Given’s murder and the hardness of life, of the unease of social death for Black Mississippians, Leonie uses the fumes and dizziness of meth to pass over into another reality, to “burn up all the sorrow and despair” (51). Slipping in and out of drugs during the novel when she parties with Misty and Al, reunites with Michael in drug-enhanced sex, and escapes the grief of Mam’s death and her hand in helping her pass over, Leonie seems to give up on the realities of life. Enabled by Michael, who had gone to jail for cooking meth, at the end of the novel the two escape life, hardly ever home, “fish-thin” and wrapped in each other and their addiction on the sofa (277).  Like the ghosts Given and Ritchie, Leonie and Michael inhabit an in-between space of otherness, slip in and out of consciousness and reality, as they become ghosts of themselves.

Violence and haunting are part of the social and personal worlds of these characters, but so are healing, knowledge, and resilience. In ceremonies of prayer and story, of remembrance and song, time and place come together to offer gestures of healing for the living and the dead. As the epigram to the novel by Eudora Welty reminds, “The memory is a living thing” always in transit, joining “the past and the present, . . . the living and the dead” (i). In this novel, memory, the past, haunts the living in the form of ghosts who appear and communicate with them. Through story, knowledge, and song, through ancient rituals of prayer and talisman, Ward conjures a balance of spirit out of a history of dismembering. As Pop tells Jojo when he gives him a gris-gris bag of feather and tusk, “’Everything got power’” and “’You need a balance of spirit’” (73). Ceremony and storytelling, like Pop’s bag, strive to find and bring balance to make things right, or straight like Pop. That is what this novel does when it layers versions of the past and listens to the voices of the living and the dead, to write a ceremony of being, of love, and home. In a culture, a place, where the “official” histories have hidden the truth of the past and its implications for the present, Ward deploys the healing qualities of story and song, of age-old rituals and ceremonies that counter institutions of oppression and ease living and dying for her characters, even those who find respite in the blur of drugs.

Pop is the storyteller, telling Jojo about the past, the way life used to be, and what happened at Parchman. These stories give Jojo knowledge he needs as he grows up. And they protect him from untruths about Black inferiority and the “official” stories that erase violence against Blacks. Like the gris-gris bag Pop gives Jojo to protect him against menacing spirits, stories also protect. By telling us who we are, where we come from, our traditions, and the unrecognized history, stories provide a bulwark against the harsh realities of a life on the edge of power. They provide a stay against confusion and balance against disappearance, against erasure by the majority society.  Most importantly in this novel, Pop’s stories free Ritchie from unremembering so that his spirit can find rest, stop haunting the present, and go home. Ritchie tells Jojo about his death, “I tried to remember how I got there.”  He remembers “being spread-eagle in the dirt” and then “I was no more and then I was again” (134-136). Knowing the unknown, “It’s how I get home,” and home, Ritchie explains, “is about the earth” (182).

Place, the earth, is known through its melodies and rhythms and songs. As Ritchie explains, “The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song,” part of the place (182-83). More than story, song breathes spirit and earth. It is primal, natural, emotional; it grounds and soothes the soul. When she is agitated, Kayla begs Jojo to sing, so he sings nursey rhymes and songs from the Head Start program to calm her. But in the end, it is Kayla who soothes the spirits of the unburied who hunker among the branches of the tree out back. She sings a song not of words but of melody that sounds of the trees swishing and swaying in the breeze, the gurgle of the earth’s waters and womb waters, and the animal noises. More clairvoyant than her brother who also listens to animals, Kayla translates the songs and murmurings of animals and the dead into “a song of mismatched, half-garbled words, nothing that I can understand. Only the melody” (284). Releasing the unburied from their perch in the tree, “Kayla sings, and the multitude of ghosts lean forward, nodding. They smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease” (284). “’Home,’ they say. Home,’’ singing in their own breath the song of the earth (285). Sung to by Kalya, Ritchie and the unburied sing their own songs, rejoining themselves to place and earth: “And I sing songs without words. The songs come to me out of the same air that brings the sound of the waters” (240).

Story and song, components of ceremony, help characters, alive and dead, know and carry the past with them. Ceremony is another way of giving meaning to the passings of life. Mam is the spiritual medicine woman, one who prays to the several mother deities (Mami Water of African lore and the Virgin Mary), hears the voices of the unsaid, and who knows which herbs to use to usher in the living, ease their pains, and open the door to death for herself. Directing Leonie in what to gather, the graveyard stones, cornmeal, rum, what to put on the cotton ball, and the litany she must recite, Mam manages the ceremony for her own passing. When it comes, “Mama bucks and goes still. Time floods the room in a storm surge” (269) as the words that Leonie recites, “. . . let in a river. That’s what took her and Uncle Given [who had appeared at her death bed] away’” (270). Like a stream of being, Mam passes through time with her dead son. After witnessing this ceremony of passing, through the grief of loss, Leonie recognizes that Jojo has also passed over, into manhood: “Jojo’s straight, straight as Pop, all the little boy gone from his eyes” (272). All that is left to do is for Kayla to sing the unburied home, closing the novel with the ultimate journey and rebalancing the powers of place.

Invited into structures of feeling, readers of this novel leave haunted not just by the lyricism and beauty of Ward’s writing, but by the violences and ghosts that continue in the South generated by its long history of racism, possession, and capitalism. Although spectral beings like Given and Ritchie float though the novel and the character’s consciousness, haunting us with the violence and unease of their deaths, it ends with an uneasy balance of spirit that transforms clairvoyance into action by the figures of Jojo and Kayla.

If the Dead Belong Here

Carson Faust’s debut novel, If the Dead Belong Here, begins, “The intruders enter quiet as light,” setting up the mystery of the disappearance of six-year-old Laurel, an Indian girl living with her mother and sister in rural Wisconsin (3). Who these intruders are, why they have taken the girl, the effects of her disappearance on her family, where they have taken her, and how she can be returned home are the questions around which the novel revolves.  As readers learn, this is not an ordinary kidnapping, but one that evokes ghostly visitations and haunted spaces as it ponders what it means to disappear and what it means to belong. As the intruders locate the sleeping girl, “They know they are saving her” (4), taking her “H o m e” (355), but saving her, but from what and taking her to what kind of home?

Organized chronologically, dating first from Laurel’s disappearance and then alternately from Nadine’s removal to South Carolina, the novel is also organized spatially, moving between the small town in Wisconsin where the protagonists live and their ancestral home in South Carolina where Nadine will encounter the Little People. This neat narrative pattern, however, is disrupted and complicated by memory and hauntings, suggesting that time and place are layered, porous, and co-existent. When the ghost of her grandmother Prentiss uses “Nadine’s pain to show the girl her own [pain],” as if Nadine were “a mirror turned inside out” (317), Faust illustrates the ways that the past is imbricated and repeated in current time and place, like the mirror that reflects alternate selves. As great-grandmother Elgon, reminds, “’History is with us just as much as the present’” (298). Imagining the in-between spaces between life and death, behind the glass of the mirror, where ghosts, the Little People, and the physically alive appear and disappear, Faust ponders what it means to belong in time and place.

               Like the other ghost stories, the characters in If the Dead Belong Here are haunted by violence, domestic, familiar, and social. Generations of Crowe family women suffered violence at the hands of their husbands, bruises marking their bodies, fear resonating through their homes. Prentiss’s husband Richard hit her “so hard that she thinks she bleeds [her unborn son] out” (321). Having watched her mother Ayita beaten and bullied by her father, Barron, the teenaged Nadine seems doomed to repeat their intimate partner violence with her boyfriend Nicholas, “coming home with all those poorly hidden bruises” (37). Violence is evident in the way Jessup policed Elgone’s healing knowledge, her woman’s knowledge, by saying that it went against the Lord, calling her a witch, causing her to practice in secret when he was gone (56). Policing is queered in the Crowe family when Morgan, Prentiss’s gay son, suffers violence and disapproval from his father, nudging him to the drugs that would factor in his head-on crash with a tree: “The hurt Richard deals has everything to do with who Morgan is” (148). His violent death is repeated when Prentiss puts her husband’s Smith & Wesson gun in her mouth and commits suicide in her grief. For the Crowe family, domestic/intimate partner violence dates back to 1727, when Fleur, pregnant with her lover’s child, was beaten by the community and her lover dragged to the South Carolina swamps where his body was planted (23-24). Later, determined “not to be slaughtered” during the Removal of 1838, the Crowe family hid in that very swamp, establishing a habit of disappearing to avoid violence and extinction (24). The continued racism against Indians, a minor but persistent key in this novel, sounds a backdrop for the familial violence and disappearances, the personal and social woven together.

This habit of disappearing is reiterated by the many “leavings” in the novel, when Ayita left South Carolina; when Barron left Ayita and their children, returned, and left again; when Aunt Rosebud left home to be with Ayita; when Morgan left home with his boyfriend Fallon to escape censure, believing that “disappearing might give them a better chance at living something closer to life” (149), escaping life in a deadly crash.  Laurel is disappeared by the invaders, and Nadine leaves her mother to find her sister.  Prentiss leaves the living with her suicide but appears in the shadows to Nadine to lead her to knowledge of Laurel’s whereabouts. Leaving is also figured as addiction, drugs and drink providing escape from violence and grief. Morgan turned to drugs, marijuana, cocaine, and PCP, and Ayita drowned herself in drink, “leaving, piece by piece . . . as she numbed herself into oblivion” (363) before she left finally with Laurel into the black waters of the in-between. Nadine sees “Mom sinking into her grief” and feels “her own grief pulling at her like a current” (86). Had she not been caught up in finding her sister Laurel, Nadine might also have gone down the addiction trail, already drinking too much.

People leave and disappear in this novel. But there are also returns: Barron’s return to Ayita; Rosebud and Nadine’s return to South Carolina, the Crowe women who live there, and the ancient knowledge they possess. Most eerily, the novel traces the return of ghosts to the material world and the ways they intervene in it. The ghost of Morgan, freshly dead, returned to rescue Anna from the crash: “She saw Morgan right when she was supposed to die. He pulled her from the wreck” (183, 207). He returns to Ayita, his sister, who mistakes Nadine for him, her own grief and perhaps guilt about his ultimate leaving haunting her. The ghost of Prentiss returns, first as the crooked-mouthed shadow woman who comes to Nadine and then as a participant in the ceremony to contact Laurel. Laurel’s spirit returns to rescue Nadine from the overdose that almost killed her: “Whatever is left of Laurel reaches into Nadine and pulls death out of her . . .” (124).  These episodes illustrate the belief that the dead belong here, are part of the ecology of life, that they intervene in the lives of the living and help connect them to the disappeared ones. As Aunt Rosebud explains, “There is no leaving for our people . . .  Our farewell—hvmv te erhvles—means until I see you again” (211).

The ghosts of Morgan and Prentiss pierce the thin filament between life and death of their own accord, stirred perhaps by tragedies of loss and grief to assist the living. Returning the missing Laurel to her family, to her mother, is more of a challenge. Neither the local community nor the police can locate her, and Barron, the father who did not know she was a daughter, has no knowledge of her whereabouts. It takes the convergence of living and dead Crowe women who possess unrecognized knowledges, the rituals and ceremonies, to summon her, present her to Nadine, and finally enable Laurel to reunite with her mother. Laurel had tried on her own to reunite with Ayita, humming a song that echoed in the trees and in the silver chain Ayita wears around her neck and murmuring “Mama” (234-36). But it will take more to pierce the veil to regain her mother.

Aunt Rosebud is the first to realize that something mystical is afoot in Laurel’s disappearance, that the Little People have taken her. The young girl has been particularly, peculiarly, drawn to the Little People, drawing figures of them and communicating with them, imaginatively becoming a part of their world before they actually take her. She would line the walls of her tree house with their images and talk with them, hoping they would teach her magic so that she can be “just like a fairy” (165). More astutely, Laurel understands that “We brought them here” to Wisconsin (165), that they are displaced from their South Carolina environs just as Ayita and her girls are.

These characters, dwarf-like figures, the Little People or ucv’ske, feature in the mythology of the Indians of the South Carolina low country. They are imagined, mythical, and real; dangerous and protective; secretive and known; seen and unseen; beings that inhabit the shadows, the in-between spaces where dichotomous definitions can co-exist, where the possible and impossible sit side by side. They are both beings you don’t want to cross, who you don’t want to talk about out loud; but they also possess secret knowledges of healing and provide refuge against the harsh realities of Removal and violence for Native Americans.  As Sophronia Crowe, the great-great-grandmother, explains, “The ucv’ske are more than stories. . . They’ll vanish you if you ain’t careful,” warning about jumping over rain puddles for fear they would lure one “to where they come from—beneath that reflected sky” (19). Mothers warned daughters, not to “speak to them after dark . . . the Little People could make you become the dark” (101-103). Connected to death and the afterlife, they also had “the real medicine” (101) that the Crowe women practiced healing others (160-63).  As Aunt Rosebud tells Nadine, “’Our family is tied to the Little People. The ucv’ske. . . . Far as I know, Laurel is the first to speak to them in a generation. Talisa spoke to them once, as a girl, but it’s been decades. I think your grandma may have made contact with them, too, but that’s harder to say. But back before any of us, the ucv’ske made us healers. Gave our family medicine’” (191). This long-standing relationship the Crowe women have had with them and their history of providing refuge and healing may explain why Aunt Rosebud is so sure that the ucv’ske have taken Laurel.

Contacting and returning Laurel are another matter.  They require rituals of smoke, blood, and water and a community of women with unrecognized knowledges.  What generations of Crowe women had been taught must now be handed down to Nadine: “It is Nadine’s turn to be taught. Any hope of getting Laurel back depends on her listening” (243). Listening to the older women, learning from them, and going through the ceremonies, Nadine is initiated into a select group of women, survivors (even in death) and healers.  First, Nadine learns that smoking is more than nicotine, it is a way to reach the spirits. As Aunt Rosebud explains, “’Mama taught us to pray with smokes. . . . The tobacco, the smoke, carries prayers to the dead’” (243). Part of a multi-layered, multi-nuanced practice, smoking is a first step to reaching Laurel. Next, Elgone explains, “’We need to talk to the dead. See if they can find her first’” (256). To conjure the dead involves rituals of drinking liquor to “get close to the in-between’” (258) and spectral/actual bloodletting as the ghost of Prentiss sinks her teeth into the living Nadine in a re-enactment of the ritual feeding of the rapunzel plant (278-79). Aunt Talisa tells Nadine: “In the beginning, the women knew how to find each other. Their symbol was a flower [the Edisto rose or rapunzel] that only grew when fed a certain kind of blood. That only grew with the right kind of knowing” (297).  After the dead (Prentiss) have been summoned, “ . . . the Crowe women will have to teach her how to call across the in-between. They will have to find a way to peer into a world they cannot see in order to contact Laurel” (280). To do this, they need blackwater from the Edisto River (298) that they pour into a bowl. When Nadine presses her face in the bowl of blackwater, peering below the surface, she understands that “dark like this is all her mother sees.” “And then she sees her” (301), the specter not of Laurel or even her mother, but of Prentiss, the woman who has haunted Nadine and now surrealistically swims into Nadine. As Nadine “offers Prentiss her breath” (309), in that co-mingled state, Prentiss shows Nadine their lives, their histories, saying “’Our pain is connected . . . We understand each other’” (321, 317).

The next step of the ceremony takes the family of women to the river, a fluid, in-between space, “a door” (333) that “connects the dead to the living . . . dream to dream” (324). Standing in a circle, linked by hands, where Nadine sees the shapes of history before she lets the river take her, “in that silence, they [the Little People] come” (338), telling Nadine that Laurel is one of theirs (347). At this moment Laurel communicates with Nadine, explaining why she left and why she must go home, not to their house in Wisconsin but to the in-between (349). Encircled by her kinswomen, “Her body floated up from the bottom of the Edisto, within the ring of your four bodies, of your eight linked hands” (352); but neither Nadine nor Laurel crosses the threshold to the other’s world. “’ We opened the door, Nadine,” Aunt Rosebud explains. “We brought Laurel to the threshold. All she had to do was step through. She couldn’t—or she wouldn’t. We did all we could’” (360). Nadine has learned where her sister is, she has seen her and knows that she is in the in-between world of the ucv’ske. But she is unable to bring her back to the material world. Instead, like the ghosts of Morgan and Prentiss, the spirit of Laurel reaches into the material world to help the living. She crosses the threshold of place to bring her troubled mother to her, to rescue her mother from the dark that has so haunted her. At the end of the novel. Ayita, pregnant with a new child, mystically disappears, her bathtub ringed by blackwater and the magical necklace that had linked her to Laurel tangled in the drain, disappeared into the in-between (370). They are home, together, given a new chance.

As this novel ponders what it means to disappear and to be present, to belong, it positions the dead, their shadows, in communication with the living, sometimes intervening in the material world. But most curiously it imagines a third space, an in-between space between the living world and the haunts of the dead, a space inhabited by the Little People who summon the living, Laurel and then Ayita and her womb-baby. Neither dead nor alive in the conventional sense, these people figure in the tales and imaginations of the Indigenous people and provide a space where Laurel, who had disappeared into the imaginative world she created/re-created, and where Ayita, who had disappeared into her grief and addiction, could find a place to “be.”   A place where the not-dead and the not-alive exist, where people get disappeared to or escape to, where the past, present, and future, where the personal and social co-exist.

Like the other ghost stories examined here, If the Dead Belong Here imagines personal hauntings in the context of historical/social hauntings, where the wounds of civilization against Indigenous people and women get replayed in domestic, familial, familiar wounds. It also imagines natural spaces where the spirits appear, where their voices are heard in the murmuring of the trees and their images glimpsed in river reflections, porous places that encourage meetings with the dead. It features interventions between the dead and the living, in which the living help the dead rest and the dead assist the living with life. Like other stories, the traumas of hauntings are assuaged through ceremony, ritual, and communities of women, secret or unknown knowledges revealed to expose the wounds and the healings. And like the other stories, it points to a solution, the peace that Laurel and Ayita attain and the initiation of Nadine into the community of Crowe women. Some amount of justice and transformation are intimated for Laurel, Ayita, and Nadine. And for the reader, ghost stories like this one do more than terrify or haunt; they encourage “a concern for justice” (Derrida qtd in Gordon, 58) derived from knowledge of the “lost subjects of history” (Gordon 195) and sympathy, a “structure of feeling” (Williams qtd in Gordon 198).

Part of the ecology of the South, wafted in by smoke and air, the ghosts in these novels weave in and out of time, in and out of being, reminding characters and readers of histories and knowledges that have been buried or disappeared. Representatives not only of deceased individuals, they reify in spectral porousness the social realities with which we must contend to find healing or suffer the continued ghosting of our personal and national identities. As I listen to the stories that had been forgotten or unrecognized and watch the people described as “other” possessed, erased or disappeared, I am more convinced of the need to keep these stories, memories, and peoples present. To resist the ease with which “White folks with money” (Clapsaddle 27) erase the unseemly sides of history, manipulate knowledge and citizenship, and bulldoze the land and the memories it contains.  Or we will all be haunted by their ghosts and our shortcomings.

Works Cited

Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.

Bone, Martyn. The Writings of Jesmyn Ward: Matters of Black Southern Life and Death. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2025.

Clapsaddle, Annette Saunooke. Even As We Breathe. Lexington, KY: Fireside Industries Books of University of Kentucky Press, 2020.

Faust, Carson. If the Dead Belong Here. New York: Viking, 2025.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 2008 new edition.

Howe, LeAnne. Shell Shaker. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2001.

Miles, Tiya. The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. New York: Random House, 2015, 2023.

-----.  Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Squint, Kirstin L. “Burying the (un)Dead and Healing the Living: Choctaw Women’s Power in LeAnne Howe’s Novels.” Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015, 187-198.

Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York; Scribner, 2017.

Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.