PASSED ON: AFRICAN AMERICAN MOURNING STORIES, Karla F.C. Holloway. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2002. ISBN-0-8223-2860-7. 232pp.

PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2002)

ISSN: 1543-0855

LaMonda Horton-Stallings

Black Death. The black community’s experience of bereavement has been the subject of many works in black literature and culture. In Toni Morrison’s Sula, readers quickly gain an understanding of how secondary character Shadrack attempts to deal with death: “It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both…In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day” (14). Shadrack’s motivation to create his dark holiday arises from an understanding that black death always seems to be sudden and surprising in ways that ironically go back to the precarious issue of race. Black death is startling because it is too violent and too soon, or shocking because we lasted so long in spite of numerous life-threatening white folks and their cultural and political policies that work to diminish black life. Markedly, with the continuous abrupt loss of black academics such as Barbara Christian, June Jordan, and others within recent years, it seems appropriate that one of our own would take on the morbid examination of death in black communities. Passed On: African American Mourning Stories serves as Karla Holloway’s critical endeavor to understand death and mourning in black communities.

In Passed On, Holloway argues that she wants to show that there is something wrong with black death. She asserts that her work is concerned with “African Americans’ particular vulnerability to an untimely death in the United States,” and how it “intimately affects how black culture represents itself and is represented”(2). In trying to complete these two tasks, the memorial text utilizes a number of important twentieth century artifacts, photographs, stories, and an emotionally focused prologue, introduction, and epilogue. With the exception of fiction writers such as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, who Holloway utilizes throughout her own work, cultural critics have been silent on the issue of death and the African American community. Passed On fills a great void in African American cultural studies. It reveals, as Shadrack’s creation of Suicide Day does, the utter lack of control that blacks have over their own lives and death. Holloway’s text opens a discussion that should be continued for years to come. Yet, the reception and use of Passed On may simply depend on what individual readers expect that it should do. Due to its two stated goals, Passed On verges on being two texts. The first text successfully masters Holloway’s initial work of showing the wrong of black death, but the later argument of representation creates an awkward second text polluted by a Duboisian approach. Nevertheless, the book will provide invaluable contributions to black literary and cultural studies.

Holloway, an endowed professor at of English and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Duke University, has published numerous works on black culture, including Moorings and Metaphors: Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature and Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character. Anyone who is familiar with the importance of folk and African cosmology in Moorings and Metaphors will be somewhat confused by Holloway’s decision to take a more conservative and Western approach to examining death in black communities.The split-persona of Holloway’s examination of death comes in her separation of the folk from folk culture, of black culture from the actions of black death. Even without previous knowledge of Holloway’s work, the split becomes apparent at the onset with the introduction and the prologue.

One must adhere to a focus on Dubois’s concept of the veil and its preoccupation with the “Negro” to understand the way Holloway broaches the wrongness of black death. The introduction relies on the first chapter from W.E.B. Dubois’s The Soul of Black Folks. As Holloway notes, in that particular chapter Dubois discusses the loss of his son as sudden and sad, but also as a necessary phase that allows his newborn to move onto freedom and away from the veil of race in the U.S. From that point on, Holloway links the veil and black mourning and death together in a Duboisian approach that limits the way in which Holloway can talk about death and black culture. In her task to alert us about what is wrong with black death and “the relentless cycle of cultural memory and black mourning,” the text becomes hampered by the life and death of black people as totally tied into the veil of race. Passed On contains many accounts of fatal incidents and events tied to racial prejudice that too often read more like references.

Holloway’s attention to the unnecessary violence involved in black death cannot be dismissed as wasteful work. In chapter two, aptly titled “How We Die,” she painstakingly takes us through black America’s tragic community narrative of death related to riots and rebellions, lynching, executions, murders, police violence, suicides, and untreated or under treated disease. She documents well-known incidents such as numerous lynching deaths, Rosewood, the race riots of E. St. Louis, the Tuskegee Experiment, as well as diseases of hypertension and tuberculosis, not to mention homicide rates. The chapter is an interesting mix of tables, sketches, newspaper clips, and first-hand accounts of death caused by racial violence. The veil hangs heavy in this chapter. Holloway’s introduction suggested that cultural memory and black mourning provide ways for the community to have control over the death of black Americans. However, the remaining chapters make the statement more of a question than a declaration. In the end, the text has two answers to that question; no and yes (with no explanation). Because Holloway relies so much on a Duboisian approach, the theory of the veil and its importance in black life, it seems that the black community has no control over its life or death.

It is only during Holloway’s discussion of less-talked about incidents and issues such as the silence of AIDS in the black community, the very public and much hushed suicide of black stars such as Dorothy Dandridge, Phyllis Hyman, as well as black male suicide rates, that we even begin scratching the surface of the culture of black mourning and cultural memory. The text comes close to approaching how the folk, with their cultural moorings and ways of mourning suggest that blacks, like Shadrack, have found ways to exert some control over their deaths. Likewise, in the following chapter, “The End of Days,” Holloway exposes the prevalence of rumors surrounding the death of Bessie Smith, Dr. Charles Drew, and an unknown athlete and A & T student, Joseph Brown, occur due to segregated blacks’ relationship with white medical institutions. Although she explains why the rumors start, racial fear or paranoia, she never fully examines how the use of rumor or the rumor mill helps the black community cope with another loss. The major awkwardness of Holloway’s text is that it only occasionally provides in-depth discussion and insight on those moorings. Too many times in the narrative, Holloway comes close to examining the culture in a way that places too much emphasis on the veil and not on the way we mourn and the way that mourning is represented. The question that Holloway consistently makes one ask from the very beginning and with each chapter: Is it, is there nothing left of black mourning and cultural memory outside of the veil white people have placed upon blacks?

Ironically, from the beginning of the text, it is Richard Wright’s well-known narrative strategy of “Fear, Flight, Fate, and Benediction” that allows Holloway to briefly move outside the Duboisian-lock. While Wright’s strategy remains tied into Dubois’s concept of the veil, Holloway manages to move beyond it as she employs Wright’s technique to discuss the grief process for the passing of her own son. At the close of her brief prologue, Holloway provides a welcomed thought divorced from the Duboisan approach: “These days, what I imagine about my child has stronger presence than what I know. ‘You were born, you had body, you died” (13). Passed On provides a wealth of historical facts and information on death, mourning, and black corporeality, but a stronger presence, what she imagines—the spirit, is missing. Death and mourning are tied to physical bodies with little room for spiritual strivings as they relate to death and mourning.

There are a number of times in several chapters when Passed On attempts to move beyond Western concepts of mourning and death to reveal a connection with black cultural mourning though the folk and the diaspora. Before taking up a Dubosian approach in the “End of Days,” Holloway returns to the folk with an examination of a notorious cultural representation of black mourning, the funeral scene presented in a film narrative on passing, Imitation of Life. Again, the veil dominates her discussion of the funerals of Booker T. Washington, Bojangles, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright to name a small number. So few are the references to the cultural trend of black artists such as Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Wright, and others who provided more than facts on the narrative of death, as they patiently analyzed the ritual of mourning outside of black/white dichotomies. Holloway claims of Emmet Till (a white on black act of violence) and Robert Sandifier’s death (black on black violence resulting in death): “Each of these deaths moved Chicago toward a familiar ritual and toward a familiar language,” but Passed On fails to give any detailed analytical insight into the ritual or language. The schism continues until the end of the text.

Although the last chapter, “Sanctuary,” thematically centers around the black church, it too borders on being a compelling, but spiritually devoid part of Passed On. Holloway’s attention to detail of caskets and funeral processions of the famous and the folk almost makes up for the business approach of the first chapter, “Who’s Got The Body: The Business of Burial.” In that chapter, Holloway takes a historical approach in her examination of black mortuary businesses. She explains how segregation impacts the burial of black people from open casket viewing and the use or misuse of make-up for the dead to the traditions of coming home for the funeral. While these facts were greatly appreciated, there were no explanations offered about where the importance of this cultural phenomenon of coming home derives, nor the importance of open casket viewing outside concerns for the physical condition of the body. Fortunately, the structure of Passed On redeems these relatively minor concerns. In addition to the strength of the last chapter, Holloway’s decision to include a funeral sermon and a final epilogue with an “In Memoriam” section outside the main text’s margins shows an acknowledgement of a folk oral tradition, a roll call of selected members of the black community who passed on in the twentieth century. The main text of the memoriam, Holloway’s discussion of personal grave site visits, is as important as the roll call she provides. If black death is simply about the black corpus, then readers may not be taken aback by the schism in the work. However, if there is more to death for black communities than the body then perhaps the examination that Holloway takes up will be continued by someone who is ready to take on the spirit. Either way the book’s existence makes it possible to begin the discussion.

References

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973.

Citation Format

Horton-Stallings, LaMonda (2002). PASSED ON: AFRICAN AMERICAN MOURNING STORIES, Karla F.C. Holloway. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2002. ISBN-0-8223-2860-7. 232pp.. PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness : 1, 1.