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Other Books by
Karla FC Holloway
Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White
/
New Dimensions of Spirituality (1987)
Mooring and Metaphors: Culture and
Gender in Black Women's Literature
Codes of Conduct:
Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character /
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial
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Mourning in
African American Life
A Review by John Saillant
Passed On examines the life of death in
African American culture and society. Karla F.C. Holloway argues
that the vulnerability of African American to early death,
particularly after the end of Reconstruction, has imbued African
American life with the beliefs and practices of mourning and
commemoration, including expressive funerals and a sense of the
presence of haunts and spirits. "Black death is a cultural
haunting," she writes (p.3). "Your whole life is a
funeral," she records Joe Louis as having said (p.205). At
the same time, she notes, African Americans have often thought
of death as liberation. Mourning practices have been both
humanizing and sacralizing in circumstances that have
dehumanized and desecrated African American life. the book is a
memorial for her son, Bem Kaylin Holoway, who died in his early
twenties while attempting with two companions to flee from
prison. His funeral sermon, 'The promise of Hope in a Season of
despair," by maurice O. Williams, author, minister, and
teacher, appears as the last chapter of
Passed On.
Holloway studied mourning rituals, visited graveyards, and
interviewed morticians and directors of funeral homes throughout
the United States as well as absorbing evidence from Richard
Wright's death in Paris in 1960 and black cult members' deaths
in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. The South, where she lives and
where her son died, looms large in her argument. Violent
deaths--therefore early ones--came for victims of Jim Crow.
Lynching and the execution of convicts between 1882 and 1930
meant that one African American was put to death on an average
of every four days in the South. The migration of African
American southerners to northern cities caused an increased
mortality among the children of the migrants, who were placed in
new disease environments as well as in crowded urban conditions,
but it also meant that many journeyed in a reverse migration to
the South to participate in the funeral of a loved one. Some
African Americans, like Booker T. Washington in New York in his
last illness, possibly in search of treatment, determined to
pass on and be buried in the South. He died in Alabama the
morning after completing the long train ride from New
York.
Resistance to the Civil Rights movement brought its own
violent deaths, including those of young people, even children.
Southern African Americans have long been on the funerary
cutting edge: African American men learned embalming procedures
by working on bodies of Civil War soldiers, an early school for
African American morticians opened in 1920s Nashville, the
drive-through funeral parlor debuted in 1960s Atlanta, a legal
challenge to funeral homes that were not providing equal
services to blacks and whites prevailed in 1970s Louisiana, and
a black-owned company markets embalming fluids particularly for
use in children's bodies in contemporary Arkansas.
James Baldwin appears, in his commentary on the serial
killing of young men in Atlanta a quarter-century ago, to
articulate the premise of many works in African American
letters, including Passed On. this is a survivor's tale.
John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Richard Allen, Frederick
Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Malcolm X all crafted narratives
from this premise. It informs Phillis Wheatley's poetry. It also
operates in landmark modern works like Sterling Brown's
"Odyssey of Big Boy," Billie Holiday's "Strange
Fruit," Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Jacob
Lawrence's migration paintings, Robert Hayden's "Middle
Passage," Archie Shepp's Fire Music, Michael
Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," Albert Murray's The
Hero and the Blues, and Toni Morrison's Sula.
Holloway's book is a survivor's tale, itself built on
remembrances of survivors as various as Mamie Till Bradley
(Emmett Till's mother) and Flukey the Gambler, who interred his
son, gunned down in 1983 in his young manhood, in a
Cadillac-shaped coffin, complete with a steering wheel and
whitewall tires. Flukey himself was later buried in a
glass-topped casket with a telephone in his hands to symbolize
his business. "Seven thousand people came to see his
body," Holloway reports, "some wearing T-shirts
sporting the slogan 'Flukey the Gambler Lives Forever'" (p.
185). A mordant humor, often one of the survivor's tools,
surfaces occasionally in the book. Holloway records the common
preference for black cosmeticians for funerals, since white ones
tend to make the deceased "look dead." Probably no
other academic book discusses the "dead Jheri-Kurl"
(pp. 30-31).
Passed On is a Mules and Men for
the early twenty-first century. Higher praise is hard to
express. Zora Neale Hurston at once set a high standard for
authors dealing with African American folklore and offered for
her times--as Holloway does for our times--a metaphor for the
folklorist. Born in 1891 in Florida, Hurston studied at Howard
University and Barnard College in the 1920s. She traveled from
New York to the South several times in the late 1920s to collect
folklore, publishing Mules and Men in 1935. Apparently
unsentimental to the core, Hurston recorded the life-giving and
the death-dealing practices of African American Floridians and
Louisianans. Some of these, like folk cures for gonorrhea and
syphilis, Hurston knew, entailed death when life was
desired.
Much like Kabnis, of Jean Toomer's Cane, she
understood the differences between herself and the people she
studied even as she interacted intimately with them. And she was
impatient with fakelore and dismissive of it. Those of us who
enjoy the resonances of the song "John Henry" can at
best find it bracing that she dismissed it as without roots in
black life. The metaphor for the folklorist given in Mules
and Men is an independent, educated, and sexually
adventurous woman. As a character in the book, she travels
independently, even into dangerous situations, in search of
material. Her possession of an automobile makes some of her male
informants dependent on her. New Orleans Hoodoo men propose her
assumption of their duties after they retire, but she knows that
she will return to New York and compose a book.
he life of the folklorist is not the life of the folk. The
sexual dimensions of the book are obscure -- almost certainly
purposely so -- but some women in Florida suspected her of
intimacies with their men, several of the Hoodoo rituals
required her nudity in the company of men, and one of the rites
in particular obligated her to abstain from sexual intercourse
for a set time. One of the illustrations of Mules and Men
is an erotic ink drawing of Hurston's character prone on a
bed--a depiction of one of the ceremonies in which she
participated.
Holloway matches Hurston's unswerving faithfulness to
folklore and her Kabnis-like awareness of being both part of
those she studies and separate from them. If Hurston's
demonstration that African Americans had a vibrant culture of
their own was needed in the early twentieth century, then
Holloway's contact with the funeral and mourning practices of
ordinary people is needed in our own time. For we are awash in
fakelores of the nation at large as well as of its racial and
ethnic groups. Nostalgia pays and plays in our time. Our sense
of folk heritages is often cartoonish. One of our challenges is
to face and, in some instances, commit ourselves to traditions
that have not been sentimentalized and commodified.
Holloway offers an evocative example of the traditional and
the possibilities of her own relationship to it in the funeral
of her mother, who, as Holloway was to do after her, had in
Alabama joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority while at Talladega
College. The chapter members planned an AKA ritual at the
funeral--a reading of the name of the deceased and a placing of
fronds of ivy (the AKA symbol) in her coffin, all performed by
sorors in white dresses. Attending her own mother's funeral, but
without the requisite white dress, Holloway was rebuffed in her
request to share in the ritual.
She continues: "Although I was mightily chagrined at the
imposition of this regulating ritualistic symbolism, which
loomed larger for the membership than did the fact that this was
my mother for whom they were performing the ritual, my
irritation did dissipate during the actual ceremony, which was
quite beautiful and moving. I sat with my family in the church
pews while my mother's sorors filled the aisles of the church
and surrounded her coffin. Just as their ceremony came to its
conclusion, one of the members came to me with the last ivy vine
and asked me to place it in the casket. By that time, I was
overcome with grief and memory, as well as the not-insignificant
impact of the impressive presence of nearly a hundred women (all
wearing white) and of the ivy that, in its abundance, was nearly
spilling from the coffin where my dearest and beloved mother
lay. And I walked forward, and tucked the last leaf into the
soft folds of the fabric where she lay" (p. 172).
One wonders whether the pseudo-traditions marketed around us
could elicit such a deep response or so much loyalty. Indeed,
the pseudo-traditional reverses the relationship between the
individual and ritual that Holloway describes so well,
subordinating a tradition to us instead of, as in the AKA rite,
us to a tradition.
But when we move from Mules and Men to
Passed On
the metaphor for the folklorist changes, although each is true
to its time. Hurston depicted herself as an independent woman
and sexual adventurer: she was both distant from the folk and
intimate with them. Holloway depicts herself as a woman in
mourning, mother of an emotionally-disturbed son who had fallen
from minor crimes against property, to imprisonment by officials
unresponsive to his need for therapy, to capital crimes against
persons, and to a last offense as he fled on foot before an
armed, mounted prison guard.
She is a mother who visits cemeteries, funeral homes,
and mortuary schools (and sometimes listens to Prince as she
does so--"I Would Die 4 U?" or "Sign o the
Times?"). A degree of intimacy is created by the common
experience of mourning for one's children. Holloway's metaphor
is just as central for our time as Hurston's was for hers. Most
of us should know this because we know about the circumstances
of many contemporary parents and children.
If we forget this,
Passed On reminds us, with its
accounts of parents burying a child, congregations commemorating
the innocent, youngsters murdering other young people, and
children planning their own funerals. One boy, for instance,
wants to be buried with his hands posed in "peace
signs," while a girl leaves a letter with directives for
her funeral, including, for her mother, "what to wear"
(p. 148). African American culture has given the world figures
through which we can understand America--the runaway slave, the
migrant, the blues singer, the invisible man, the jazz player,
to mention a few. The mourning mother is a figure in this line
and is, unfortunately, likely destined for the same relevance
and longevity.
Copyright (c) 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved.
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update 23 June 2008 |
