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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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Other Reviews
African-American
burial and embalming rituals, funeral services and undertaking
industry are all examined in
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial a cultural analysis of death and dying
among 20th-century black Americans. Duke University
English professor Karla F.C. Holloway combines historical
research with interviews of present-day undertakers and others
as she chronicles the discrimination and violent threats faced
by black funeral parlor owners; the development of rituals like
open-casket services and processions; and the influence of
disproportionately violent black deaths on mourning practices.
Punctuated with Holloway's personal stories (including that of
her son's death), the book is an elegantly written survey for
general readers and cultural historians alike.
--Publishers Weekly
After the violent death of her son, Duke
University professor and author Karla FC Holloway found herself
dealing with loss, grief and the finality of death. Like many
authors, Holloway found that researching and writing about the
rituals of death became the catharsis for her own pain.
In
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial, Holloway creates a "portrait of death and
dying in twentieth-century African-America." Holloway's
endeavor feels random, and at times, vacillating among
historical accounts of the emergence of African-American funeral
home businesses, to a short study of violence in the
African-American community, to the various "rituals of
death" that have developed over the century.
Holloway suggests that the violence that has
historically plagued African Americans has played a significant
role in the perception of death in African-American culture. She
writes, "The generational circumstance may change, but the
violence done to black bodies has had a consistent history . . .
paired with the cultural expectations of an open casket,
presented a particular challenge to the black mortician's
skills."
Historical factoids, such as the origins of
funeral wreaths and observations of such traditions as the
"homecoming"-- the great trek South when a family
member living in the region passes -- are interesting, yet when
offered alongside pictures, and very real accounts of brutality
and violence, her observations seem more like random trivia than
seamless information.
The documentation of African Americans and
their death passages, as they were, are intriguing. However,
Holloway's transgression from the cultural and historical
origins to stories focusing on the deaths of famous African
Americans somehow lessens the scope of what seemed to be the
true intention of her work, to present a thorough look at death
through the cultural eye of African Americans.
--Michaelyn Elder, a Harlem writer and
editor --Black Issues Book Review
Holloway shares her research into the
seldom-explored subject of death and dying in the African
American community. Confining her investigation to contemporary
mourning rituals, she interviewed countless numbers of funeral
directors, ministers, casket makers, physicians, and bereaved
friends and relatives. By interweaving these conversations with
visits to the gravesites of prominent black Americans and
examples of death and grief as portrayed in literature, music,
and the media, she provides an in-depth analysis of the unique
psychology of death prevalent in African American society.
According to the author, African Americans
live more closely and deal more realistically with the
philosophical concept and physical reality of death than do most
other Americans. This close association with grief and tragedy
has culminated in a number of distinctive religious and secular
ceremonies and traditions that are examined in this fascinating
sociological survey.
--Margaret Flanagan -- Booklist
Carry Me Home: Karla FC Holloway says
her new book about African-American funeral practices must have
been in her blood. But hse never thought it would become a piece
of her broken heart.
She has always had funeral directors in her
family, and her father was licensed as a mortician, though he
never practiced. ("My mother said, 'You may touch them or
me,' and fortunately he chose her," she says.) So Ms.
Holloway, an English professor and the dean of humanities and
social sciences at Duke University, had long wanted to write
about the history of black death and dying.
"No culture bases so much of its
identity on the persistent rehearsal of commemorative conduct as
does African America," she writes in Passed On: African
American Mourning Stories . . . . "Some notion of racial
memory and racial realization is mediated through the veil of
death." As the victims first of slavery, then of lynching,
riots, medical experimentation, malnutrition, segregated medical
care, executions, or gang violence, black Americans
"haven't had the luxury of thinking we'd die after a good
long life," she says in an interview. "Is it any
wonder that the passion of the 'home going' has such a dramatic
narrative context."
In addition to reading newspaper articles and
other archival sources, Ms. Holloway attended conventions of
morticians, visited them in their homes, and talked to them at
funerals--for people she knew, as well as for strangers.
"'Our people like to put on a good
show'," Ms. Holloway quotes black morticians as saying.
Black funerals tend to be longer, louder, and more of a
performance than white funerals. "Viewing the body,
touching, kissing, lingering--the contact is important."
Funeral anguish becomes a ritual venting of the community's
broader grief. And children are often brought to see the body,
as a kind of warning. "This kind of instruction shouldn't
be part of any parent's experience," says Ms. Holloway.
Nor should what happened to her own son. Bem,
whom she and her husband had adopted at age 4, had begun to show
signs of mental illness as a teenager. he was serving a 95-year
sentence for rape and attempted murder, and facing capital
murder charges as Ms. Holloway was doing her research. Working
on the chapter about executions, she found that she was writing
about "what I expected would be his end, and I had to stop.
It was too much." Then, in 1999, he was killed, shot in the
back while trying to escape from prison. His death became
headline news.
"I had not expected the book to be tied
to my own heartbreak," says Ms. Holloway. "It was not
until I tried to save myself by going back to the book that I
realized I couldn't write it without him." She wove the
tale of Bem's death and funeral into the fabric of Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial
and gave the book a second subtitle: "A Memorial."
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial is also a memorial of sorts for the
black funeral industry, which is increasingly under threat from
larger, white-owned businesses. In a strange sense, that shift
brings black funeral practices back to where they were in the
early 20th century, when, Ms. Holloway learned, most black
people were buried by white morticians. "Whites were often
as disrespectful to black bodies in death as they were in
life," she writes, and family members were forced to use
the back door to white mortuaries. But they were
discouraged--often by the threat of lynching--from drawing
businesses away by setting up their own funeral homes.
By mid-century, though, segregationist
impulses ensured a thriving black funeral industry.
African-American embalmers claimed--and still claim, says Ms.
Holloway--to be more skilled than their white peers, because
their work often required them to mask the effects of a violent
death. The neighborhood mortician, often the only man in the
neighborhood who wore a suit all week, became a leading
community figure. he had a fleet of fancy cars that he would
rent out for other services. And black morticians set up burial
associations and death insurance to cover fancy funerals, since
it was important to their often-poor clientele to go out in
style.
"I went into the project kind of
resentful of the claim the black funeral business has on our
lives--all the money involved, the people who would give up
medicine in favor of funeral insurance," says Ms. Holloway.
But the cathartic effect of black funerals, she decided,
"helps make African-Americans the resilient and hopeful
people that we are.
Those funerals may begin to look increasingly
like white funerals, she fears. in the 1990s, white morticians
began to lure bodies away from black funeral homes. often
corporate-owned rather than family-owned, the white businesses
are more modern, and able to extend credit to families who can't
afford funerals--who haven't, for example, taken out death
insurance for their children. And wealthier black families are
attracted to the more-prestigious white funeral homes. The
decline of the black funeral business is inevitable, Ms.
Holloway says, "It's a business so tied to money, and black
money is now so much more integrated. I wanted to capture
it."
--Jennifer K. Ruark, The Chronicle of
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update 23 June 2008 |
