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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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Scholar's
Research on Black Death and Dying
Foreshadows a Personal Tragedy
Press
Release -- Duke University Press October 2002
Durham, NC -- They say that death is the great
equalizer, but most in the African American community would
agree otherwise. Black families are much more likely than white
ones to experience the untimely and/or violent death of a loved
one. As Toni Morrison wrote in Beloved, "not a house in the
country ain't packed to the rafters with some dead Negro's
grief."
For Karla FC Holloway, to research and write a history about
black death and mourning seemed natural: the story needed to be
written, and Holloway, who has always had funeral directors in
her family, was a natural to write it. When Holloway embarked on
the project more than a decade ago, she had no idea that before
its completion, she too would be mourning the premature death of
a family member.
Holloway's book, published this year by Duke University
Press, is
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial.
To research the book, she attended funeral directors'
conferences
and interviewed physicians, ministers, casket makers, and
grieving relatives. She visited and photographed the grave sites
of prominent black Americans including Richard Wright, Louis
Armstrong, Arthur Ashe, Thurgood Marshall, and many more.
Holloway, an English professor and dean of Duke University,
reports that whenever she wrote the phrase "black
death," her word-processing program would underscore it
with a squiggly green line, suggesting that something was wrong
with the phrase or the spelling. "there is indeed something
very wrong with it," Holloway writes, "and this is my
point."
"Our people haven't had the luxury of thinking we'd die
after a good long life," she says. And they are therefore
more likely to plan for their funerals, including the clothes
they will wear, the music that will be performed, and the types
of cars that will transport the body and the mourners. in one
particularly haunting passage, she describes funeral
instructions prepared by children and teenagers.
In 1999, Holloway was forced to live the story she was
telling. Age age 22, her adopted son Bem was shot while trying
to escape from prison. the notifying phone call came to Holloway
from the prison chaplain; the next call was from a local
television news station. While Holloway and her husband spent
hours trying to learn the details, the muted television
continually broadcast scenes from his death scene.
She and her husband were too traumatized to make what is
known in the funeral industry as "the first call"--the
call to a mortician, notifying him of a death in the family. But
they soon found themselves conducting the business of the
bereaved: calling a pastor, notifying family and friends,
arranging for their son's body to come home.
Throughout the book, Holloway traces a number of practices
that are specific to black death and dying" burial
associations created by black morticians so that their
often-poor clientele could go out in style; the dramatic, almost
performance-like nature of black funerals, the bringing of young
children to view the body as a piece of cautionary instruction.
All of these practices, Holloway argues, are related to the
black way of death, a color-coded pattern that encompasses
slavery, lynchings, gang violence, suicides, and targeted
medical neglect. Black death means that African American mothers
are more likely to hear about their child's death from reporters
than from a doctor or family member.
Although the persistent theme of premature, violent death,
Holloway writes, "invaded my serenity . . . well before my
son's life took its final, tragic turn," she had no idea
she would endure the story of black death ad dying that she was
researching. She decided to include Bem's story in her book
because "I couldn't write it without him." She says, I
do not tell his story for judgment or absolution. i tell it
because it has the characteristic of an 'incident report' that
is, finally, community property.'
Telling Bem's story in print has put Holloway in the position
of being an expert--both professionally and personally--on black
death and dying and on grief and mourning in general, a subject
she discussed movingly during National Public Radio's September
11 anniversary coverage. She says, "I have come to feel
that telling his story is a way for me to publicly claim him as
my beloved child. That experience of the book is one I had not
anticipated, but one I cherish."
Contact: Lisa M. Dellwo, Publicist / 919-687-3639 /
ldellwo@dukeupress.edu
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update 23 June 2008 |
