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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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A Memorial to the Family Business
By Karla FC Holloway
The funeral home in Louisville held both our
fascination and our fear. After all, my sisters and I were only
visiting; but our Kentucky cousins were, quite literally, at
home in the upstairs residence of the family funeral home. For
them, living stairsteps above the lingering floral scent of the
viewing room, the always-locked embalming room, and the ruffled
pillows and bronzed caskets on display in what would have been a
bedroom was a matter of everyday life. But for my sisters and
me, Louisville visits were grand drama.
Our frightened giggles filled our bedrooms as we regaled each
other with spooky stories of ghosts wandering through the house
and scarier ones of bodies leaving cushioned, billowy caskets
and creakily finding their way upstairs. From our perspective,
every imagined noise during those sultry summer nights came from
that darkened staircase that led down to the S. Leroy Mason
& Sons Funeral Home.
Many years later, I found myself immersed in the history of
death and dying in Africa America. I was preoccupied with the
stories of our burials (Why was James Weldon Johnson's
gravestone the least notable among the graves of the Nail
family, his in-laws?); the currency in the business of burial
(How many cars does it take to put on a respectable show at a
Funeral?); and the ways and means of our funeralizing (Do you
touch the body? Take pictures? Weep? Wail? Cremate?). As
important a question for me (and others who wondered at my
macabre preoccupation) was how I came to this interest in
writing a book about Black death, dying and the business of
Black burial.
Frankly, I wasn't sure.
Perhaps the memories of those summertime visits to Louisville
had not fully faded, but begged some adult renegotiation. Or it
may have been that my research was a way of discovering my own
generational space in my father's story.
On the den wall of my childhood home, included among a series
of family honors and awards, was my father's diploma from
Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Wheeling, Ill. -- a relic
of a career brought to an abrupt end when he married my mother.
During my high school years, a news reporter's feature story
about his professional accomplishment as Deputy Superintendent
of the Buffalo, N.Y. Public Schools opened with a comment about
the citywide familiarity with my father's serious demeanor. the
reporter speculated that his "grave" affect might lead
some who did not know he was an educator to easily imagine a
mortician. Then it revealed to a rather surprised Buffalo
community the career he almost had in the burial business. So it
may have been that I came to my interest in this business
honestly.
Nevertheless, whatever the space of its origin. I had no idea
that Passed On: African American Mourning Stories would be
anything other than a narrative and photographic history of this
profession and its folk. But in the midst of telling stories of
Black death, i found mine own buried within. Our son suffered
from a mental illness that would portend a troubling childhood
and eventually lead to his demise. he died his own violent
death, killed by a prison guard's bullet as he attempted escape
through a cotton field.
When i stumbled my way back from grief to a writing life, the
book was no longer a professional exercise, but a personal
mourning story. Given what I had already written about our
youth, given the statistics and the vulnerability that shrouded
too many of our children, somebody's child was always and
already a breath away from the story Somebody's child was mine
as well.
As much as the spaces of funeral homes were mine for childish
reverie, and as consistently as they ere a particular space of
loss insulated within a culturally practiced expression of grief
and mourning. I finally wrote Passed On as "memorial,"
one answer to the culturally conditioned query: "Who's got
the body?" In this story of the ways we died and were
funeralized, in this record of our burial places and mourning
spaces and, yes, in this recollection of my own son's final
days, passed On recalls a century-long experience with death and
dying in African America that belongs, finally, to each of us.
Source: The New Crisis (March/April 2002)
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Karla Hollloway's experience reflects that
[recalling the life that passed]. Holloway, a professor of English
and dean of the humanities at Duke University, is the author of
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories -- A Memorial.
Holloway tells of her son, whom she and her
husband adopted at age 4 after the boy had been abused and
shuffled between foster homes. he was a polite, thoughtful and
compassionate child, but his rage stayed buried deep inside until
mental illness overtook him.
The beloved boy became a violent man who embarked
on a reign of terror, committing horrific acts. Imprisoned for
rape and accused of murder, he died while trying to escape from
prison.
This son's funeral stands out from all the rest.
"I had always had a certain skepticism about rituals. I
gained a new appreciation for the power of ritual to give us a way
to leave the space [of despair], turn around and keep
moving," Holloway said.
"I don't remember who was at my son's
funeral. It was the music, the heavy accent of the flowers, the
sermon, the solace, the sense of being held, not literally but
metaphorically, that brought me balm and solace."
She remembers the minister speaking of hope in a
season of despair in words that touched her soul. "Don't let
it make you bitter," he quoted from James Baldwin's novel, Another
Country. "Try to understand. The world's already bitter
enough, we have to try to be better than the world."
Holloway's grief still echoes in her voice.
"I guess it made me feel I still had a spirit in that
moment--that moment when you're not sure anything is left inside
you--and that I was being given a task. maybe that's part of what
the best funerals are about. they don't end with the moment: They
leave you with a sense of purpose.
Source: Judith Graham, Chicago Tribune
(April 28, 2002) * * * *
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update 23 June 2008 |
