Haunted Places in a Haunted Country

The Reformatory. Tananarive Due. 2023.

Some places are haunted, and I think on some level we all believe that. Americans did not invent the idea of the haunted house, but I’ve always thought that there’s something about American life that lends itself particularly well to ghost stories. The history of the United States as currently constituted is relatively short - not much time for ghosts. But we all know (even if we like to pretend we don’t know it) that whatever brief contemporary way of life exists here now, it’s built on a graveyard. Even those of us who only came to these shores because of some other reason than conquest, those of us whose ancestors came in slave ships or coffin ships, we only came here and not somewhere else because of that conquest. We all live on top of death, or we left death behind us from wherever we came.

This makes the American continent a rich place for horror - there are ghosts everywhere. I think even when we don’t believe in literal ghosts, we all believe that certain places just aren’t quite right. Certain places just have the odor of death and suffering about them, even years after anyone suffered there. I’ve always been baffled by people who have weddings at southern plantations - can’t they smell it? Can’t they feel all the ghosts? Isn’t some part of them afraid of, I don’t know, being punished?

There are helpful ghosts and vengeful ghosts in The Reformatory, but they’re all angry, and they’re all only there because of great suffering. The real horror in the book is, of course, based on a real horror - the Gracetown Reformatory is based on the very real Dozier School for Boys. The terror that took place there - the forced labor, the abuse, the murder, the starvation, the simple psychological horror at being taken from your family - is so great that you almost don’t need ghosts to be afraid. The ghosts aren’t really there to scare the reader, though. They’re there to tell you that even in death, there’s no fixing it - that places like this can burn down and evidence can be erased but the stench of death will linger, forever.

Due’s own relative was incarcerated at the Dozier school, and died there at a very young age. Due’s anger at his fate, her rage at the fate of so many other boys like him, makes itself felt in every word. Gloria Stephens’ desperation to save her brother from the school is Due’s own desperation to write her great-uncle back to life, to give him on the page a salvation that never came to him in life. There’s a part of me that thinks such stark wish-fulfillment weakens writing, and most of the time it does, but not here. Due earns it, and she’s one of those horror writers who excels at writing children, children who feel so real and so vulnerable that you can’t help but like them and wish the best for them, even when there’s no hope for it. You want the best for Gloria and her brother Robbie, and for all of the boys Robbie meets, and for the people who care for them in an uncaring world.

It’s hard to be optimistic after reading a book like this. Some characters do manage to make it out alive, but others don’t, and there’s really no separating the two kinds into deserving and undeserving. All of these boys deserved to make it out, but most of them didn’t. Some of the evildoers in The Reformatory are punished, but most aren’t. It would be unfair to the real ghosts, I think, to pretend that what happened was something other than what it was. There can’t be any pretending in horror, not in real horror, and horror at its best is about forcing us to see what we’d rather not. Due is as good at that as any American now working in the genre. This book deserves to be a classic.