When the Reckoning Comes. LaTanya McQueen. 2021.
A few years ago I visited Jefferson’s plantation Monticello. I think these days the people who run the place do a fairly good job of integrating the history of slavery into the museum; it’s become something you can’t and shouldn’t ignore, despite how much certain people would like to. I suppose it’s harder to ignore with Jefferson, on account of everything - at this point only the most racist of cranks are Hemings denialists, which makes it all the more difficult to talk about Jefferson without talking about the enslaved people who made his life what it was. One can’t be separated from the other, the comfort from the torture.
One of the things you learn about on the slavery tour (which is, interestingly, optional - I’m sure plenty of people decline to go on it) is the hierarchy of slavery at Monticello and the dauntingly precise organization of the enslaved population. There were the skilled craftsmen and craftswomen, and the family's personal servants - many of whom were literally family either to Jefferson or to his wife. There were the semi-skilled workers in the nail factory, mostly young boys who as they worked were being evaluated for elevation to apprenticeship in a skilled trade like carpentry. And there was everybody else working in the fields down the mountain, most of whom never saw Jefferson or his family. What I remember most are the enslaved people who were sent down the mountain for field work, either as punishment (for real or imagined infractions) or because they were judged unfit for the work that was done in or near the mansion. The enslaved people, and the white people, called it being “put in the ground.”
I’ve always remembered that phrase, “put in the ground.” There’s something darkly appropriate about it - it conveys as much as anything else I can think of the grim reality of American chattel slavery. To be a slave in America meant to no longer be a living person - you were a body who was put places, moved about rather than moving. You were, in a very real sense, a dead thing: not capable of agency or social action or social connection. To work on the land in a state of slavery meant to be put in the land, to become a tool used to work on it, not a human being with an enlightenment age mastery of the earth but a part of the earth that is mastered. To be a slave is to be not even an animal - but a corpse, a ghost.
I thought of that image often when reading this book, which is like much American horror about the ghosts of history coming back to life, but in particular about dehumanized people insisting on their humanity. There have always been people who resisted, in ways impossible to ignore and ways easy to overlook, being merely things that were put in the ground. That resistance could be as brash as running for your life or as small as looking your enslaver in the face. That resistance is all over this novel, which takes place at one of the sicker phenomena of contemporary America: a plantation wedding.
I was reminded of The Jackal, which I read and wrote about earlier this year, when reading this book. Both deal with a young Black woman who returns to her racist, segregated hometown for her white friend’s wedding. She is forced to confront both the horrific racism she had tried to escape and her friend’s complicity in it. The difference is the plantation: this wedding is taking place in a graveyard.
The white friend is given a greater complexity in When the Reckoning Comes, but not an exonerating complexity. She is a poor white girl who desperately wants to join the local gentry, and will give up a lot to do so - class, and the tendency of poor southern whites to both ally with and then abandon poor southern Black people is given due attention. White supremacy isn’t a malevolent outside force here but a kind of vulgar class loyalty, a choice people make to foster one kind of solidarity instead of any other. There were always other options; most white people didn’t take them. I admire the book for this; it portrays honestly the different ways class mobility manifests itself in a segregated society, the different ways some people can move up or move out (or move up only by moving out) and others can only stay where they’ve been put. The white characters are rendered honestly, and not unsympathetically, but they aren’t let off the hook. They may not have made history under conditions of their own choosing, but they did - and do - make it.
I also thought of The Reformatory, another horror novel concerned with the haunted places of the American South. I must say, for all of the excellence within When the Reckoning Comes in terms of characterization and theme, it doesn’t quite gel as straight horror in the way The Reformatory does. The pacing is a bit off; so much time is spent on build up, and on the mundane but revolting social discomforts and non-supernatural fears of the main character, that the literal ghosts feel like a bit of an afterthought. They have to be there, that’s the point, as it was the point of Due’s novel: the past isn’t dead. But I wonder whether this novel would have worked a bit better if the supernatural elements had been excised altogether. Certainly the real stuff would have been enough. The wedding happening at all, at the place where it happens, is horrific on its own. Slavery and its tentacles still squirming through history into the present is horror enough on its own. The ghosts are a potent enough metaphor that they almost don’t need to be made literal to be real; you can feel them regardless.
I recommend the novel despite that, however; what’s good is very good indeed. Mira, the protagonist, is impressively rendered and sympathetic. Her childhood friend Celine is as well, in a different way - she’s pathetic and manipulative and helpless and sly in the way that real people can be. You can believe at once that these women were genuine friends as girls, and that racism ultimately made true intimacy impossible when they became adults. And the portrayal of slavery, intimate and dehumanizing, emotionally stifling and shallow, is excellent: one of the best portrayals of true social death I’ve seen since Octavia Butler’s Kindred. That’s high praise from me, and I mean it. McQueen is an excellent writer; I’m going to keep an eye out for more of her work.