American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and Ethnographers

Abstract

s I sat in the darkened theater of the Yale Rep, watching the 1987 opening performance of August Wilson's new work, The Piano Lesson, it occurred to me that new spectres were haunting America-specifically, that ghosts were populating African-American literature in growing numbers. The play's action turns on the ghost of a murdered white slave-owner who haunts the descendants of his slaves. The spectre's power must ultimately be exorcised through the invocation of the black family's own ancestral ghosts. Toni Morrison's Beloved, which dared to make a ghost a central, fully bodied character, made its stunning appearance in the same year. I recalled, too, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), in which the emotional development of the protagonist is propelled by a series of encounters with family ghosts. Why, I wondered, this curious proliferation of ghosts? Wilson's play went on from its New Haven tryout to Broadway, capturing a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Meanwhile, another African-American ghost story began to draw notice: Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). In this novel, the spectral appearance of an enslaved African ancestor begins the process of unraveling the title character's family curse. As in Morrison's and Wilson's works, the familiar trappings of the Gothic-the haunted house, the family secrets, endangered inheritances, imprisonment and escape, the encounter with the unspeakable, and indeed, ghosts themselves-were all generously present. Yet these conventional elements play a vastly different literary role than they do in traditional Gothic novels. The Gothic generally explores personal, psychic encounters with the taboo. At the most basic level, its ghosts function as plot device-providing crucial information, setting in motion the machinery of revenge or atonement