North Carolina Is Haunted by Its Own History in “The Devil’s Done Come Back” https://ift.tt/kNT7laR
Ghosts are made up of the living, but to haunt, they need a place. In the anthology The Devil’s Done Come Back, fifteen writers hunt down the specters of North Carolina to discover what composes this place’s soul. Ed Southern edits these poems and short stories to create an atmosphere in North both jarring and familiar – the perfect setting for the Southern tradition of ghost stories.
Holding this collection together is the overstory “The House of Vine and Shadow.” Its main character, Nick Batts, attempts to buy and develop the land of an elderly couple whose house is overgrown and appears uninhabited. Once inside, however, he finds himself paralyzed in his chair (both physically and metaphysically) as the couple unravels stories of this region. These tales begin at the beginning, all the way to Virginia Dare, the first English colonist born in the U.S. In “Girl, Dare, Doe,” Amy Rowland juxtaposes a young Dare, a modern girl, and a troubled doe to depict the historical violence, neglect, and invisibility borne by fauna and women alike throughout this state’s history. The agency erasure of women in North Carolina continues to be exorcized with ‘The Lulling of Blackbeard’ by Heather Freese, a re-telling of the death of Blackbeard from his young bride’s perspective. The ending, at least, illustrates how women claim their power even in the most precarious situations. Blackbeard is, “lulled by Mary, excited by Mary, confounded by Mary, unable to take her by force…” The bride, round with someone else’s child, distracts him during battle, creating the opportunity for a deathblow. Even without a head, “Blackbeard’s body, still moving, reached for her, desperate to quench his desire.” It is from this beginning that the book grounds itself in how history itself is a ghost that continues to haunt us.
Phantoms are created at every location where injustice visited upon the innocent or where things never had a chance to be made right. While many pieces start exactly where you think they will, and maybe end that way too, the ghost – and the circumstance of its current state – is almost never what you thought it was.
The Devil’s Done Come Back combines elements of Southern Gothic/Flannery O’Connor grotesqueness with painfully true history. In this way, we are shown how what haunts is the midwife who can’t save enough babies from enslavement, what vexes are duties we did not fulfill, or those we died trying to, and that even a family’s love can bedevil. Our longing can become a wraith living beside us. In “My Family Arrives at the Beach,” Julie Funderburk writes, “Love is often death’s undisputed cause.” And in “Chimney Rock” by Jeremy B. Jones, the protagonist longs for his grandfather to return as his father figure: “I haven’t talked to him since he croaked, but I’ll admit I am open-minded about convening with the passed on.” The truth of grief running through this writing appears stealthily like a haint moving through the North Carolina woods.
In the piece from which this collection derives its name, Ed Southern writes of Malachiliel Hide in his newly acquired woods. He encounters Jack, who appears harangued and much worse for wear. Jack demands payment for having cleared the devil from his lands. His method for expulsion was to answer the devil’s questions honestly and truthfully. Jack’s simplicity and graciousness made him impossible to corrupt, frustrating the fiend into retreat. When Jack reappears to Mahaliel Hide, the descendant of the aforementioned Hide, things have changed. The Hide family’s holdings, culminating through the inherent greed and inhumanity of America’s Civil War, are spent. Jack announces, “The Devil… He done come back.” It appears our unmended ways are the demons that possess us, even across generations.
“The House of Vine and Shadow” closes out the collection with Nate Batts accomplishing his goal of buying the old couple’s house to redevelop the area. But it is not the ghosts he encounters which scare him the most: it is the absence of them. Just as it was explored in The Weird South: Ecologies of Unknowing in Postplantation Literature by Melanie Benson Taylor, these short stories and poems commune with the contradictions, violence, and unfulfilled promises found specifically in the hollers and creeks of North Carolina. From these writings, ghosts don’t seem to bother with the dealings of the living world until they interfere with the stories, the values, and the nature that created them. In that way, the ghosts of this collection seem to know better about who we are and what is right because they were there when those things were unmade.
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