Gothic 3 shy deer5/21/2023 The ghosts’ attire, “rags and breeches, T-shirts and tignons, fedoras and hoodies,” brings together in a single Gothic image the brutality of slavery and Jim Crow–era lynchings and the more contemporary and familiar violence that claimed the lives of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown. This litany of brutal torture and death spans the history of black life in America. He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found out I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me still. TOWARD THE END of Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, one of the narrators, a black teenager named Jojo, comes across “a great live oak full with ghosts.” “ith their eyes,” the ghosts speak their violent deaths to him in unpunctuated prose:
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