From the issue dated February 15, 2002
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Author Weaves Son's Story Into Book on African-American Funeral PracticesBy JENNIFER K. RUARKCARRY ME HOME: Karla FC Holloway says her new book about African-American funeral practices must have been in her blood. But she never thought it would become a piece of her broken heart. She has always had funeral directors in her family, and her father was licensed as a mortician, though he never practiced. ("My mother said, 'You may touch them or me,' and fortunately he chose her," she says.) So Ms. Holloway, an English professor and the dean of humanities and social sciences at Duke University, had long wanted to write about the history of black death and dying. "No culture bases so much of its identity on the persistent rehearsal of commemorative conduct as does African America," she writes in Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, out this month from Duke University Press. "Some notion of racial memory and racial realization is mediated through the veil of death." As the victims first of slavery, then of lynching, riots, medical experimentation, malnutrition, segregated medical care, executions, or gang violence, black Americans "haven't had the luxury of thinking we'd die after a good long life," she says in an interview. "Is it any wonder that the passion of the 'home going' has such a dramatic narrative context?" In addition to reading newspaper articles and other archival sources, Ms. Holloway attended conventions of morticians, visited them in their homes, and talked to them at funerals -- for people she knew, as well as for strangers. "'Our people like to put on a good show, '" Ms. Holloway quotes black morticians as saying. Black funerals tend to be longer, louder, and more of a performance than white funerals. "Viewing the body, touching, kissing, lingering -- the contact is important." Funeral anguish becomes a ritual venting of the community's broader grief. And children are often brought to see the body, as a kind of warning. "This kind of instruction shouldn't be part of any parent's experience," says Ms. Holloway. Nor should what happened to her own son. Bem, whom she and her husband had adopted at age 4, had begun to show signs of mental illness as a teenager. He was serving a 95-year sentence for rape and attempted murder, and facing capital murder charges as Ms. Holloway was doing her research. Working on the chapter about executions, she found that she was writing about "what I expected would be his end, and I had to stop. It was too much." Then, in 1999, he was killed, shot in the back while trying to escape from prison. His death became headline news. "I had not expected the book to be tied to my own heartbreak," says Ms. Holloway. "It was not until I tried to save myself by going back to the book that I realized I couldn't write it without him." She wove the tale of Bem's death and funeral into the fabric of Passed On and gave the book a second subtitle: "A Memorial." "It was a chance to make his death part of my story, not the story it had been," she says. When she received an advance copy in late January, she felt, in some sense, as though the book allowed her to "return him to my embrace." Passed On is also a memorial of sorts for the black funeral industry, which is increasingly under threat from larger, white-owned businesses. In a strange sense, that shift brings black funeral practices back to where they were in the early 20th century, when, Ms. Holloway learned, most black people were buried by white morticians. "Whites were often as disrespectful to black bodies in death as they were in life," she writes, and family members were forced to use the back door to white mortuaries. But they were discouraged -- often by the threat of lynching -- from drawing business away by setting up their own funeral homes. By mid-century, though, segregationist impulses ensured a thriving black funeral industry. African-American embalmers claimed -- and still claim, says Ms. Holloway -- to be more skilled than their white peers, because their work often required them to mask the effects of a violent death. The neighborhood mortician, often the only man in the neighborhood who wore a suit all week, became a leading community figure. He had a fleet of fancy cars that he would rent out for other services. And black morticians set up burial associations and death insurance to cover fancy funerals, since it was important to their often-poor clientele to go out in style. "I went into the project kind of resentful of the claim the black funeral business has on our lives -- all the money involved, the people who would give up medicine in favor of funeral insurance," says Ms. Holloway. But the cathartic effect of black funerals, she decided, "helps make African-Americans the resilient and hopeful people that we are." Those funerals may begin to look increasingly like white funerals, she fears. In the 1990s, white morticians began to lure bodies away from black funeral homes. Often corporate-owned rather than family-owned, the white businesses are more modern, and able to extend credit to families who can't afford funerals -- who haven't, for example, taken out death insurance for their children. And wealthier black families are attracted to the more-prestigious white funeral homes. The decline of the black funeral business is inevitable, Ms. Holloway says. "It's a business so tied to money, and black money is now so much more integrated. I wanted to capture it." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A23
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education