Alan Ackmann

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead

by Randall Kennan

Kennan is another Sewanee Writer, and several stories in this collection—which focuses on African American culture in the fictional town of Tims Creek, South Carolina—were very well done. One of my favorites included The Foundations of the Earth, which dramatizes a grieving mother’s attempts to forge a relationship with her dead son’s gay lover. The story is set in a staunchly religious environment, yet never falls victim to moralizing or oversimplification, and shows us the human drama that is the natural consequence of such doctrine, rather than focusing on the doctrine itself. Equally powerful is the sensual, more experimental Run, Mourner, Run, which also focuses on homosexuality, but whose central plot of a young white man seducing one of Tims Creek’s most influential black citizens emphasizes betrayal rather than communion.

Some stories are not entirely successful— Cornsilk and Ragnarok: The Day the Gods Die both fall well short of their ambition—but all of these are dwarfed by the collection’s flagship fable Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Presented as a historical document, complete with dedication page, cited sources, and lengthy annotations, this sixty page yarn is an exploration of one of the darker, more legendary episodes of Tims Creek’s ancient past, when a fierce preacher summoned the city’s dead, who rose and visited a retribution on the living. This incident is described in detail, but these gory, carnage-riddled pages are far from the story’s dominant feature and are instead presented as something which may or may not have happened (“you will hear lies above suspiscion”, reads the Zora Neal Hurston epigraph) and which may or may not have been deserved. By the time readers get to the actual events, these events have been through so many filters that their nature is suspect. The central narrative device is a transribed and annotated dialogue between two aging residents, one of whom swears by the resurrection’s occurence, and the other of whom disavows it—though each of these characters have only heard of the story through others, and their accounts contradict each other radically. These dialogic passages are off-set by editorial divergences that seem almost trivial, as well as sermons, diary entries, and personal letters from people involved, each of which has been compiled by Kennan’s editorial persona. By the end, the impression is that of folklore that simply feels true, although it is—as one character puts it—only “near about” the truth, at best. This makes Let the Dead Bury Their Dead a story about the ways in which a culture constructs its identity, and how it chooses the things which it will cling to or disgard. This broader ambition—to characterize a place and time, as much as a people—is felt elsewhere in the book, as characters from some stories make brief cameos in others, adding up to a more comprehensive tableau. While it wasn’t always a pleasant read—Kennan’s Borgesian structures can be difficult to penetrate—it was a rewarding one. If you’re looking for an intelligent, emotionally gripping drama, you could do much, much worse than a visit to Tim’s Creek.

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Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jun 24, 08:32 PM.
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