Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial

Ways of dying

In traditional African American communities, the extravagance of a person's sending off would be far greater than anything they had experienced in life. Families would sometimes bankrupt themselves to pay for the finest cars or a large brass band. Funerals were an event involving the local church, neighbours and community organizations; distant relations would come home for a funeral. While white funerals tended to be short and restrained, black funerals were long, public and elaborate -- extravagant responses to African Americans' ongoing experience of violence at the hands of white America. Sudden and often gruesome death has been part of many black families' lives, from lynching (by white mobs or by the police), to more recent gang murders and suicides among young black men. Through elaborate mourning rituals, the community came together after a violent rupture, helping to heal their loss and renew hope. Furthermore, black communities looked towards death as an escape from the pain of life. As the black writer W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "losing the joy of this world, (the negro) eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next".

In Passed On, Karla F. C. Holloway weaves a seamless and engaging narrative from interviews, historical sources and personal testimony, showing continuity in the black experience of death. "(C)ollectively, the story of how we died shaped a tragic community narrative", writes Holloway. Her tales are by turns poignant, horrifying and amusing. We read of the mother who displayed the mutilated remains of her lynched son, "so that the world could see what they had done to my child"; while the funeral instructions of one lady read "please don't buy a new dress - use the pink or white already here", perhaps fearful that she would be buried in tasteless garments. Holloway also tells the story of the violent death of her own son, who was shot while trying to escape from prison. The book is, she says, "my postmortem and our memorial" to her son. It is also a memorial to the African American community as a whole: in the final section, she describes her trips to lay flowers at the graves of renowned black Americans, including Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X and Joe Louis.

This emphasis on the sorrowful continuity of black experience at times glosses over important shifts and distinctions. For example, in the late twentieth century many African Americans began to choose white funeral parlours; black death, Holloway notes, became "less a matter of family history and culturally dictated practice than fodder for the entrepreneurial". Structuring a book around a way of life in decline imbues the project with a certain nostalgia. In addition, Holloway's focus on the mournful element of black experience excludes the creative, striving aspect of African American history. Great black Americans are largely represented by their graves and their thoughts about death, rather than their achievements. However, any one-sidedness could be seen as the result of Karla Holloway's absorption in her subject, a subject that she sensitively and engrossingly explores.

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