Book Review: Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine HolmesA Southern Gothic horror about Black women and the burdens they carry
Our Sister’s Keeper Mississippi, 1927. Thea and her husband Kid have just moved to the town of East Cobb, Mississippi. What they expect to find is a dusty, impoverished community suffering under the Jim Crow laws, but what they find is a prosperous Free Black town where white people do not come and the Black citizens are happy and healthy. Thea quickly learns that there is more to East Cobb than meets the eye though, for the Groanings– spectral figures of tormented women from the past– are rising up again, but only for the women of East Cobb. The men are strangely unaffected. In another part of town, Marah serves as a carrier– someone who takes on the worst memories of the men’s lives so they can forgo the trauma of the past, lead their families, and make East Cobb a prosperous place. Only women can be carriers, though, and taking on these awful burdens shortens their lives. After yet another death, Marah and the other carriers begin to subtly take action against the people who have made East Cobb into what it is: a seemingly perfect community that willfully forgets the horrors that lie beneath. Southern Gothic is a subset of the Gothic genre that is peculiar to the American South. It is a subgenre that sits the reader down and makes them confront a dark past plastered over by a genteel surface that is itself rotting away. Once-wealthy families deteriorate on aged plantations while they refuse to acknowledge four hundred years of chattel slavery and oppression perpetrated against the indigenous and Black peoples whose labor built the region’s foundations. There are no lonely moors and no persistent mists to keep things hidden, either. In small town America, everyone knows everybody else’s business, creating a kind of panopticon that can be as oppressive as isolation. As Leila Taylor states in her book, Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul, “The traditional gothic atmosphere is foggy darkness and English damp, but the Southern Gothic climate is a sweltering humidity and oppressively blinding sun.” In such a bright environment, it’s only willful ignorance that keeps the past and its sins at bay, but even that can’t keep things hidden forever. Jasmine Holmes’s new novel, Our Sister’s Keeper, deals with the consequences of a town that keeps trying to forget the past. East Cobb’s citizens assume that forgetting makes it easier to be strong and prosperous, though only the men are allowed to forget. The women– especially a subset of outcast women– are forced to carry the men’s burdens and pushed into a narrow, idealized notion of Black womanhood where they must make a perfect home and raise a flock of perfect children, all without letting their true emotions show. They must not be upset at their husbands or make a scene in public or be anything other than a radiant wife and mother. They must subsume their own desires for the sake of husbands and community. When Kid and Thea arrive, they are forward-thinking young adults who truly wish to support each other in their careers. From the first moments of their arrival in East Cobb, however, the town’s insidious nature works its way under Thea’s skin. The matron who welcomes Thea into her new home seems friendly, but it’s soon clear to Thea that she means for her to fulfill a single role: mother. Thea’s own desire for a career of her own are irrelevant. When Thea begins to see horrifying visions, the other women are only too happy to gaslight her to try to enforce their form of social control so they can continue to ignore the town’s haunted past. Meanwhile, Marah, a carrier of men’s traumas, suffers alongside her sisters who have been forced into this position alongside her. She can’t remember much about her life– none of them can– but when she starts seeing a ghost from her past, Marah slowly begins to realize that things cannot continue as they have been. There must be a reckoning, or more young women will be forced to suffer and die for the sake of the men who would rather forget their pain than deal with it. East Cobb is a beautiful place, but beauty cannot persist on a rotten foundation. Our Sister’s Keeper is a tense and often uncomfortable book that asks the reader to keep going, to not look away from the pain inflicted on others. It is about the communities we make, what they are built on, and what– and who– some are willing to sacrifice to create their idea of utopia. It is about the labor Black women are asked to take on to make other lives easier and the demands made upon them to conform for appearances’ sake. It is dark and twisting, and it’s one of the best Gothic horror novels of the season. Thank you to NetGalley and Bindery Books for the advance copy for review. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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