Black Mass Graves & the Horror of Not Knowing
On “Summer” by Tananarive Due (2007)
This post has spoilers! Trigger/content warnings include anti-Black racism, the 1921 Tulsa massacre, mass murder, possession, and a brief mention of sexual violence.
As Black Americans, there’s a lot we don’t know about our own history (thanks to colonization, slavery, and other means of erasure like the intentional omission or destruction of records). “Summer” is a short story by renowned Black horror and speculative fiction author Tananarive Due, originally published in 2007 in Whispers in the Night, edited by Brandon Massey. (I read it here).Themes of the unknown and local and interpersonal mysteries are heavy in this story, so let’s talk about it!
Story Summary.
In “Summer,” we follow the main character, Danielle, as she tries to care for her baby daughter alone while her husband is gone for summer training for the U.S. Army Reserves. Kyle will be away from Danielle and their thirteen-month-old baby Lola for two months, clear across the country in California. Meanwhile, Danielle contends with ominous flies, developing news of at least six bodies being unearthed on a local farm down the road from her home, and Lola getting, well, possessed by creatures that come from the swamp. But only for the summer.
Danielle’s grandmother has passed away and Danielle and her young family now live in her house, close to both the locally infamous swamp and locally notorious McCormack farm. There are things that come from that swamp, but only in the summer, and one hot night, one of those things takes hold of Lola. Contrary to most (Catholic-based) possession stories, the leech from the swamp has an overall positive effect on the baby, at least from Danielle’s perspective: Lola stops crying, starts talking, and acts a lot calmer and more docile. But she also watches everyone and everything with disturbing intensity.
Danielle doesn’t have a lot of family support, but with the help of her cousin Odetta and Uncle June, she learns as much as she can about Lola’s situation and Graceville’s lore, and receives a tonic that will expel the…whatever it is from Lola’s body.
But at the end of the story, Danielle’s wrestling with a compelling choice: she has to decide if she’s going to give Lola the tonic (even though Uncle June hasn’t shared a single ingredient) or if she’s going to give herself a break “just for the summer” and let Lola stay possessed and docile until the thing leaves on its own in the fall.
I don’t think that we as readers are meant to judge Danielle for having these thoughts or being tempted — Due spends much of the narrative explaining how Danielle is tired, isolated, frustrated, and scared by turn. We’re meant to understand that this is a rational possibility that any parent could be tempted to choose, given the right (or wrong circumstances).
And against the interpersonal backdrop of Danielle’s grief for her grandmother and loneliness during her husband’s absence and frustration with her child, there’s the absolutely disturbing mystery about the bodies on the farm. How many bodies are there, really? Who put them there and why? And, of course, who were they in life?
Danielle and Odetta speculate about all these questions, about whether the people buried there were Black or Indigenous, how long they’d been there, if the current Mr. McCormack himself put them there or if it was one of his even more nefarious ancestors.
But this highly effective plot device that Due uses to build social and communal tension in tandem with the family drama at the forefront of this story unfortunately has some very real precedents.
Mass Graves, Lost Cemeteries, Actual Black People.
In June 2020, Smithsonian Magazine reported on a cemetery uncovered in Clearwater Heights, a majority-Black neighborhood of Clearwater, FL. Researchers from the Florida Public Archeology Network used ground-penetrating radar to look beneath a local parking lot and reveal 70 possible graves that neighborhood residents had discussed for decades. The reporter notes that this event is the “fourth forgotten black graveyard identified in the Tampa Bay area in the past year.” Here’s more extensive coverage of the local “discoveries” from the Tampa Bay Times: Zion Cemetery, Ridgewood Cemetery, Clearwater Heights, and College Hill Cemetery were all unearthed in a short period of time.
Perhaps the most famous of these recent news stories about uncovered graves revolves around the discovery of full coffins related to the 1921 massacre of as many as 300 Black people in Tulsa, OK. Now commonly known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, this was a formative event during the Jim Crow/segregation era.
From May 31 to June 1, 1921, white mobs descended on Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” a famously prosperous area in the city’s Greenwood district.
As with many of these events, the supposed inciting incident for inexcusable white violence was the alleged attempted rape of, or another form of sexual violence against, a white woman by a Black man, as reported on May 31, 1921 in the Tulsa Tribune. (1) And as with many of these incidents, the underlying causes were economic, capitalist, and white supremacist in nature.
Greenwood had grown into one of the most prominent and wealthy Black neighborhoods in the country over the first two decades of the 20th century. White Tulsa residents felt threatened by this economic success and took out their unjustified anger on Black city residents, leaving 9,000 people homeless and 800 injured, in addition to the 300 dead.(2)
Then, in late 2022, 19 adult-sized graves and two child-sized coffins were unearthed during excavation in Oaklawn Cemetery. (3) They were all unmarked, but researchers did link them to the 1921 massacre.
Readers of Tananarive Due’s “Summer” get a first-hand view of the community process of uncovering forgotten graves. But do we as communities ever really forget the people we lose, who go missing without a trace?
Real Trauma and Black Horror Fiction.
There’s a lot that Danielle, the main character in “Summer,” doesn’t know, even by the end of the story: she doesn’t know what the things from the swamp are, or even what to call them. She doesn’t know whose bodies are on the McCormack farm or how they got there, or what’s in Uncle June’s tonic, or if she’s going to use the tonic at all.
The unknown has a lot of power to create fear, in horror media and in real life. Oppressors know this, and that’s part of why slaveholders/human traffickers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. If knowledge is power, the process of keeping certain things secret and withholding that information can increase a group’s authority.
The mass and/or unmarked graves we’ve talked about are a prime example of how robbing individuals and communities of their identities in death and not affording them the respect of a proper burial — denying their loved ones and descendants access to them — is a power move.
Denying someone’s identity or legacy in death is part of denying the whole person. And we, as people living today, should be very much aware of this as a means of dehumanization. The common phrase that I first heard from my dad is that the winners write history, but with the internet and more tools than ever for community-building and communication, that doesn’t have to be the norm anymore.
Why We Should Care Today.
There’s a lot of Black history in Tulsa, beyond the tragic and horrific events of 1921 and whatever interpersonal acts of racism led up to the massacre and followed it. Just ask Greenwood Rising, a nonprofit in Tulsa that’s committed to accurately telling the city’s history and helping shape its bright future. I haven’t been myself, but I’ll go if I’m ever in Tulsa, and I’d recommend visiting if you can!
Black history has a tendency to be reduced to pain, tragedy, and the violent things other people did to us: slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, mass murder, police brutality — the list goes on. But I want us to remember that, just like our lives today are so much more than our worst moments, so were our ancestors’ lives. They fought hard against daily and systemic injustices, some of which we can’t fathom experiencing, because of their sacrifices. But they also had parties and found joy in nature and fell in love and made art and expressed themselves, like the people in this marching band. We have a responsibility to tell the truth about the past — the whole truth, including the ugly moments, but in the bigger context that includes the beauty, too.
More to Think About.
Below are some questions to ask yourself and prompts for further research. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog and the newsletter here on Medium — I’m sending out “extras” on the Tuesdays between posts with things that didn’t fit into the main entry.
And email me at blackhorrific@gmail.com and follow me on Tiktok (@domi_aaaaaa) if you want to talk more!
- Are there any Black cemeteries in your area that you want to learn more about?
- What’s something unknown in horror fiction or movies that really scares you?
Thanks for reading!
Sources.
(1) Fain, Kimberly. “The Devastation of Black Wall Street.” JSTOR Daily, July 5, 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/the-devastation-of-black-wall-street/.
(2) Fain, Kimberly. “The Devastation of Black Wall Street.” JSTOR Daily, July 5, 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/the-devastation-of-black-wall-street/.
(3) Romo, Vanessa. “21 more unmarked graves are discovered in the Tulsa Race Massacre investigation.” NPR, November 2, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/11/02/1133461415/tulsa-race-massacre-unmarked-graves-discovered.
