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I thrust them up toward the surface, to the fractured sky so they can live, but they keep slipping from my hands. It is so real that I can feel their sodden clothes against my palms. I am failing them. We are all drowning...It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.
This passage is part of a dream told from Leonie's perspective, where she and her family are riding on a boat that sinks and everybody starts to drown. As the dream progresses, everybody else's troubles quickly become too much of a burden for Leonie to bear. The weight of everything that has happened to Leonie and to her family is “drowning” them in this dream. The events of their past, common experiences that Leonie looks back on with a mixture of fear and fondness, are represented in the dream as an ocean in which none of them can swim. She feels she’s doing everything she can for her family to “thrust them up towards the surface” and keep things going, but it’s getting harder and harder to keep moving forward. When she wakes from the dream, as she does in the second half of the passage, the reader can see that dreams like these are themselves part of the problem. Leonie’s circumstances are difficult, but the way her mind clings to and replays both the good and the bad of her past contributes to keeping her trapped. Every time she tumbles into dreams like this it gives her a new “bruise in the memory,” one more thing that “hurts when [she] touches it.”
The car shrinks the world to this: me and him in this dome of glass, all the hateful light...the memory of my words, of Mama’s gray paper face, of Jojo’s and Michaela’s reaction to my slaps, of Pop’s shrinking, and of Given’s second leaving. Our world: an aquarium.
In this passage, Leonie describes her flood of emotions when she's sitting in the car with Michael after Mam's death, trying to persuade him to drive away up North and get high with her. She is desperate to take refuge in drugs because she’s shocked, angry, and grieving. When Leonie says that the car “shrinks the world to this,” she means that when she and Michael are alone together in the vehicle there are fewer factors to take in. Things are smaller, and to some extent she can control the scale at which the outside influences that are overwhelming her are able to take over. Previously to this, she tells the reader that while she was in the house with Jojo, Kayla, and Pop she couldn’t see or breathe. The memories of everything that has just happened are crowding in on her, and she’s desperate to get away. Being in the car both helps and doesn’t help, because like fish in an aquarium, she and Michael can still see out into the world from its “dome of glass.” They’re imprisoned with their memories in the car, but it’s also the only way Leonie can imagine they might find an escape from the horrible events of the recent past. She doesn’t want to forget Mam and Given but she doesn’t want to remember them either. She just wants to get away, and hopes that Michael taking her up North will provide a temporary reprieve.
In that day that never ended, I watched the tops of the trees toss, and I tried to remember how I got there. Who I was before this place, before this quiet haunt. But I couldn’t. So when I saw a white snake, thick and long as my arm, slither out of the shadows beneath the trees, I knelt before It.
After his untimely death, Richie grapples with the loss of his memory. He desperately wants to remember what happened to him, as he believes that understanding his past is crucial to him being permitted to enter the afterlife. This interaction is one of the first things that happens to him in the limbo he gets stuck in. It’s "a day that never ended,” washed out by timelessness and disorientation. Richie can’t locate his memories or himself in this strange half-life, so he looks for any guidance he can find. The act of watching the "tops of the trees toss" suggests that at first he’s watching his surroundings passively, unable to decide on his next steps. Richie's struggle to recall "how I got there" and "who I was before this place" results from the erasure of his identity and history, a consequence of his violent end. The fact that he can’t remember how his death happened is an analogy to the real erasure of the histories of Black people by systematic oppression. Richie’s inability to remember is a poignant reflection of the broader theme of forgotten or suppressed histories, particularly those of marginalized individuals. His encounter with the "white snake, thick and long as my arm" gives this passage an unnerving, mythical feel, as if he were being visited by a god or a demon. In many folkloric traditions, snakes represent transformation or rebirth. The snake later becomes the “scaly bird” that guides Richie through his quest for knowledge. The author signals that the animal is more than just an animal with the capitalization of the last word in the passage. Richie knows to kneel before the snake, and it’s referred to as “It” in the same way Christians might write “He” when talking about God. It’s clearly something supernatural and powerful, but at this point neither reader or Richie are sure of its purpose.
None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. They perch like birds, but look as people. They speak with their eyes: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times she locked me in the shed and starved me to death while I listened to my babies playing with her in the yard they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes…
In Chapter 14 Jojo becomes fixed to the spot when Richie reveals a horrifying sight to him. Jojo has started going out for long walks, and Richie catches him alone one day and shows him a tree full of the ghosts of murdered Black people in the woods near his house. All of the ghosts in the tree are greyish and frightening, with large soulful black eyes that “speak” to Jojo. They appear to come from a variety of periods of history, and to have been fixed to the earth by the racism and violence that caused their deaths. The stories here run together into a litany of horror. One soul’s tormented story bleeds into the next as each “tells” Jojo about their murders. All of the deaths he encounters here are violent, but none of the ghosts “show” them. Even if they were hung or mutilated, they just look like ghostly people. This points to the fact that, for their murderers, the fact that they looked like Black folks alone was enough to make their lives forfeit. Jojo is particularly horrified because Richie is crawling up the tree to join them. Instead of going to the “other place” after learning his story from Pop, he seems condemned to stay trapped on the land that imprisoned and enslaved him, forever angry and grieving.
