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Summary
Chapters 9-10
Chapter 9
We return to Richie's perspective, which begins with him thinking about how young and innocent JoJo looks. He then starts to think about how he himself had no understanding of time when he was younger, and how Parchman trapped him after he died. He was imprisoned after death, as he was in life, watching the prisoners struggle to survive, fight, and have sex. As he waited for the white snake to return and help him, he slept and burrowed deeper into the earth.
He believes he jumped backward and forward in time during this period of digging and sleeping, switching from the contemporary, to the time before European settlers came to America, and back to a more modern period before appearing to Jojo and Kayla. He then thinks about a horrifying anecdote told to him by a prostitute called the Sunshine Woman, in which an escapee was brutally tortured and lynched. When River heard what the woman was telling Richie, he was angry that Richie had been exposed to such a horrifying story, not knowing that Richie had already seen the corpse of a lynching victim. He decided then and there that he was going to escape from Parchman, the feeling spreading over him like a fever. In the present, he continues to watch Kayla and Jojo, thinking about how the white snake had instructed him to return to River. He believes that he will be able to pass on from the earth to the afterlife by doing so.
Chapter 10
This chapter begins with Leonie waking up with her head in Michael's lap, feeling disoriented and wrong, as if her body has been put back together incorrectly. She has no memory of what happened while she was unconscious, including their encounter with the police officer. She still feels extremely ill, and tries to sleep. She dreams anxiously about drowning, She can’t stay asleep for long, and is surprised and slightly disappointed when Michael tells her that he thinks they should go home to her parents’ house. She had imagined them getting an apartment, but that dream quickly fades. When they arrive at Pop and Mam’s house, however, it’s empty, and Michael decides that they have to go and see his parents.
The family arrives at Michael's parents' house, where the atmosphere is immediately charged and hostile. Jojo and Kayla are confused about where they are, never having met their paternal grandparents. Michael knocks on the door and his father Big Joseph answers. His mother Maggie also comes to the door, hearing Kayla saying that she’s hungry. Big Joseph refuses to let them in, reminding Michael that they aren’t welcome in his home. Michael introduces the children to Maggie and they enter. Leonie is terrified and nauseated, feeling like she is going to vomit at any moment. Big Joseph can’t hold back a racist tirade, and starts to fling racial slurs and bigoted opinions at Leonie and the children. Michael starts a fight with him, and Leonie and the children run to the car. They wait, listening to the fight happening inside, and Michael eventually bursts out of the house followed by Maggie. She talks to him and hugs him, handing him a grocery bag. They leave, and go back to Mam and Pop’s house. Pop is there, and he cautiously greets Michael, telling Leonie to go and see Mam.
Leonie tells Mam that Michael is home, but she’s barely listening. She tells Leonie that it’s time for her to pass on to the next life, and that she needs her daughter’s help. Mam wants to summon Maman Brigitte, a spirit from the mystère, in the hopes that she will guide her to the afterworld. For her spell she needs cemetery rocks, cotton, cornmeal, and rum. Leonie is miserable at the idea but agrees to help, seeing how frail her mother has become.
Analysis
From Richie’s perspective, Jojo is all innocence. Even though Jojo has been forced to mature beyond his years, Richie thinks that his own experiences at a similar age were far more traumatic. By the time he was as old as Jojo is in the present, he had already witnessed a significant amount of violence. Much of Richie’s sense of self comes from his trauma; it’s both what keeps him trapped on earth and what makes him understand his purpose. In his time spent trapped in limbo at Parchman, Richie experiences disorienting voyages through time. When he awakens from his hibernations under the earth, he’s sometimes not in the timeline he expects to appear in. He sees the place before white settlers came to it on one occasion, and as a working plantation with enslaved people there on another, and then awakes in “the new Parchman” where men “sat for hours in small windowless rooms, staring at big black boxes that streamed dreams.” Parchman doesn’t just have a hold on Richie as the place where he himself was imprisoned: it’s like a weight in a net, pulling all the history around it down into itself. All of the versions of Parchamn, past and present, are accessible to him, because he has found out that after death, time becomes like “a vast ocean... everything happening at once.”
Richie thinks back to the story told by the Sunshine Woman, a prostitute who used to visit Parchman, and muses that violence against Black people doesn’t seem to have changed much since he was alive. In the present, one of the reasons he feels superior to Jojo is this accumulation of knowledge. When the white snake speaks to him and tells him he must go to River to continue his journey, Richie doesn’t give staying where he is a second thought. He can’t ever truly leave Parchman behind because it’s so strongly imprinted on him, no matter where he goes.
Chapter 10 shifts the focus to Leonie, who wakes up feeling disoriented and wrong, as if her body has been put back together incorrectly. She spends a lot of time in this chapter feeling hyper-conscious of her own skin and flesh. This is particularly true when she visits the house of Michael’s bigoted parents.. Michael can’t stop talking about the fact that she and her children are Black, which makes Leonie and Jojo feel very aware of the space their bodies take up. The cruel, hostile reception from Big Joseph—which quickly becomes a violent fight—is a microcosm of the general state of intergenerational conflict about race in America. Michael doesn’t see Leonie and his children as lesser beings because they aren’t white, but to Big Joseph, they’re barely human. It doesn’t matter to him that Michael is their father—the fact that they share blood with Leonie is enough to completely disqualify them from being worth his time.
It isn’t just fathers and sons who fight in this chapter. As soon as Leonie and her family return to Bois Sauvage, Mam asks for her help with a ritual to summon Maman Brigitte. Mam is a Vodou practitioner, and Maman Brigitte is a spirit from the mystère whom Mam believes will help her in passing to the next life. Mam instructs Leonie that she must find a series of ritual objects in order to perform the ceremony properly, but Leonie is extremely reluctant to get them, as she believes she will be helping her Mam to die. It’s only when Mam begs her, and Leonie suddenly realizes how fragile she is, that she agrees to help. These chapters are preoccupied with the idea that passing into the afterlife might not be as simple as just dying. There are preparations to be made.
