The story I am telling you is a haunted story
Chapter 1, Part 2
In advance of the February 20 release of Our Trespasses, we are serializing the first chapter of the book. Find part one here.
This excerpt is from Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods by Greg Jarrell, ©2024 Fortress Press. You are welcome to share this post, but it should not be reprinted, excerpted, or reproduced without the written consent of Fortress Press.
In a story of the New Testament, Jesus and three of his friends have been atop a mountain, where Jesus is transfigured from ordinary human form into dazzling brightness. The spirits of two ancestors, Elijah and Moses, join him. It is a moment of miraculous clarity. But as Jesus and his friends leave and rejoin their group, they walk into a scene of confusion. The rest of Jesus’s friends, the disciples, are arguing with religious leaders over an attempt to heal a boy possessed by a spirit.1
The spirit silences the boy. When he tries to talk, the spirit casts him down onto the ground. It thrashes him around. He foams at the mouth. The spirit throws him into fire or tosses him into water.
The boy’s father is desperate. “Help us!” he cries, for the silencing spirit does not only destroy the boy; it holds its grip over everyone around him. It moves across generations. The things the boy would say, the spirit wants unknown, wants to drown in the churning sea. The silencing spirit aims to quiet the boy not only now but always. It removes the boy from his community, a loss for both the boy and those around him. “Help us,” the father cries, making the scene political. At stake is the health not only of one person but also of an entire community.2 Of a neighborhood, you might say.
Jesus, confronted with the scene of confusion, exorcizes the spirit but not before it nearly kills the boy. Indeed, the child is like a corpse. He is assumed dead, lost to the silence. It appears for a moment that breaking the silence results in death. Only when Jesus lifts him by the hand is the healing complete. Though the story does not mention it, we assume the boy is now ready to speak.
The Gospel does not say what happened to the silencing spirit after Jesus sent it out. Specters do not die nor remain in the spirit world. The silences that follow children and families and communities are revenants, always coming again. “There are always more ghosts to return.”3 Hauntings persist. The silencing specter moves elsewhere. It returns from someone else’s future, from another block or neighborhood.
The story I am telling you is a haunted story.
It is haunted by those who were forcibly silenced, whose names and legacies were written out of most—but not all—of the record. It is also haunted by those who kept silent, who would not speak, those for whom power or prestige or opportunism or misplaced faith rendered them unable to act in defense of justice.
As Reynard narrates the story of his childhood home, he tries to name the presences that came in and took it away, but the words escape. Some force, some system of power, has excluded him from its full telling. They kept themselves silent. At the same time, he speaks of the place he remembers from sixty years prior. He sees into the invisible rupture and begins speaking in the present tense. For the rest of us, there is a quavering. We see that the specters of the place remain invisible. We intuit that they are real, even as they elude us. We want to know how to speak of them, but no one has taught us. None of our people knows how.4
In our walks, Rey and I are telling stories of “exclusions and invisibilities,” as sociologist Avery Gordon has written.5 Ghost stories. Walking the blocks of Second Ward with Rey, I know I am failing to see what is not there. Some lingering remains, something animating this haunted space, a space where the land still does not have rest.6 I do not speak of ghosts in the Hollywood sense of escapism, of idle entertainment while avoiding the political and theological confrontations that shape the world. Rather, “to write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects.”7 The hauntings of Brooklyn—those of the silent and of the silenced—have had material and spiritual effects that continue to influence the geography of the city and the descendants of the people on every side of its story. This work will examine how those institutions who hold a stake in the physical, economic, and spiritual present and future of the place might “conjure differently.”8
To conjure differently. A ghost collapses time. What was past keeps returning from the future. With a haunting, the time is out of joint.9 The thing that the haunting demands to be done might make possible—though not inevitable—a reckoning with the history that created the haunting.10 Perhaps a confrontation with lingering silences will alter the future from which the specter returns. “Ghosts hate new things,” Zora Neale Hurston said. Short of a detailed accounting of the past that describes our present, the future is phantasmagoria.
The spirits who seize tongues, who throw into the fire those who might speak another future, challenge us for the specificity of names and places and details. They demand working with words to tell stories that have been concealed. Without the words, the possession holds. Conjuring differently requires reckoning with the trespasses of the past and naming how those trespasses exist, unseen but nevertheless real, in the present. Only then can a community speak something new to the ghosts that haunt it.
What I want to know, what I have pursued for years, is an answer to the question Reynard left open: who are They? What were their names? I want to know where they lived and where they worshipped. I want to understand the stories they told themselves that kept them comfortable amid a landscape of destruction. How did they teach one another to be silent? And how does the silence still operate in them? In me?
Coming Monday: Driving a Bulldozer, Wearing a Suit
Invite me to speak. Organize a walking tour. I will be speaking about the book several times in February and March, including on the radio show “Charlotte Talks” on Thursday, February 15 at 9AM. Beyond that, I’ll be speaking in several churches and leading numerous of my popular “Charlotte’s Haunted Future” walking tours. I still have space for speaking and tours in the spring and early summer. The fall is open, though beginning to fill in. I’d be thrilled to come and talk about my work for your congregation, leadership team, Rotary Club meeting, or fantasy football draft.
One Last Note: As for me and my house, we’ll keep celebrating the Max Roach centennial for a little while. Here’s a favorite track from a favorite album:
The story I am referencing here is Mark 9:14–29. Over the course of this work, I will return to this story repeatedly. I will sometimes use the phrase Mark 9 as a shorthand reference for it. For those without a Bible handy, the text is printed on the back of the book.
In Mark’s Gospel, exorcism and healing stories like this are always political. See Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 26–31, 140–49, 190–94.
Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2018), 639–58, 642; Elaine Enns and Ched Myers, Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021), 36–41; online lecture from Myers, “Always More Ghosts to Return? Healing the Haunting of Racism in America,” https://tinyurl.com/3xvw3yrs. I am deeply indebted to Ched Myers and Elaine Enns for their remarkable work and its intellectual and spiritual impact on me. Their influence runs deep through this book. Through their work, I learned of Avery Gordon, Eve Tuck, and other social critics and theorists using the concept of haunting. My research and understanding have been heavily developed from their intellectual and spiritual guidance and from my constant reference to their bibliographies. See the Acknowledgments section for more on their influence.
“We search for what has disappeared that has seized hold of us,” says sociologist Avery Gordon. Her work Ghostly Matters has been a constant companion as I have worked through the stories presented in this book. The quote in this footnote is from Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 6, 81.
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 17.
This is a common Old Testament statement, especially in the books of Joshua and Judges, though usually found in the positive. After a period of conflict, where an enemy arises, eventually peace is restored. The narrator tells the story of the lack of peace and its restoration and then closes a story with the formula “and the land had rest forty years.” See, for example, Judg 3:11, 3:30, 5:31b, and so on.
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 17.
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 28.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, act I, scene 5, line 190. This line is the quotation that serves as the epigraph for Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994). This volume will be cited throughout my work.
See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 46–48.