Claiming, Killing, and Haunting in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In reading Sethe’s impossible choice between ending her children’s lives or letting them be taken back into slavery, critics have largely blamed her daughter’s death on the system of slavery. That critics do not want to blame Sethe for the murder is understandable, given how much she suffers under slavery. What these critics miss, however, is Sethe’s agency. In killing Beloved and attempting to kill the rest of her children, Sethe makes a property claim that speaks directly to the history of cases on American property law and slavery. This chapter examines Sethe’s choice in the context of State v. Mann and Pierson v. Post, arguing that her willingness to destroy makes her a valid property owner. Her legal possession, however, is answered by spectral possession when Beloved haunts to reclaim personhood.

Specters on Staircases in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a haunted house seeking to climb the stairs only to be thwarted by a seemingly supernatural African American woman. These scenes signify the women’s contradictory roles as powerless property and powerful specters. Treated as property, the women do not just haunt the houses, they haunt as houses; they are conflated with the legal property of white families, even after the end of slavery. The women’s status as housekeepers, however, allows them a “keeping,” or possession of property, that provides them the power as specters to block the outsiders, who want to transgress the boundary of time to travel back into the past. Legal possession established by property rights confronts spectral possession signified by haunting.

From Damsels to Specters in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

This chapter focuses on Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (written circa 1858 and published 2002). Although Jacobs and Crafts depict their personal experiences in slavery, they infuse their stories with gothic tropes to employ the power of fictionality. Gothic damsels in distress are beset by lascivious slaveholders and traders who are cast as monstrous villains. While the damsels are haunted by the law’s pronouncement of them as merely property, they find refuge in haunted spaces, thereby claiming a different kind of ownership. This spectral possession is then doubled by the authors, Jacobs and Crafts, who shape their narratives as literary property they themselves can own.

Playing Con Games in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

This chapter focuses on confidence games played in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986). These con games expose the weakness in the legal construction of people as property. In each novel, white characters conflate enslaved people with animals, but this conflation allows black characters to hide their agency. Blinded by racism, white characters become the dupes of con games in which black characters outwardly perform the identity of property while covertly taking on the agency of people. Despite legal resolutions that seem to restore order in Melville’s and Twain’s texts, lingering haunting reveals that the racial categories destroy everyone. Williams offers a twentieth-century answer to this destruction by imagining people formerly enslaved escaping to the West, thereby crafting the only con game that works.