Ours, p.59
Ours, page 59
But if you ask the dead, they will say Saint’s disappearance decided Ours’s fate. Madame Jenkins discovered Saint’s absence after she went looking for her to tell her she was getting married to Mr. Wife. What welcomed Madame Jenkins, other than the house’s chipped blue paint, was Saint’s garden overrun with weeds that had crept up the porch and overtaken the banister and chairs. The front door gaped open, and waves of colorful fabric stretched from the threshold in gossamer rivulets that poured down the steps. But lilac growing from a mound in front of the house made Madame Jenkins think Saint was dead, which is what she reported when she returned to Ours.
For years after Saint went missing, the Ouhmey assumed the stones still worked because no one bothered them for decades to come. Then the axe men came.
The axe men had leveled the trees just south of Ours, pushing northward until their closeness to town and the noise of their labor attracted the Ouhmey to investigate. They saw dozens of men with axes relieving the trees from their trunks. Leaf crash on the tumble down. A spray of hares escaped from their burrows into the hunger of shadows.
Powerless, the Ouhmey listened as the leveling of trees drew closer, each branch crack and trunk split echoed the cracking and splitting of their lives. By the turn of the century, Ours was incorporated into St. Louis County, the surrounding woods cleared out for roads on which a white man in a suit arrived by car, the first anyone in Ours had ever seen, discussing with them insurance payments, tax payments, deeds, and other concepts foreign to them. Paperwork needed to be signed. A certain amount of money was owed. They couldn’t live there for free. As one of the oldest and keenest in Ours, Joy handled most of the paperwork and debated with the man about certain procedures and legalities. She wished her son was there to assist her, but he had died several years prior from natural causes, leaving her with three grandchildren to help raise with their mother.
Joy failed at getting most of what Ours needed during negotiations with the man in the suit but succeeded in securing the land just east of Ours’s mainland and west of Saint’s abandoned home as part of Ours. When she signed her name, she dated it 1912. The man shook his head—“It’s 1922”—and laughed. “Happens to the best of us, kitten,” he added, and before Joy could ask what he had called her, he was dashing back to his car and speeding off.
By 1930, new roads were paved through Ours and the adjacent field, a post office set up, addresses given, a census taken (520 residents, all Negro, varying ages between two months and ninety years old, near fifty-fifty split male and female, limited if any education, no income, no birth records).
For the most part they were left unbothered, until 1939 when World War II began and the airport expanded by adding nearly 10,000 feet of runway. James S. McDonnell, an aviator and engineer and man no one in Ours cared about, formed the McDonnell Aircraft Company at Lambert, and thereafter the airport produced military resources. More woods west of Ours faded in under a week and the war-readying noise increased, machine screech the endless screams of a civilization birthing an end.
Eventually, the money they had saved dried up. They looked for work in nearby towns, avoiding Delacroix as historically unsafe. Paid a pittance, they barely made it each month. They survived this way for two more generations; each decade, more and more of Ours disappeared in the mouth of industry and eventually luxury as passenger flights became most flights in and out of Lambert Airport. By 1980, Ours had 25 percent of its original land and fewer than 250 residents.
The early fears of strangers encroaching on their space hardened into resentment and complacency. Petitions to stop building factories and landing strips went ignored. Poverty increased with no new jobs created. Neither the factories nor the airport wanted or needed to hire them. Their schools went underfunded, the unasked-for roads built decades ago hadn’t been maintained since they were built. Sewage pipes backed up. Lead in the water. Closest hospital two miles away. The Ours cemetery the only remnant from the 1800s, its population growing more quickly than the town’s.
Folktales about a woman who freed enslaved Africans with magic, then disappeared, circulated during the early 1900s. By 1990, only a few remembered how it went but had turned Saint’s name into a Candyman-type game, where saying her name five times while looking into a pool of water would summon her to forcibly take you to “freedom” by pulling you in and drowning you, the idea being that she had no idea slavery had ended. “Aight, keep playing and I’mma get Saint to drown you” became a joking threat parents used to quiet their children. God’s Place was gone by 1992, over which an empty field meant for recreation was built. No one called it a park because there weren’t any swings or slides or woodchips, no field house and hardly any trees, and certainly no maintenance. But they barbecued there, held birthday parties there, put up tents to block out the sun and drizzle for baby showers, and played football using the ends of the long fence as touchdown markers.
It took almost a century for things to begin to level out. Jobs came, schools were renovated, and town leaders successfully rallied for a hospital to be built nearby. Though by that time, some would’ve said it was too late, would’ve said the drug dealers had more say than the pastors. No one in Ours felt that way. They kept the streets clean, their lawns mowed, flowers growing around the outlines of the houses. They greeted each other as best they could and felt no slight when a greeting wasn’t returned. They held block parties, rent parties, party parties, sliding up and down one another’s bodies, reminding them they had their own skin, tendon, muscle, and bone, and that it felt damn good to touch and be touched, licked across the pasture of their neck, focused on, enmeshed.
Marvin Gaye asked “What’s going on?” from one record player down the street, while up the block, TLC sang they “ain’t too proud to beg” from a car stereo. Children danced beneath a rigged hydrant, rainbows flashing their flipped grins overhead. Out of breath, the children sat on the curb, sipping from juice jugs and sharing a sandwich bag of Frooties. Their tongues the color of wildflowers, breath ripe as an orchard.
Every decade offered a new beginning. Even dressed, the adults became nude to each other, a cascade of shea-buttered arms backlit by streetlights dressed in moths. And none rushed to hide themselves while the ground, the earth that had once haunted them, felt softer beneath them. They lived, as they had always lived.
Acknowledgments
I owe my life to Spirit, the ancestors, and my family and friends.
Thank you, Mom, for your patience. You’ve been asking for this novel for almost twenty years. It’s here! I wrote this for you, especially.
I’m thankful to my agent, Bill Clegg, and the Clegg Agency, whose early and enthusiastic support energized me to finish this book that had been long in the making. Your involvement, faith, and ready-to-fight attitude have changed my life.
I also want to thank the incomparable Paul Slovak, whose editorial eye and attunement to my vision made this process not only smooth but inspiring. Thank you to Allie Merola for getting me. Thank you to Andrea Schulz for believing in my work enough to support it within and outside the walls of publishing. Endless thank you to the Viking team and copy editor Joy Simpkins.
Thank you to my Bennington College family, especially Benjamin Anastas and Michael Dumanis, for checking in with me and offering emotional support.
To my Randolph College colleagues and students for yearly encouragement, check-ins, and helping me build confidence in this work, I thank you all (there are so many of you!!) for being a part of this journey. Big thanks to Gary Dop for supporting my genre-hopping.
Thank you to Kathryn Davis for years of support, starting at Wash U!
Thank you to Crystal Wilkinson for believing in my undergraduate potential all the way through adulthood.
Big thanks to Brittany Allen, Alex Chee, Bill Cheng, Mira Jacob, Luis Jaramillo, Tennessee Jones, and Julia Phillips for reading very early passages of this novel, all of which have been removed but advice for which has been applied to every chapter that exists in this book. I learned about clarity and easing a reader, and about kindness and generosity as comrades from our time together.
Major thanks to Elijah Bean, the best roommate anyone could ever ask for. You made my life bearable with your presence.
Thank you to Preston Anderson, Brit Bennett, Jamel Brinkley, Aricka Foreman, Hafizah Geter, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Robert Jones Jr., Stephanie Land, Evan Mallon, Airea D. Matthews, Jamila Minnicks, Jon Jon Moore Palacios, Justin Phillip Reed, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Safiya Sinclair, Jayson Smith, UGBA, Javier Zamora, and anyone I am missing (please forgive my memory and spatial limitations of the book itself), who have all offered various forms of support, from early readership, to listening to me read excerpts so that I might edit, and/or for public enthusiasm about the novel.
Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the Whiting Foundation for support over the years.
Author’s Note
Ours began as a short story. I had written it as a submission to an undergraduate creative writing contest my sophomore year. The judge that year was Crystal Wilkinson, an Affrilachian writer and early influence. She selected it as a fourth-place winner, and in her note she wrote that the story felt more like the beginning of a longer piece. I had been found out! I did not see my submission as a short story but took the risk to see if I could win some money to supplement my student budget. This short story and the novel that grew from it are inspired by a family story that I included inside the novel itself. My paternal grandfather, Joe Francisco, was a pastor who grew up in Alexandria, Louisiana, before moving to Gary, Indiana. The story (a Gary, Indiana, story) is that a woman had come to visit my grandaunt, Tea, who lived with my grandfather at the time. My grandfather had the habit of salting his thresholds to keep out evil, so by the time the woman had come to visit Grandaunt Tea, the doorway and the windowsills were covered in salt. Long story short, the woman made a move as if she were about to come in then stopped herself, refusing to enter the home even after my grandfather invited her in a few times. This woman, not wanting to cross the salt because she was unsure of her own status with the powers of good or was an evil spirit fully aware of what salt would do to her, refused to enter my grandfather’s protected house.
My interest in African spirituality, hoodoo, conjure, and mythology has accumulated over the course of many years, starting with the eloko when I was in grade school. My mother had purchased an encyclopedia on African mythology to broaden my then obsession with Greek mythology. I read about uchawi haramu, a kind of dark sorcery used to make people ill, and about the Bakongo goddess Nzambi, who made the children of the first man and first woman mortal because they buried their dead child in the earth against Nzambi’s wishes. These stories added breath and breadth to my imagination and later made it easier to read The Black Book, edited by Toni Morrison; Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa by La Vina Delois Jennings; A Refuge in Thunder by Rachel E. Harding; Echo Tree by Henry Dumas; and many others. The encyclopedia offered an early foundation for my ability to understand other spiritual and mythological possibilities, seeing signs and symbols of Africanaity in Black literature that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
Virginia Hamilton’s book Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, planted the seed for supernatural stories centering Black people. I learned that even in our true tales, stories founded in real life with no supernatural elements, there is a string of magic, of the mundane swirling into itself to unfold on the other side of real: fantastic, uncanny, sometimes frightening. I read this book incessantly as a child, even copied one of the drawings in the book as an art project. Her Stories, another book gifted to me by my mother, is one of my earliest memories of discovering that Black people had a rich history of imagination, fantasy, spirituality, and a gift for exploring the surreal.
Ours is my attempt at creating a contemporary mythology for Blackness in the United States of America and acts as a continuation of such investment that began with my previous book, Mutiny. I aimed to write an epic taking place during the antebellum period where slavery is not the main antagonist without disregarding or disappearing the enslaved. I mean to trouble the ever-present depictions of violence against Black people that purportedly toe the line between revelation and spectacle. What I hope to see happen is an offering of mercy to each other as we navigate this history together.
I wrote a book of this length to give a full-life perspective of characters who may often go overlooked. In my opinion, there is no main character and therefore no side character. The story is one of freedom and slavery, and like stories of slavery, stories of freedom require the investigation of a range of figures as well as an understanding of how they all relate. The town itself is a character, and the evolution of the experiences and relationships between characters are to be read as a unit. Everyone has their time and their say, their archetypes and their nuances, and I’ve given them space to have full selves in a freedom they deserve.
On October 12, 2022, at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Drs. Saidiya Hartman and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discussed Hartman’s seminal text Scenes of Subjection. Dr. Taylor asked Dr. Hartman to speak to the recent mode of saying “enslaved” when referring to slaves, calling this motivation a “softening of our understanding of what slavery was.” Hartman’s response encapsulates my own feelings: “I think people want to maintain the idea of the dignity of the enslaved and that Black life isn’t simply totally exhausted by the category of slave. To me, to say slave isn’t to exhaust those practices; it’s just to name the structural relationship.” As for my decision to use “enslaved African” versus “slave” versus “enslaved,” I do not fall into the camp that believes the word “slave” takes away from the lives of those who were slaves/enslaved.
My use of “enslaved African” is to point to the diffusion that is diaspora. I use both “slave” and “enslaved” interchangeably as nouns throughout the book, choosing one over the other usually for aural reasons. I use “enslaved” as an adjective, as in “enslaved cook.”
“So-called master” is a critique of coloniality, not a denial that those who were called “master” had power over their slaves.
Chapter 2: The phrase “and now even the hollow is gone” is a nod at Janice N. Harrington’s poetry collection titled Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (BOA Editions, 2007).
Chapter 8: Eloko (plural Biloko) is a dwarf-like creature that lives in rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are sometimes described as envious of the living and deeply greedy regarding their treasures. Differing from my own interpretation, biloko live in hollow trees that they disguise with vegetation, leaping onto unaware travelers. They are known to wear small bells that can cast a hypnotic spell on prey, making prey easier to devour whole. Magic protection, such as a charm, could protect against this sound. Along with the bell, biloko are known to have childlike voices used to deceive potential victims.
Chapter 18: “ ‘You’ve known places,’ Frances said. ‘We all know somewhere inside ourselves we never thought we’d know. Dusky places. Places more ancient than God’ ” is a nod to Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Chapter 21: The story about Here and There that closes this chapter is my take on a traditional tale about Eshu-Elegba. For more information, please see “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu-Elegba, the Yoruba Trickster. Definition and Interpretation in Yoruba Iconography” by Joan Wescott, published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 32, no. 4 (October 1962): 336–54, https://doi.org/10.2307/1157438.
About the Author
Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at New York University.
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Phillip B. Williams, Ours
