Telling ghost stories: Collateral consequences,haunting,and a criminology of fiction

Presence/Absence

Examining Roy and Celestial’s marriage through the lens of haunting reveals how the liminal space between presence and absence can begin as a meaningful connection that later deteriorates, turns disruptive, and renders each character a fragile, ghostly presence. In the early months of Roy’s imprisonment, he and Celestial’s letters express the ways they are haunting, and haunted by, one another’s presence/absence. Writing to Celestial, Roy asks that she “bear down on the pen” so he can run his fingers over the ridges of her writing after the lights are out (45). Responding to Roy, Celestial asks if he can sense her prayers for him because when she prays, she can so clearly “picture . . . the way [he was] when [they] were last together, all the way down to the freckle over [his] eyebrow” (47). His ghostly presence during her prayers is echoed in the way Roy works to conjure Celestial’s presence at night despite her physical absence. He writes, “if I concentrate, I can touch your body with my mind. I wonder if you can feel it in your sleep” (59). While not physically with one another, they each work to summon the ghostly presence of the other and reject the stark absence imposed upon them by Roy’s imprisonment.

Roy reflects on this liminal intimacy when he writes, “[i]t’s a shame that it took me being locked up, stripped of everything that I ever cared about, for me to realize that it is possible to touch someone without touching them. I can make myself feel closer to you than I felt when we were actually lying in bed next to each other” (60). This act of connection, of “leav[ing his] body,” is “exhaust[ing]” and Roy asks Celestial to reciprocate by touching him “with [her] mind” so he can “see how it feels” (60). For Roy, being with Celestial in this phantom space is better than nothing, but when she does not return his letter, the fragile nature of their spectral connection begins to be revealed.

Rather than reaching for Roy with her imagination, Celestial focuses on keeping him present through her work as an artist. She compiles a series of portraits she has made of Roy over the years, preparing the images for a potential showcase. Eventually responding to Roy’s letters, she justifies her absent correspondence with his presence in her art: “working all day with images of you makes me feel like I’m spending time with you and sometimes I forget to write. Please forgive. And know that you’re on my mind” (61). Celestial feels Roy’s presence in and through these portraits despite his physical absence. The dolls she later creates in his image further fill this interstitial space. As miniature doppelgangers of Roy (61, 107, 228), the dolls comfort Celestial in the early years of his absence. For instance, she dresses a doll for Roy’s mother in Roy’s baby clothes, “in the clothes [his] mother had intended for her grandson to wear” and works for “three months to get the chin right” (61–62).

As time passes, the intimacy of this liminal space is less like connective tissue that binds them to one another, and more like something uncertain and hollowed out. This uncertainty sustains itself across the novel, causing Roy and Celestial to question the reality of their marriage. As Roy notes, they were only “properly married for a year and a half” when he was taken away (5). On numerous occasions, Celestial gestures at the precarity of a marriage that exists in a liminal space: “I’ve done my best to be married without actually being a wife” (82); “[w]hat we have here isn’t a marriage . . . we are not sharing [our lives]” (82); “I feel like I’ve been playing at marriage” (153). Even their love—if it exists—has a ghostly presence that Celestial describes as “dormant” and “[a]sleep inside of [her]”, the question of its reality hidden in the palimpsest of Roy’s letters: “like he wrote it down, erased it, and scribbled over it” (111). Celestial’s ambivalence is shared by Roy who wonders if his key will work in the lock of their Atlanta home (234) when he is eventually released because she “may not be [his] wife, but [he] is still her husband” (272). Because of their experiences with incarceration, this uncertain space takes on a kind of permanence, as if replacing the permanence of their marriage: Roy reflects, “[f]or the rest of our lives there would be something between me and Celestial. Neither of us would ever enjoy the perfect peace of nothing” (297). Celestial and Roy have to learn to live with the haunting of Roy’s incarceration, the “something between” them whose afterlife extends far beyond his release.

As their marriage struggles, Celestial and Roy find the spectral presence of one another mutating from uncertainty to a haunting absence. These hauntings manifest as ghostly versions of both characters. Celestial, for example, is haunted by a “Roy-ghost” (228) who “show[s] [him]self in the guise of other men” (224). Celestial sees the Roy-ghost so many times over the course of his imprisonment that she “become[s] accustomed to the stuttered breath, the dancing hairs on [her] suddenly cold arms and neck” and concludes that “[y]ou can live with ghosts” (224). So frequent are these manifestations that when Roy actually appears outside Celestial’s shop in Atlanta, she assumes he is a Roy-ghost: “I had learned to suppress the startle, but this one caught me unaware because he actually looked like Roy” (228). Celestial’s familiarity with this Roy-ghost helps her sense Roy’s actual presence in her home when he is released from prison “early.” Rather than a comfortable sensation, she experiences his unexpected arrival “the way the tiniest cramp in your womb lets you know to get ready”; the “skin on [her] arms puckered and pilled, sending rapid sparks crisscrossing along the pathways in [her] blood” (235).

Later, Celestial makes sense of the uncanny feelings Roy conjured upon his return by admitting that she “had forgotten he was real,” that he had become an “idea” that “didn’t count” (283). Convincing herself there were laws limiting their responsibility to one another—that is, they had been apart longer than they had been together—Celestial recalls hoping that she “would become a memory to him in the way he was a memory for [her]” (283). Believing that a “ghost is a memory made solid” (235), Celestial wants her and Roy to remain ghosts to each other, occupying a now familiar liminal—rather than tangible—reality.

Roy also comes to experience Celestial’s flickering presence as more of a loss than a comfort. Just as Celestial would see the Roy-ghost briefly inhabit the bodies of other men, so too does Roy see a young Celestial in the body of Tamar, Celestial’s shop assistant. Watching from outside her shop, Roy mistakes Tamar for Celestial “standing on a ladder, attaching a winged doll to the ceiling” (232). The ghostly memory evaporates quickly and he realizes the “girl was too young” although she “looked like Celestial did when [he] first met her” (232). The version of Celestial that Roy sees in Tamar is the one he has carried with him across their five years apart, “the woman [he] held in [his] mind when [he] slept on a dirty prison mattress” (242). In this way, Tamar is “more like Celestial than Celestial herself” (242), more real to Roy because of her similarity to the spectral manifestation he has summoned so many times. Enhancing the uncanny nature of Celestial’s “look-alike” (233) is the “winged doll” that “favor[s] Roy” hanging angelically above as the ghostly presence of the baby Celestial chose to abort after discovering her pregnancy following Roy’s arrest (228). Here, the doll conjures both a lost future/Future (the name Roy intended for their child) and a distant past that haunts Roy as he struggles through his liminal present.

When Roy and Celestial reunite as more than ghostly apparitions, they return to one another changed and echoing absences that they each must mourn. Celestial forecasts this change in an early letter to Roy: “when something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It’s like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It’s the same thing, but it’s not the same at all” (41). Roy notes that Celestial was not how he “remember[ed] her . . . She was different now, sadder” (239). He “want[s] her back the way she was when [he] met her,” when they were “together on all levels” (261–262). Roy’s grief reflects the difficult reality of their situation—a reality also felt by Celestial as she views a changed Roy. Exchanging letters in the Epilogue, Celestial describes seeing Roy’s writing as like a “brief encounter with a friend you know you may never see again,” a reminder of “how far [they] have traveled away from each other” (304).

(In)visibility

Imprisonment continues to haunt Roy and Celestial’s marriage in the way it simultaneously summons invisibility and unwanted visibility—a duplexity scholars refer to as hyper(in)visibility (Petermon, 2014). The concept of hyper(in)visibility highlights the ways that Black people in the United States are often seen as—or made visible through—racist stereotypes that eclipse—and render invisible—Black subjectivity (Petermon, 2014). Hyper(in)visibility thereby articulates how white supremacy relies upon harmful stereotypes (e.g. the criminalblackman or the Angry Black Woman) to maintain control (Mowatt et al., 2013; Russell-Brown, 1998). As characters, Roy and Celestial directly engage with the pressures and impacts of these stereotypes, the effects of which haunt and obscure their perceptions of one another.

For Roy and Celestial, experiences of hyper(in)visibility are repeatedly characterized as inevitable. Writing to Roy early in the novel, Celestial recalls the story of her mother who, as a young girl, was referred to by a white child as a “baby maid.” Here, Celestial’s mother experiences hyper(in)visibility as the white child’s statement erases her subjectivity behind the unwanted visibility of a racist stereotype. Resultantly, Celestial’s grandparents move their family to Atlanta in an attempt to alter what she refers to as “just that inevitability” (63). Ironically, Celestial confesses to Roy that she was unable to escape a similarly inevitable, albeit intrusive, line of thinking: upon seeing a little boy that looked like Roy a “voice in [her] head that was not [her] own said, A baby prisoner” (63). Horrified, Celestial processes the feeling that Roy’s incarceration was inevitable by making “a diminutive pair of prison blues” that transforms one of her dolls from a “toy” to “art” (64).

The doll’s positive reception provides one of the earliest points of conflict within Celestial and Roy’s marriage. Specifically, when interviewed after accepting an award for her artwork, Celestial decides not to speak about Roy’s incarceration and the origin of the “baby prisoner” doll. Here, Celestial finds herself in a bind where she feels mentioning Roy could negatively impact her career, but not mentioning Roy erases his experience and harms their marriage. Trying to explain her omission to Roy, she writes: “[w]hat is happening with you is so personal that I didn’t want to see it in the newspaper” (64). Celestial understands mentioning Roy inevitably conjures stereotypes of the criminalblackman that not only eclipse his subjectivity as her wrongfully convicted husband, but also her subjectivity as a burgeoning artist. Celestial’s awareness of this reality informs her decision to keep what is happening to Roy “personal” (i.e. hidden). In other words, Celestial knows that mentioning Roy means they will both be “looked at [but] not seen” (Petermon, 2014: viii).

Celestial’s choice initiates a dialogue between the couple about the core differences in how Roy’s incarceration is impacting each of them. Roy, hurt, accuses Celestial of being “ashamed” of him and “cross[ing] a line” (65); in turn, she admits that “[m]aybe it was selfish, but [she] wanted to have [her] moment to be an artist, not the prisoner’s wife” (67). Roy fails to see Celestial’s perspective until his biological father Walter explains that being a prisoner’s wife and a Black woman means Celestial is constantly contending with stereotypes that cast her as having “fifty-eleven babies with fifty-eleven daddies; that [she’s] got welfare checks coming in fifty-eleven people’s names” (67). Black women experience hyper(in)visibility at the intersection of race and gender, the result of which is not only a systemic invisibility but a hypervisibility in the shape of stereotypes such as the promiscuous Jezebel (Mowatt et al., 2013). Lorde (1984) describes this reality when she writes: “[w]ithin this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism” (42).

Celestial articulates her experience to Andre in detail: visiting the prison is “different for women. They treat you like you’re coming to visit your pimp . . . like you should know better. Like you’re a delusional victim. If you try to fix yourself up and look respectable, it’s worse in a way. They treat you like an idiot because it’s clear you could do better if you weren’t such a fucking fool” (157). Explaining the impact of this hyper(in)visibility to Roy, Celestial ends their marriage in a letter, writing: “I’ve got to change the way I’m doing things, or I won’t have any spirit left. I’ll support you. I’ll visit you. I just can’t do it as your wife” (84; emphasis added). Haunted by the hyper(in)visibility she experiences in relation to Roy’s imprisonment, Celestial uses what little control she has to distance herself from him.

Celestial’s ability to resist certain experiences of hyper(in)visibility illuminates Roy’s inability to do the same, particularly when it comes to his innocence. Roy’s hyper(in)visibility is the very reason his accuser—a white woman—finds him interchangeable with other Black men, including the unknown man who raped her. Roy’s invisible innocence haunts his marriage to Celestial who writes, “even when I explain that you’re innocent, all they remember is that you’re incarcerated. Even when I tell the truth about you, the truth doesn’t get delivered. So what’s the point in bringing it up?” (66). Here, Celestial once again gestures at the inevitable bind present in Roy’s hyper(in)visibility and the way it so forcefully obscures his innocence. Although Celestial can choose to omit Roy’s story from her narrative—to resist its haunting—Roy has no choice but to struggle against the doubt conjured by his invisible innocence. Referring to Davina, for example, Roy reflects, “she said she didn’t believe that I raped that woman in the Piney Woods Inn, but isn’t there always a little seed? The second side that every story is supposed to have?” (171). This little seed of doubt haunts Roy’s every interaction and he responds to the letter where Celestial ends their marriage with a single line: “Dear Celestial, I am innocent” (84). Celestial responds with the same: “Dear Roy, I am innocent too” (84). Implied in both responses is the haunting presence of doubt and the reality that neither of them are innocent of hurting one another as they grapple with the impact of their hyper(in)visibility.

Although individual depictions of hyper(in)visibility take place throughout the novel, these depictions are ultimately expressions of how the criminal legal system in the United States systemically renders Black people (in)visible, raiding Black communities to fill prisons—a reality Roy aptly refers to as “Ameri-KKKa” (45). Roy and Celestial’s marriage is impacted by their individual choices and decisions, but the context they find themselves in also carries structural inevitabilities. For example, Celestial knows that “no Black man is really safe in America” (39), just as Roy knows incarceration does not necessarily have anything to do with “being guilty or at least being stupid . . . on that fateful night, every smart decision [he’d] made suddenly became irrelevant” (127; emphasis added). Roy recalls Walter’s wisdom too: “that’s your fate as a Black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve” (201; emphasis added). Roy’s description of that “fateful” night and Walter’s observation about a Black man’s “fate” in America echo the “inevitability” Celestial describes, further underscoring how their marriage is haunted by a criminal legal system that systematically seeks to render Black people (in)visible.

Disrupted temporalities

Imprisonment further haunts Roy and Celestial’s marriage by disrupting their experience of a shared linear temporality. Undoing this simultaneity, Roy’s imprisonment forces them to struggle across a seemingly incommensurable temporal divide. Below, we consider how the characters experience premonitions, disparities akin to time dilation (time passing at different rates), and differing perspectives on their temporal realities as disruptions that complicate their ability to be together.

On the day of Roy’s arrest, he and Celestial experience premonitions that foreshadow Roy’s incarceration and suggest the couple might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both characters look back on the events of that evening throughout the book, clearly haunted by the ways they ignored or dismissed these premonitions. Remembering the drive to Eloe, Roy recalls Celestial identifying an eerie feeling akin to “[leaving] the stove on” (13). Unable to shake the feeling, she says, “I don’t feel good about this, Roy. Let’s go home” (14). Roy disagrees, too focused on their plans. In retrospect, however, he acknowledges the presence of signs warning them to alter their course: for example, Olive mixing the iced tea with salt rather than sugar; Roy’s high school diploma falling off the wall, cracking the glass (18). Consequently, “looking back on it, [feels] like watching a horror flick and wondering why the characters are so determined to ignore the danger signs. When a spectral voice says, GET OUT, you should do it. But in real life, you don’t know that you’re in a scary movie” (14). Even though Celestial advocates for listening to these “danger signs” and “spectral voices,” believing in their presence, Roy can only perceive their legitimacy in retrospect. Still, Celestial mistakes “passion for premonition” on their last night, experiencing an overflow of emotion that “filled [her] eyes and closed [her] throat” (33). Celestial later sees ignorance in her interpretation of these emotions: “I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they happen” (32–33). In the moment, however, Celestial and Roy ignore the echoes of “an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its clapper” (33–34).

During Roy’s imprisonment, time begins to move differently for the couple as they occupy often incommensurable worlds. This temporal disruption is articulated in their letters to one another. Not only are the letters undated (resulting in disorientation for the reader), but they are clustered almost entirely at the end of section one, Bridge Music, save for three in the Epilogue. As a result, the letters are experienced as out of joint with Celestial’s visits to the prison that appear within the novel’s alternating first-person narration: “by the time you get this letter, I will have already been to visit” (47); “I know that you’re mad at me. You have a right to be frustrated. But I hope that we don’t waste our visit being angry. When we sit down together, our time is precious” (79). Further, Roy and Celestial’s letters are often delayed, contributing to their experiences of living within differing temporal realities: “they said you can’t receive mail for at least a month. Still, I’ll write to you every night” (41); “I got your letter yesterday—did you get mine?” (57); “by the time you get this letter . . .” (73). Here, conversations stretch far beyond their in-person counterparts, elongating conflicts that could be resolved if they were together in a shared present. Out of time with each other, Roy and Celestial’s marriage struggles to bridge these temporal disruptions.

On several occasions, Roy demonstrates comprehension of the way their worlds have come to operate under different constructions of time. From Roy’s perspective, 5 years “[i]n inside life, it wasn’t forever. It was a stretch of time with an end you could see” (133). Five years of life “inside” is somehow tenable even if it is different from “real-life time” where “[f]ive years [i]s a long time” (133). Roy has learned to accept that time is different—virtually incomparable—for those inside the prison and those outside. He reflects on the impossibility of measuring time under these circumstances noting, “[t]ime can’t always be measured with a watch or a calendar or even grains of sand” (133). Part of his understanding has been learned from Walter who never misses an opportunity to remind Roy that Celestial “has been in the world this whole time” and “[e]veryone’s life has moved forward, except yours” (124). Out of sync with the present, Roy is released from prison into a world and a marriage in which he struggles, and ultimately fails, to catch up.

For Celestial, the past haunts and disrupts her present. Specifically, thinking about the night of Roy’s arrest has become unbearable: “I still look back on that night, although not as much as I once did. How long can you live with your face twisted over your shoulder?” (28). For Celestial, thinking about the past becomes an impossible contortion. Unfortunately for their marriage, the past is not only where Roy is trapped but where he prefers to be. As Roy says to Walter: “[y]ou can’t tell me to live in the present when the past was so much better” (125). Responding to Roy’s remarks on her appearance after a visit, Celestial acknowledges her weight loss and grey hairs: “maybe that’s what you saw—time getting away” (80). Here, Celestial acknowledges the three years that have, at this point, been taken from them. Haunted by this loss and by their differing temporalities, Celestial ends their marriage in a letter:

I blame it on time, not on you or me. If we put a penny in a jar for each day we have been married, and we took a penny away for every day we’ve been apart, the jar would be depleted a long time ago. I’ve been trying to find ways to add more pennies, but our visits in that busy room at that sad table send me home with empty hands. (82)

Diverging from Roy’s experience of time as often unmeasurable (by watch, calendar, or sand), Celestial quantifies the time taken from them as pennies placed in, and removed from, a jar. Their jar has long been “depleted,” their visits at the prison counting—apparently—for little.

Even once he is released from prison, Roy is continually described as out of place in the present. When Big Roy picks him up, Roy is in the right place but at the wrong time: “‘You’re early,’ he said” (128). Roy cannot “help but smile” at this description, noting that he “didn’t even know what part of early [Big Roy] was talking about” (128). According to Hetherington (2001: 25), to “arrive before one is due” is a form of haunting and here, Roy appears where he does not belong as a spectral figure of the past come to haunt the present. Roy recognizes, however, that he is early both in the sense of the “5-day bump-up that was announced three days ago” and “putting in less than half of a 12-year bid” (128). Importantly, Roy responds with a statement that troubles the idea of a singular, linear temporality: “‘You the one who taught me that 5 min early is late’” (128). Roy has learned to think about time differently, to understand how “early” and “late” can collide.

Reuniting upon Roy’s early release in what should be a shared present, Roy and Celestial are haunted by both the past that did happen and the future(s) that did not. Celestial’s stolen future visits her in the form of “the ghost of what could’ve happened but didn’t” (230): a tall “good-looking man dressed in a tan wool coat . . . 100 percent Atlanta” (227). In Roy’s stolen future, Celestial was “the shiny door to the next level” (19). Having spent five years planning for a 12-year sentence, early release causes Roy to wonder what he “would have done differently if [he] had known that 5 years was all [he] was looking at. It was hard being behind bars when [he] turned thirty-five, but would it have been so hard if somebody told [him] that the next year [he] would be a free man?” (133). Undoubtedly, a different sentence would have resulted in a different reality—perhaps one more akin to the future he had in mind. Regardless, Roy and Celestial are unable to reconcile the difference in time they each experience(d) and the novel closes with their brief exchange of letters accepting their irreconcilable temporalities.