Social obligation and an ex-boyfriend once landed me at a lineage society dinner in Charleston, South Carolina. The exact association doesn’t matter; pick one, and you’re probably right. Beneath stern portraits of Confederate generals with epic facial hair, white people ate rubbery chicken and celebrated the fictions they willed into history. Anyone with money and connections enough to join that particular society owed both to the blood and sweat of enslaved people. No one acknowledged it. And as I scanned the dining room of that vaunted Charleston club, I realized that every member of the waitstaff was Black. I kept my mouth shut as a server took my plate. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I hope y’all spit in our food. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a hundred and thirty-years after the War ended, that roomful of white people continued to enact the crimes of their ancestors. It’s no wonder Southern literature lends itself to narratives about generational trauma.
Southerners pass down their legacy of violence and repression like genetic inheritance. Regardless of ethnicity, we live in the shadow of our historical past: oppressor or oppressed, perpetrator or victim, and often both (Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire notes that colonialism “decivilizes” the colonizer, inevitably corrupting and ensavaging those responsible for it. While the nature and severity of violence differs, colonizers are not immune to colonialism’s ravages). Since our historical past continually intrudes upon the present, horror lurks behind every Southern story, no matter how innocent. We love to forget it. But even at their most repressed and liminal, those horrors leave smeared, bloody fingerprints behind. When I tell Richmonders that I write Southern Gothic, they imagine Spanish moss, mint juleps, and gracefully ruined plantations. They forget that down here, beauty and brutality are close as brothers.
Substitute “love” for beauty, and it’s obvious why Southern Gothic remains particularly prone to examining familial trauma. In his seminal, problematic treatise, The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash lingers on the Southern propensity for horrifying, sudden acts of violence, which he attributes to our frontier roots; paradoxically, that tendency exists alongside an addiction to redemption. We sin on Saturday so we can be saved on Sunday. Those grand, conflicting impulses create ripe conditions for the powerful to abuse the powerless, including vulnerable ethnic and cultural minorities, the poor, or women and children.
Add our tendency to view people not as discrete entities, but as members of complex societal webs—the quintessential Southern question remains Who are your people? Our past may be violent and repressive, but we remain in its thrall. Cash also notes our collective obsession with genealogy, and though The Mind of the South was published in 1941, the proliferation of lineage societies shows that they remain a collective pastime on par with SEC football. Genealogy might be “a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead and to one another, the past to the present and the present to what is to come,” as Thomas Laqueur says in the London Review of Books, but its inclusion also “entail[s] exclusion.” Genealogies enforce racial oppression as well as rank classism.
If love and brutality, violence and courtesy, sin and redemption are close Southern kin, is it any wonder that our literature examines their persistence in the personal, intimate present? The microcosm of an abusive family mirrors the macrocosm of Southern history. In my own Southern Gothic books, I write circles around my abusive past; the personal stands in for the collective. Ever since Ellen Glasgow dismissively coined the genre’s name, functional families have been rare in Southern Gothic; other than Atticus Finch, a good dad is hard to find. The genre has a rich tradition of dysfunctional clans whose offspring grapple with personal, societal, and historical demons.
Consciously or unconsciously, Southerners remain captive to ancestral sin; the past is our wound, and the past is our anchor. While historical trauma is a hallmark of the genre, some books deal with the ways those horrors are passed down through generational trauma. As William Faulkner says in Absalom, Absalom!, this trauma becomes “a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory … an entailed birthright passed from father to son.” Faulkner’s a master at tracing that madness, and so is Toni Morrison, but if you’ve read this far, you probably already know that. Here are five Southern Gothic books about generational trauma that perhaps you haven’t read yet.
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
If all you know about this book is its movie adaptation starring Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, the novel itself will surprise you. Much of Pat Conroy’s writing is an attempt to exorcise his childhood trauma, and The Prince of Tides stands as perhaps his most artistic and eloquent depiction of dysfunction. Conroy often copped to his obsession with OG Southern Gothic author Thomas Wolfe; the proof is in the prose. If you’re a fan of spare, concrete language, stay far away. This book elevates the Southern love affair with language into a fetish.
The Prince of Tides tells the story of Tom Wingo, whose estranged, possibly schizophrenic twin sister Savannah long ago fled their South Carolina home for New York City. A celebrated poet, Savannah survives a suicide attempt, and when Tom arrives in New York to look after her, he discovers that her seemingly incoherent ramblings are anything but—instead, “she’s screaming out her autobiography.” He agrees to decode those ravings for Savannah’s psychiatrist, and the narrative becomes a nonlinear history of the Wingo family at the hands of a violent father and a narcissistic mother.
The novel examines the roots of Tom and Savannah’s trauma, both familial and societal; they were doomed, Tom suggests, not only by their parents but also by the “fragrant prison” of the small-town South. Trigger warnings abound, including on-page child abuse, misogyny, sexual assault, and self-harm. Conroy nails maternal narcissism so well that my own mother confiscated the book so she wouldn’t tell on herself. A stunningly beautiful read, but a heart-wrenching one.
A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
The 2020 loss of queer North Carolina author Randall Kenan dealt a severe blow to Southern letters. A gay writer who fled the South for New York City, Kenan was known for blending speculative and literary fiction. Both his short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and A Visitation of Spirits could properly be called horror, though in his obituary, The New York Times preferred “magical realism.”
A Visitation of Spirits uses nonlinear narrative and experimental structure to explore marginalization, queer identity, and historical trauma. A sixteen-year-old, queer Black teenager, Horace Cross has been forced to hide his identity from his fundamentalist, small-town family. To escape, he wants to turn himself into a bird—echoing the folkloric tradition in which enslaved people take flight to escape their bondage. Syncretizing old-time religion, Black spiritual tradition, comic books, and science fiction, Horace concocts a transformation ritual. Spoiler alert: it goes badly.
At the same time, Horace’s second cousin Jimmy Greene drives two relatives to the deathbed of a third. A small-town minister and high school principal, Jimmy reflects on familial life as he attempts to reconcile his relatives. While Horace deals with his personal demons, Jimmy examines the macroforces of generational and historical trauma as the novel spirals to an explosive close.
A Visitation of Spirits discusses the dual marginalization of being Black and queer in the American South, especially when coupled with the weight of familial and societal expectation. Kenan also spends plenty of time critiquing Christianity; the novel is laden with the detritus of religious trauma. A beautiful horror of a book.
A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli
When I discovered Piccirilli was a native New Yorker, I was stunned. A Choir of Ill Children is his only true Southern Gothic work, but the novel reminds me of Faulkner in all his nonlinear, literary glory (though Piccirilli’s sentences are far easier to follow). Piccirilli pairs Flannery O’Connor’s affection for the grotesque with occasional doses of Harry Crews’ meanness, and the result is a gloriously bizarre novel with a core of stark beauty.
With his parents gone, Thomas has inherited his father’s position as the big man in the backwater swamp town of Kingdom Come, as well as The Mill, a crumbling mansion, and care of his conjoined triplet brothers, who share a brain. Witches are trying to manipulate him. He’s haunted by a murder which may or may not have happened. His best friend babbles prophecy (usually while naked), and he’s pining for the girl he loved as a child. As Thomas rambles through Kingdom Come, he tries to cope with both his personal demons and his family responsibilities. Hang tight and pay attention; Piccirilli is a master, and this plot does come together.
We move in spasms, says the first line of this novel—observation and announcement, a comment on both the book’s characters and structure. Thomas does what he must because the forces of family, town, and Southern society will not allow him to do anything else. The novel’s conclusion feels as inevitable as the tides, and the residents of Kingdom Come—including Thomas—are shackled by their past. If O’Connor loved the bizarre, Piccirilli positively worshipped it.
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
A native of the South Carolina Upstate, queer author Dorothy Allison was born to a fifteen-year-old mother. Bastard Out of Carolina, a 1992 finalist for the National Book Award, deals with a fictionalized version of Allison’s physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather; it’s been banned in numerous states for its graphic content. Allison says that, “The novel is mean, meant to rip off all that façade of imagination and lies we place around sexual violence and children.” It’s a political novel, but it’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful work that illuminates the struggles of the poorest of poor white folks in the American South.
Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright is born (like Allison) to a fifteen-year-old mother, and when hospital authorities won’t accept the family’s lies about a fake husband, winds up with “illegitimate” stamped at the bottom of her birth certificate. Her mother Annie does her best, but marries “Daddy Glenn” when her daughter is around five. Soon after, he begins physically and sexually assaulting Bone. Annie knows and doesn’t know; she deeply believes that her husband will change. Of course, he never will.
This complex picture of generational trauma, poverty, and family dynamics in the 1950s is a Southern feminist scream. “Girl children in my family are taught to endure and survive and not to fight back,” Allison once told NPR. She wrote for herself, but she speaks for all of us. Laced with beautiful prose, the author captures the beauty and horror of life in the South like few others. Serious trigger warnings, but a necessary tale that gives voice to those who have struggled to survive the terrible forces of poverty and abuse.
Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington
As a South Carolinian, I thought I’d grown jaded to the bizarreness of life in the South, but Dennis Covington’s true account of snake handling churches left me jaw-dropped. A city boy from Birmingham, Covington attended the murder trial of a preacher accused of attempted murder by rattlesnake at the behest of The New York Times. What follows is an examination of the social and historical forces behind a religious culture in which people pick up snakes, drink strychnine, and prophesy in the name of God.
Covington admits in a new afterward that he didn’t intend to write New Journalism (a form of writing popularized by Southern great Tom Wolfe, in which literary style and subjectivity insert themselves into traditional reporting). But after he attends his first snake handling service, the heady danger reels him in. Soon, preachers and congregants are calling him “Brother Dennis,” and as he discovers his own family ties to the Holiness practice, he falls deeper and deeper into the bizarre world. Covington makes this descent seem almost logical, or at least understandable.
The poverty and alienation of Appalachian folk come down from the mountains is never over-dramatized, but Covington makes a compelling case for the generational trauma at the root of snake handling practices. With characters like “Prophetess Daisy,” and twins “Burma and Erma,” this story could easily have been reduced to caricature; Covington never takes the bait. Instead, his self-involvement gives the book authenticity. And while the book ostensibly focuses on the (literal) agony and ecstasy of people who handle serpents, it ends up being about the author, about faith, and about the generational trauma which drives people to clutch it tight.
It must be 25 years since I read The Prince of Tides, but I’ve never forgotten it. As I recall, the prose is worth the ugliness. Thanks for the reminder–time for another read, I think.