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In the author's note to her award-winning Brown Girl Dreaming (2014),1 Jacqueline Woodson describes how many of her older family members "have made their . . . journey to the next place." She could not literally walk the roads of her childhood with them as she wrote the book, but, as she journeyed metaphorically through her memories of the South, "it felt as though each of them was with me." It is easy to see that Woodson links the presence of her departed loved ones to remembrance: "they're all deeply etched now, into memory" (323). What I'd like to explore here, however, is the way in which her collection of poems continually evokes images of ghosts: the dearly departed are present, though not as living, tangible people. Woodson's text works to "dissect fraught . . . psyches" (Mabura 206) and might therefore be read as belonging to the body of work identified as the Gothic.2
What's at Stake: The Implications of Categorizing Woodson's Text as "Gothic"
Ghost imagery is not typically associated with nonfiction life writing; however, thinking back on history requires thinking about the dead. Therefore, writing in the genre of verse biography-even more than writing standard biography and autobiography-might make authors especially prone to conjuring up ghosts, hauntings, and spectrality: metaphorical connections between memory and spirits of the past lie close at hand, and the barrier between the past and the present seems easily transgressible.3 Robert Sullivan's Captain Cook in the Underworld (2013), for example, employs the Orpheus myth and thus evokes the spirits and specters of Hades; one of Barry Hill's poetry collections is titled Ghosting William Buckley (1993); in "The angel of death, Dublin," poet Libby Hart describes an ill man who
looked keen into my eyes
like a ghost who sees its future.
It was then that I thought that death
Grows inside of him like a talent.4
It seems more striking, however, for such an alliance to be found in children's and young adult literature, where ghosts are typically relegated to fantasy narratives and books about the supernatural. When the gothic mode is employed, it is habitually associated with the scary and the traditionally macabre, with mystery and awe. Chloé Buckley identifies a broad "postmillennial upsurge in gothic children's...