Horace had no alternative but to retreat into a world of guilt and confusion, not understanding the reasons for his exile.
When we first meet Horace Cross, a Black teenager living in the small town of Tims Creek in Eastern North Carolina, he's planning on transforming himself into an animal. He considers his options carefully, and concludes that he'd like to be a bird; perusing the bird guide at the local library he chooses a red-tailed hawk. At midnight, he sneaks out of his grandfather's house to perform the rite he's discovered in reading, one which requires, among other things, the blood of an infant, for which he has substituted a kitten. But he fails to be transformed, and dejected in the rain, he takes up his grandfather's gun and begins to wander nude around Tims Creek. Though the rite hasn't worked, it's unleashed something: a host of demons that propel Horace forward, making him face the agonies of his life. Chief among these: being gay in a community where his desires constitute a mortal sin.
Horace's story is interspersed with sections narrated by his cousin, the reverend Jimmy Cross, who was the last person to see Horace on the night of the demons. We know, from Jimmy's narration, that Horace committed suicide that night, unable to bear his guilt. Horace's death is just one of the failures haunting Jimmy; his words of conciliation--"You're normal; you'll change"--having been worse than useless. Other failures include the death of his beautiful, radical wife, Anne, and his inability to reconcile two of his elderly relatives. (The plot, such as it is, of Jimmy's sections mostly involves taking his elderly aunt to see another relative, Asa, on his deathbed, and the bitter spitefulness that emerges from the woman's confrontation with death.) Jimmy longs to be a good pastor, to shepherd and to guide, but where is the wisdom that might have saved Horace? Is it in Tims Creek, or does one have to look elsewhere?
This weekend we visited the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, which is a single room lined with framed photographs in a genteel house in genteel Southern Pines. I was pleased to see there the face of Randall Kenan, who died rather young a few years back, along with the faces of a few other authors I have loved but who are not well known, like novelist John Ehle and poet A. R. Ammons. What struck me about Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits was how it emerges from the tradition of the Southern Gothic. It's got one foot in the ordinary rhythms of Black life in Eastern N.C., and another in the wizards and comic book heroes that make up Horace's reading material. The demons that haunt him include a pair of eyeless women and a bison wearing a dress. As Horace wanders through Tims Creek, they chip away at his sanity, and ultimately he loses himself, succumbing utterly to the grotesque visions that his guilt and shame bring forth.
On one level, A Visitation of Spirits is a loving evocation of a culture: the celebration of a hog being killed for barbecue, the simple country church, the binding of strong family ties. But it also poses hard questions about the difficulty of being gay, or out of any kind of ordinary, in small towns like Tims Creek. Kenan makes explicit connections to the Civil Rights movement; suggesting that the strong moral clarity that defeated Jim Crow has faltered in the case of men like Horace. I don't think it's a stretch to read the hapless Pastor Cross as an image of the Black church, diminished in its post-Civil Rights era, unable to provide guidance for those who need it most. "It is good to remember," the last lines of the novel read, "for too many forget."
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