Michael Hicks's Reviews > The Reformatory

Tananarive Due's The Reformatory launches readers into Jim Crow-era Florida of the 1950s for a powerful shock of historical horror. Due is entirely unflinching in her portrayal of American racism, and it's a potent reminder of both how far we've come and how little we've traveled forward since then. The South's Jim Crow laws and the legal discrimination it set forth, along with our disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples and Filipinos, were studied in the 1930s by Nazi Germany and helped to inspire and lay the groundwork for the Holocaust. America's always been Number One at being a racist nation, which is why so many of our lawmakers and school boards scramble to ban the teaching of actual American history, even as our laws changed in the years since the civil rights movement.

We may no longer have separate drinking fountains or Whites Only movie theaters, but we've maintained serious imbalances in judicial sentencings and given police carte blanche to murder Black Americans for such heinous crimes as sleeping in their own apartment at 2AM, or talking on their cell phone in their backyard, or for reporting a burglary of their home, or reading a book in their car, or changing the tire of their car on the side of the street, or for simply "appearing" threatening or for talking back to an officer. When Nazi-lover Donald Trump, who has encouraged Black protestors to be beaten at his rallies, promises to Make America Great Again, it is to these ideals of racist American history that he and his Cro-MAGAnon followers yearn for.

And if you've been reading this review and whining to yourself that I'm "being too political" or that I'm just "woke," well, brother, you ain't gonna make it very far with Due's book at all. The Reformatory, you see, isn't just political -- it's honest. Due grounds this ghost story firmly in its historical roots and doesn't shy away from the discomfort that era should provoke in her readers. 1950s Florida is a racist and rotten swamp, and at the center of it is 15-year-old Robert Stephens and his sister Gloria. Robbie has been sentenced to serve six months at the Gracetown School for Boys for the heinous and life-threatening crime of having kicked a white boy in the shin while defending his sister's honor. That white boy's Klan-connected father also pulls a few strings to make sure that Robbie is viciously flogged while in detainment by the reformatory's overseer, Haddock. Haddock, back in the 1920s, set fire to a building on the School as punishment for those boys living inside, killing dozens and keeping his involvement secret. His victims, though, have continued to haunt the reformatory and only a few of the boys, like Robbie, can see them. Eventually, his ability to spot these haints draws Haddock's attention, and that's when Robbie's troubles truly begin.

Lest one wager that while the world outside the Gracetown School for Boys may be unfair, there must be some common ground amongst the boys sentenced there, right? Yeah, no. The school, like everything else, is segregated, and while the Black boys are driven like slaves and beaten regularly, the white side has swimming pools and train rides. Like everything else in America, there exists two worlds, one for Blacks and one for whites, and Gracetown is a microcosm of American society at large. A white boy kicking another white boy would just be boys being boys, but a Black 15-year-old kicking a white boy puts a target on his back and his family's back, as well, summoning forth the ire of the Ku Klux Klan and their torches and pitchforks, and disobeying the schoolmaster could mean being mauled to death by dogs.

For Due, this isn't just American history. It's family history. The fictional Gracetown and its reformatory is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, and her Robbie Stephens is a stand-in for the real-life Robert Stephens, her uncle that she never knew and who her family kept secret, who died in 1937 as a victim of the Dozier School, one of nearly a hundred boys killed and buried in an unmarked grave there. Dozier became notorious for its century-long campaign of abuse, rape, and cruelty inflicted upon the boys sent there, and Due has woven these real-life atrocities into Gracetown's background.

Lest one worry that The Reformatory is all doom and gloom, rest assured that Due does not wallow in the unsavory. It can be a challenging and heartbreaking read, but not one that is so heavily mired in the graphic depiction of human evil that it becomes a truly miserable experience to endure like, say, Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. In fact, Due mostly shies away from the truly awful and heinous, approaching Haddock's depravities in roundabout ways, offering up hints without delving into the deeper, darker aspects of it all. We know what Haddock does to those boys in the shed with a broomstick, for instance, without having to be led inside ourselves and forced to experience the hurt and humiliation up close and personal. She focuses, instead, on the more mundane aspects of American racism circa the 1950s -- the way courts and police behave toward a person of color, the scrutiny of white eyes on Black bodies, commentary on the NAACP and Black unionization efforts, and the like -- and lets the mere existence of so many of Gracetown's ghosts do the heavy lifting through implication. We know from all the restless dead that violence has been done, and continues to be done under the horrors of Jim Crow and the KKK. So, so, so much violence.

Jim Crow-era history is American history, and its legacy continues to live on even if its laws no longer do. We see the aftereffects of it damn near every night on the TV news, in stories of officer-involved shootings, in Trump's rallies and his demonization of People of Color and immigrants, in the cheering and jeering of his moronic, red-hatted faithful, and the zealous, full-throated embrace of Christian conservatives for authoritarian white privilege. In two weeks, Americans will be voting to determine if we should continue attempting to make small strides forward, or throw it all away and turn the clock back to a more calamitous and rascist time and make the central issues of The Reformatory the enduring landmark of America's legacy. It's a frightening time, but Due's work couldn't be more timely. Or more necessary.