Let the Dead Bury the Dead

In Tim's Creek, Kenan's imagined eastern Carolina hamlet, the past lingers as a constant beneath the surface and, on occasion, breaks through to assert itself upon the present. Founded by runaway slaves, Tim's Creek exists somewhere between rural idyll and forgotten backwater, but through Kenan's deft excavation of Southern life it becomes a place of myth and national reckoning. A three-year-old child becomes a vessel for the voices of the dead; A demagogue preacher raises an army from the grave; A mother is undone by a drowning that may have been no accident; A pig speaks. Moving with grace and traditional folk cadence, scholarly oral history and lyric realism, Randal Kenan's LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD gathers an unforgettable chorus of Black and white, rich and poor, the living and the long-departed. By turns mythic, comic and devastating, Kenan's prose summons a community where the supernatural is simply another fact of life, and where the past presses ceaselessly against the present.