Julian Randall’s The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Shit is a dazzling ghost story that braids intimate narratives with cultural commentary to explore the author’s own past, present and future.
Randall, a Chicago-born poet and author, opens The Dead Don’t Need Reminding in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is attending an M.F.A. program. There, living in the South for the first time in his life, he reflects on the origins of plantation-style architecture in the university’s modern-day fraternity houses and endures violent encounters with racists. He seeks out the history of his Southern-born great-grandfather who “fled his home under threat of tar and feather.” Throughout, he riffs on Miles Morales, Jordan Peele, “BoJack Horseman” and many more cultural touchstones to tell stories of his lineage, of himself and of the places that shaped his family.
These are the “stories that shape us. The stories we turn to out of scarcity, the cousins we make out of characters.” While there are tender notes in his writing, Randall never avoids the violence of our American history and present, writing that “white supremacy is a death cult, a religion for the feral.” And, “America is a gaping mouth with an insatiable appetite for Black suffering, Black labor, Black cool, Black flex, Black silence, Black death.”
This is a story not just about a Black man surviving a visit to the Deep South, but about him staying alive long enough to learn where he came from. Our narrator invites us to witness his vulnerability and imagination, shepherding us through time and place from Chicago to the South and back again as he shares his research into his lineage and the depths of his depression. Through smart cultural critique to rich poetic imagery, Randall’s writing moves at a quick pace that reflects his city roots; but when he slows down to describe the lands and people that haunt him, we witness a gifted Southern storyteller. And so we gather on the porch, waiting to hear this story, low and soft, drifting through the kudzu.
