pulsively amassed over the years. It remains one of
the richest scholarly collections for American liter-
ary study. Van Vechten died in New York City on
December 21, 1964.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernard, Emily, ed. and introd. Remember Me to Har-
lem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van
Vechten, 1925–1964. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2001.
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan
in the 1920s. 1995. New York: Papermac, 1997.
Helbling, Mark. “Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem
Renaissance.” Negro American Literature Forum 10
(Summer 1976): 39–47.
Kellner, Bruce. Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent
Decades. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1968.
Lueders, Edward. Carl Van Vechten and the Twenties.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1955.
———. Letters of Carl Van Vechten. Edited by Bruce
Kellner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Worth, Robert F. “Nigger Heaven and the Harlem
Renaissance.” African American Review. 29, no. 3
(Fall 1995): 461–473.
Robert M. Dowling
Visitation of Spirits, A
Randall Kenan (1989)
Published by Grove Press, RANDALL KENAN’s first
novel, A Visitation of Spirits, immediately estab-
lished him as one of America’s most promising
and challenging new writers. Similar to J. CALI-
FORNIA COOPER’s Family and TONI MORRISON’s
BELOVED, Visitation uses a complex mix of realism,
dramatic dialogue, and fantasy to render a pro-
vocative image of African-American sexual and
cultural alienation and of the inescapable imbrica-
tions of history in manifestly personal experiences
of trauma.
The story takes place in Tims Creek, North
Carolina, a thinly disguised version of the town
of Chinquapin, North Carolina, to which the New
York–born Kenan moved while still a young child.
Tims Creek is also the setting for many of the sto-
ries in Kenan’s acclaimed collection Let the Dead
Bury Their Dead (1992). Through a complex nar-
rative that details the lives of four generations of
the Cross family, most notably those of Horace
Cross and his cousin James Malachi Green, or
Jimmy, this compact but dramatically dense work
intensively explores issues of homosexuality, fa-
milial responsibility, historical memory, and the
cultural dynamics of interracial contact and class
mobility.
A Visitation of Spirits is divided into five sections
titled “White Sorcery,” “Black Necromancy,” “Holy
Science,” “Old Demonology,” and “Old Gods, New
Demons.” These titles refer to the polarized notions
of race and history by which the members of the
Cross family will be, often literally, bedeviled. The
destructive force of these binaries is experienced
most dramatically by the 16-year-old Horace, who
attempts and fails to deploy sorcery as a strategy
for transcending the complications and guilt at-
tending his struggles with his homosexuality and
his longing to achieve what he imagines to be the
utopian state of emotional coherence and physical
ease signified by a red-tailed hawk.
The grounding narrative in A Visitation of Spir-
its consists of a recounting of the hellish night on
which, while cradling a shotgun, a naked and mud-
begrimed Horace travels through Tim’s Creek in
search of death and salvation after the failure of
his attempt at physical transformation. Simultane-
ously, in another temporal mode, the heterosexual
Jimmy tries to come to terms emotionally with the
failures of his unrewarding life as a minister, high
school principal, and widowed husband of an un-
faithful wife. The novel’s masterly web of stories
and flashbacks leads to a final confrontation that
leaves Horace dead and Jimmy even more cultur-
ally and emotionally bereft.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holland, Sharon Patricia. “(Pro)creating Imaginative
Spaces and Other Queer Acts: Randall Kenan’sVisitation of Spirits, A 523