As a Black Bard of the South, Randall Kenan Toppled Monuments
In Zeke’s model, earlier than the Civil Warfare runaway slaves led by a person named Pharaoh based a “maroon society” on the land the place Tims Creek now stands. Pharaoh was caught and offered to “the household in North Carolina in them days,” turning into Senator Owen Cross’s “No. 1” slave, the person’s most prized possession, working his means deeper into his grasp’s favor earlier than ultimately escaping for good, setting the plantation on hearth in his wake.
Edited and with exhaustive footnotes and an introduction (dated within the then-future yr 2000) by Jimmy’s relative Reginald Gregory Kain (who shares Kenan’s credentials and initials), “Let the Lifeless Bury Their Lifeless” is a story-within-a-story-within-a-book, an ingeniously metafictional Russian doll of blithely unreliable narration. But in some way, whether or not owing to regional or racial bias, or to the creator’s deeply ingrained humility and privateness, Kenan has not taken his rightful place within the postmodern canon, although Tims Creek proved as generative as any Macondo or Yoknapatawpha.
However Kenan’s mythmaking was not only for the sake of craft, or style: Taken collectively, his fiction quantities to a private toppling of monuments, just like the removing of the bronze Silent Sam from U.N.C.’s campus in 2018. In Zeke Cross’s telling, it’s not his namesake white man however the Black escapee, Pharaoh, who emerges because the true pioneer, the folkloric hero, the founding father.
To the bare eye there’s nothing romantic, not to mention magical, about the true Duplin County. Throughout this deeply Christian, working-class nook of rural North Carolina, buffered by miles of swamp and farmland from the massive cities of Raleigh and Wilmington, unassuming Baptist church buildings are as commonplace as hog farms. Properties, whether or not colonial-style or cell, are protected by skinny white crosses the place driveways meet nation roads.
On one such highway, someplace alongside the 13-mile stretch of Freeway 41 between the city of Wallace and Chinquapin, there’s a billboard promoting excursions of the restored Liberty Corridor plantation. “The Antebellum South was as soon as treasured for its grace and attraction,” its website says. The positioning “stands at the moment as a proud reminder of a time that exists solely in historical past books.”
On that very same highway there additionally stands one other, subtler signal marking the non-public grounds of the Kenan household cemetery. Randall Kenan is buried miles away, in a plot on the facet of a again highway marked solely by a single pear tree, subsequent to Mary Kenan Corridor. It’s tempting to undertaking onto his unadorned grave web site a loneliness recognized solely by the dwelling, however Kenan had an uncanny capacity to see the magical within the mundane. Because the Crosses train us repeatedly: Simply because a spot doesn’t announce itself doesn’t imply it’s not there.