"The Book of Night Women" Passage Analysis by Cody Tucker

“A road set before every negro, from he slip through the slave ship or him mother pussy, that be just as dark. Black and long and wide like a thousand year. And when a negro walk, light get take away from him so he never know when he hit a curve or a bend. Worse, he never see that he walking round and round and always come back to where he leave first” (James, 120).

            In this passage, James opens a chapter after the events of Andromeda’s death. The chapter before this passage looks at the aftermath of this death as the slaves grow fearful and superstitious.  This fear is connected to their perpetual bondage. From the outset, slavery increases the anxieties of people. I don’t believe that the Obeah ghost is the cause of all this. I can see that it is much deeper than that. The use of ghosts (whether real or imagined) almost always have some symbolic message within a work of literature. To believe an incomprehensible supernatural force has killed Andromeda is almost a comfort given the alternative. The slaves are forced to live in huddled masses. Not many of these people have friendly relations with each other. At one point, Chiron points out that the Johnny Jumpers or field slaves could be the killers. An unsaid, but possible, answer is that one of the whites could have done this. This brings me back to the above passage. It is described as an endless life process of drudgery and darkness for slaves. With this abundant lack of safety, freedom, and happiness; their lives are figuratively covered in a darkness of constant sorrow and doubt. The slaves are unable to come together to figure this murder out. It has been noted that the Obeah was taken to Montpelier with the rest of the kin in the form of the cultural story no doubt passed down to younger generations. So, it is psychologically plausible for the slaves to use this myth to make up for the confusion of the darkness that they face in this murder. There are many instances of literal darkness to parallel this, such as Lilith’s time in the cellar. To think that our fellow humans can be so cruel to each other is too much for a mind to bear. Such thoughts begin to transcend what we know of the mortal world. Supernatural explanations are used as a kind of relief from some of this horror that is out of our hands. These were frightening times when the works of men could have been mistaken for those of monsters.