Fellow Travellers

Posted by Tristan Beiter

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I love when a story is about itself, when every aspect of the tale is bound up with all the others, when everything about it is rooted in particulars. This doesn’t just go for speculative fiction (A. R. Gurney’s plays, for example are deeply rooted in the minutiae of the mid-century American upper-middle class), though I do think that the habits built by genre reading can help make those specifics easier to see as a motivator in SFF. After all, when the world of a story can’t be taken for granted because, to the reader, it is new in a way that contemporary fiction can never achieve, it can become easier to see the assumptions and connections that hold a narrative universe together.

Eden Royce’s Psychopomp & Circumstance is a profoundly particular novel in all the best ways. Set in a fantastical Reconstruction South Carolina where magic is commonplace, and centering on twenty-one-year-old free Black woman Phaedra (Phee) St. Margaret, it could not be set in any other time or place or about any other people. Out of these details emerges a compelling story of choices, selfhood, family, and grief that resonates in its specificity.

The immediate particularity of the novel is communicated right from the very first sentence: “Her final cotillion was in full swing and Phaedra St. Margaret was vex.” This opening not only provides important information about Phee’s age and class but also situates the voice of the novel in its Southern Black context. By aligning the language of the narration with the long history of Black American Englishes through language like that adjectival “vex,” Royce locates race and place not only in individual characters but in the fabric of the narrative itself. This is underscored by the skillful use of free indirect discourse throughout the text. The third-person narration stays close to Phee, sublimating her thoughts and feelings into the language of the story subtly and effectively. This, in turn, helps the people around her—her mother, her father, her smug and arrogant suitor Desmond, funeral director Prioleau Cross, even her deceased Aunt Cleo—render in vivid color, full of feeling and presence.

The narration also bolsters its representation of Phee through the absence of laborious explanation. Although the novel is full of description, it never halts itself to reveal features of its world to an uninitiated reader, especially not features that might correlate with real-world demographics. The speculative aspects of the setting emerge naturally and quickly—a comment about the ritual necessary for magic, the carriage drawn by hippocampi through the flooded streets of New Charleston. The cultural particularities are treated even more smoothly. Food is the most salient aspect of this book to this white northerner. Benne seeds (a sesame cultivar brought from West Africa and common in traditional food around Charleston); scuppernongs (a large muscadine grape found in the American South); and “a crispy-top sweet potato pone with dark crusty corners of crystallizing brown sugar and butter” (a distinctive style of baked or fried bread): all are among the new-to-me foods that make an appearance and that would be immediately recognizable to not only Phee but to large numbers of past and present Black and Southern Americans.

Food is, of course, not the only manifestation of this move. The evocative descriptions that nonetheless expect the reader either to know what is referred to or address that lack of knowledge on their own, without altering the novel or interrupting the narrative, help to bring its approach to cultural particularity to the fore. But the plot of the novel is also rooted in these particulars. In the second chapter, the story really gets going when a messenger arrives to announce the death of Phee’s Aunt Cleo and asks who will serve as her psychopomp, making sure that her spirit is sent on its way appropriately. Drawing again on the specifics of African-American culture [1], the “homegoing” that Phee needs to plan and execute will allow Cleo’s spirit to be at rest, fitting this distinctively Black Christian funerary tradition seamlessly into the magic of the setting.

Phee takes on this responsibility over the objections of her mother, who would rather Phee settle down with ambitious and well-to-do Desmond than attempt to make her own way and disrupt the plans her mother has for her. This is especially true given that Phee’s aunt and mother became estranged due to a necklace of their mother’s being found in Cleo’s bag at their own mother’s  homegoing service a number of years earlier. Although Phee’s mother doesn’t make an in-person appearance after Phee departs home to her aunt’s to manage the service, she haunts the narrative as much as the ghost of Cleo does, a constant presence reminding Phee that she lives in her particular nineteenth-century time and place, with all the expectations and opportunities that attended women in the period. Even the modes of independence that Phee does consider—Cleo’s life in her community, entering into business under her father, and the like—feel carefully selected to resonate with the setting, rather than having Phee experience too much that might be redolent of our contemporary world.

As the novel develops, so too does Phee herself. Early on, many of her choices feel reactive, merely a response to her mother or her situation: She decides to visit her aunt because some gossip reminds her that she hasn’t done so; she takes the position of psychopomp largely because her mother won’t; she requests the carriage go at a leisurely pace because it is what she is used to, even though it means her trip to her aunt’s home takes all day. Later in the novel, however, Phee has developed a much clearer sense of what exactly she is looking for in her quest, and she is able to make her own, more proactive, choices. By that point, she sees what will be able to make her happy and what sort of person she really wants to be, and in the process, she comes to better understand her family and her relationship to them—even as she thinks through what it might really be like to live her own life rather than the one her mother has laid out for her.

Part of doing so is dealing with grief. As Phee better understands Cleo’s life, and her own feelings about the loss of her aunt, this understanding translates into a clearer sense of herself, her goals, and the possible forms of life that are open to her beyond respectable marriage to a man handpicked by her mother for his social status and comfortable income. For Phee, grief for her aunt—and regret for her own failure to participate in the life Cleo built—become important tools in making sense of her own future and her own family. By the end of the novel, Phee is able to see not only the choices she can make but the whole complex matrix of choice that animates her family life, seeing how everyone’s choices impact the others around them and either open or constrain possibilities.

In this way, one of the core questions of the novel is choice. Not in the sense that Royce is providing her readers with instructions for what choices to make, but by means of exploring what it is even to have choices—and all the many ways that choices are constrained. The setting is never far from this idea. While it is clear that Phee’s family is an established free Black family, the way in which enslavement forecloses the ability to choose keeps coming back in inescapable ways. Most notable in this respect is a scene around two-thirds of the way through the book in which Phee meets a recently freed woman whom Cleo had been teaching to read—a fact Phee discovers when, without thinking about it, she asks the woman and her husband to help her find an address and hands them a business card, only then realizing that this young woman born into slavery would not have been permitted to learn to read.

This is not the only time that the novel uses its early Reconstruction setting to explore choice-making and the various kinds of limitations on their freedom to choose (in the broadest sense) that people experience. This combines with the particularities of Phee’s family to really show what is lost when genuine choice is not available—and what is gained when people are truly free in that way. Yet part of the novel’s approach to choice is also one of interconnectedness: That these reflections on choice are brought about by familial bonds, and a complex web of moral and personal obligations, is never forgotten. Freedom does not, in this novel, come from isolation but rather from the deliberate building of meaningful ties. Part of what Phee is empowered to do by choice is to better understand how she wants to exist in community with the people around her, how to build and maintain an interconnected network which supports all of their wellbeing and freedom.

Ultimately, Phee’s story is about exactly these sorts of personal and local matters—her family and friends, her life. Even when the story gestures at its biggest ideas, they are grounded in specific characters who live in a specific time and place. The story would be utterly different if any of these elements were changed: There are many stories about choices and grief and family, told from many times, places, and cultures; but what makes Psychopomp & Circumstance so successful is the way that it is exactly itself. Insofar as these questions are “universal,” they are universally particular. Choices are made in circumstances; grief is felt immediately and differs from loss to loss and mourner to mourner; families are composed of people with backgrounds and feelings and experiences. All of this is self-evident, but so often the discourse of universalism insists that only what is shared between different experiences is significant, flattening those particularities. In Psychopomp & Circumstance, however, Eden Royce refuses that hollowing effect to deliver a richly alive narrative that is able to think through its ideas because of its grounding. It draws the reader in by insisting on its details—and in so doing serves as a reminder of the power of the granular in choices, communities, and storytelling.

Endnotes

[1] Royce makes clear in her acknowledgements the source of this particular moment: She mentions planning her own grandmother’s homegoing, revealing the ongoing presence of this tradition in the present. [return]

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