`Reform' school inspires masterful horror novel
The Reformatory Tananarive Due Saga Press
“Black history is Black horror,” novelist Tananarive Due has said. In her stunning new novel, The Reformatory, Due underscores this insight to brilliant effect.
Set in the Jim Crow South in 1950, the book unsparingly depicts the violence and trauma inflicted on the children and teenagers imprisoned in the Gracetown School for Boys, a juvenile-detention home inspired by the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla.
Due has a personal connection to this history. In 2013, she learned from the Florida state attorney that her great-uncle was among the scores of missing boys buried in unmarked graves at Dozier. From this unbearably grim past, Due has fashioned an enthralling tale of childhood resilience and hope.
Robert Stephens, 12, lives with his 16-year-old sister, Gloria, in Gracetown, a close-knit Black community that borders a town populated by descendants of those who enslaved their ancestors, including members of the Klan.
When Lyle Mccormack, a white boy (and the siblings' occasional playmate), makes sexual overtures toward Gloria, Robert comes to her defence. Though Lyle struck him first, Robert is sentenced to six months at the notorious Gracetown School for Boys.
Black and white children are incarcerated there, all of them subjected to the brutal punishments doled out by Superintendent Haddock. Those who attempt to escape are hunted by guards with vicious dogs, as well as locals who receive a small bounty for each boy they capture, dead or alive. No one has ever escaped.
In Robert's hometown, children are known to see haints — ghosts. Robert has glimpsed his dead mother several times, and his sister senses the future — usually dire — of friends or strangers.
As soon as he enters the reformatory grounds, Robert is assailed by a terrible vision: “His skin felt like it was sizzling grease in a pan. The sky above him went black as he waded into thick smoke. Then came the worst: the screams. Robert had never heard human screams so wretched they were like animals. The sound was solid enough to touch, all around him. Boys. A room of screaming boys. Burning in a fire ... faces twisted with pain and terror, half hidden in the smoke clouds, some already charred black.”
Inside, Robert is quickly befriended by Redbone and
Blue, two boys who work with him in the kitchen, a coveted assignment since they can gorge themselves on leftovers.
Redbone is extremely protective of Blue, despite the younger boy's penchant for malicious pranks.
The narrative alternates between the points of view of various characters: Robert as he plots his escape from the inside; Gloria, who is doing the same with the help of her elderly godmother, Miz Lottie; and Gloria's white employer, whose efforts at kindness are tainted by her casual racism.