All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Jemma, a young Black teacher who sees the dead, leaves her troubled past in Chicago behind after accepting a generous job offer in Louisiana from a reclusive family, the Duchons. Jemma is surprised to find that she wasn’t hired to tutor a child, but to break a family curse that binds them to their ghost-ridden house and threatens their lives. Why Jemma? Not because she can see spirits, though that’s a useful skill; it’s because they’re her biological family—a surprise to her, given how white they look. Adopted on the night of her birth by Carl and Mabel Barker, a Black couple who would turn out to be emotionally abusive parents, Jemma is the only member of the Duchon bloodline that the curse has ever allowed out of the family grounds.
Belonging is the chief theme around which all others circle in this novel: belonging or not belonging to country, community, and family. The novel is set in the early sixties with the monster of American white supremacy smiling on wickedly from the background. In this time of unabashed violence against civil rights organizers, protestors, and anyone else who didn’t fit into white America’s bleached image of the nation, everyone is asking questions of belonging: who belongs to a country, to whom a country belongs, and where we come to feel we belong.
Against this backdrop, Jemma arrives at the Duchon home and meets Honorine, the household’s grandmother. She assumes the old woman is white until, while noting Jemma’s aversion to the Southern heat, Honorine says:
“Not like our ancestors in Africa, hmmm?”
Jemma blinked. Our ancestors in Africa?
A high voice carried into the room. “Oh, you must excuse Grandmère! She forgets herself sometimes.” And a younger woman swept into the foyer, just as pale as Honorine, but with black hair trailing in loose waves down her back. “Here you are, only just arrived, and she’s already started in on Africa, as if we’ve forgotten we’re all colored. You must be Jemma Barker. I’m Fosette.” […]
Jemma’s mind stumbled over the word “colored.” These pale ghosts of women were Black? (p. 20)
Honorine’s immediate signaling of her Black ancestry makes for awkward conversation, though no more so than Fosette’s enthusiastic apology. Both women’s statements have a ring of desperation mixed with pride: a desire to create a connection and establish distance with Jemma simultaneously, alongside the family’s pride in their bloodline. In other words, their treatment of Jemma as an inferior does a great job illustrating colorism.
Trying to fit the Duchons’ motivations, actions, and desires into a logical framework will send you down an impossible spiral of contradictions if you try to take colorism out of the equation. How can they act superior to Jemma while being completely dependent on her to break the family curse? Because, as light-skinned “colored” people, they believe that this is their due. The Duchons are at ease with their moral and ethical contradictions, but they’ll certainly render any decent reader indignant at the injustice of their carefree internalized racism. Jemma finds it galling and is reminded of a disturbing rhyme from her childhood [1]:
If you’re light, you’re all right.
If you’re brown, stick around.
If you’re Black, stay back!How many times had [Jemma] heard that on playgrounds and row house stoops? And how many times had she felt relief to be brown enough to be able to stick around? (pp. 26-7)
Sandeen excels at scenes highlighting the horror of self-hatred, and turning colorism into a children’s nursery rhyme makes for a chilling read. Jemma finds the Duchons’ embrace of colorism exasperating, but the horror of the novel is that these ideas are ingrained in her as well. However, she wasn’t raised in the Duchon home and is both more self-aware and able to make the historical parallels:
[The Duchons’] skin color served as an unpleasant reminder of even harsher times in the nation, when terms like “octoroon,” “quadroon” and “house slave” often hinted at a life that wasn’t quite as cruel as it was for people who looked like Jemma. (p. 21)
The people now wandering the Duchon house as ghosts lived and died as slaves, indicating the unfinished business of historical justice. They also highlight how this antebellum system of appointing slaves of paler skin tones to lighter tasks hasn’t disappeared. It’s just evolved.
The novel is, then, an excellent example of how horror is an important genre for the oppressed. In the podcast The Literary Life, Tananarive Due has said that “marginalized communities and people who have been traumatized are especially drawn to the horror genre because it fits the wound just right.” She explains how monsters can be a validation of our experiences, and how seeing characters kill, outsmart, and escape the monster—or not—can be a healing process. You can feel this desire to heal in the prose of This Cursed House: The brilliant portrayal of the morally indifferent Duchons illustrates the long-lasting, harmful effects that colorism’s legacy has had on Black communities. But a flaw in the novel’s approach to characterization ultimately mars its other achievements.
The main character of a novel has to be believable. Sometimes Jemma is. But sometimes she isn’t. There’s a question, of course, that everyone asks characters in a haunted house: Why don’t they leave? Jemma can, and does. And then she returns. Once the Duchons really show their nasty side, it’s hard to see why she would. Honorine says, “If the curse remains unbroken, [Jemma] also risk[s] a most horrible death” (p. 64). Sure. But once we discover that the curse doesn’t tie Jemma to the house in the way it does the Duchons, it’s hard to believe there’s a real threat to her life. The only believable reason for her return is a desire to belong to her biological family—again, we see the theme of belonging, now in the context of the family. But surely during Jemma’s quest to be a Duchon, thoughts—or even ghosts—of the family that raised her would be haunting her? She remembers her parents being cruel, but nothing else. There are some observations on adoption to which an adopted person could relate, but they’re mostly clichéd. Overall, the care and nuance that the novel dedicates to the language of colorism and internalized racism proves lacking for the generally accepted taboos about adoption. Speaking as an adopted person, it was hard not to take to heart the many moments where the novel reinforced the idea that a family with adopted children isn’t a “real” family. This was doubly unfortunate, because this novel’s adoption story is particularly unique.
Cross-cultural adoption stories are flourishing in contemporary literature. In Nicole Chung’s memoir, All You Can Ever Know (2018), the author must balance natural curiosity about her Korean birth family with her loyalty to her fiercely loving white parents. An essential secondary character in Raven Leilani’s novel, Luster (2020), is the Black adopted daughter of a white couple who are ill-equipped to deal with both the nuanced and overt racism she encounters. As Sean, the adopted Black-Native American character in Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (2024), says, “[E]verything about race and background was trickier when you were adopted.”
Yet This Cursed House is unique among these examples. Jemma is a Black woman, adopted at birth by Black parents. She didn’t know that she was adopted until her parents told her at the age of fourteen, and while the hierarchy of skin tone was present, the novel implies that it wasn’t as pronounced in her adopted home. Now she’s confronted with pink-pale biological relatives needing her, but remaining incapable of seeing her as an equal. The most glaring example is Tante Simone, whose contempt for Jemma is evident from the beginning. In a private conversation, after Simone makes a series of passive-aggressive insinuations about her,
Jemma whirled and faced the woman. “Don’t say that about me.”
“Or what? What are you going to do? Curse me like my sister cursed us? You don’t have it in you. I’ve told Maman that you also don’t have it in you to undo what was done. Come March next year, one of us will be dead, just like every other time. But probably not you, because you’re not really one of us.” (p. 110)
Experiencing contempt like this, it’s hard to imagine Jemma wouldn’t have some new appreciation for the family that raised her. Sure, because Simone is Jemma’s biological aunt, Jemma might not think about her parents. But wait. Where is the rest of the family that adopted her? These absences are a serious flaw in characterization, and one that’s typical of stories of adopted children. Did the couple who adopted Jemma, Carl and Mabel Barker, not have any brothers or sisters? Surely Jemma would have immediately thought about a favorite aunt and compared her with “rude Simone” (p. 33), “horrid Simone” (p. 79), “that harridan Simone” (p. 108)? With each interaction with the Duchons, positive and negative, she’d be redefining her understanding of family. But she doesn’t. In fact, she doesn’t compare any of the Duchons to any corresponding family members, grandmothers, uncles, or cousins. These complex thoughts that would naturally be going through Jemma’s mind as she gets to know the Duchons are nowhere to be seen. Yes, writers have to decide what they wish to include and what they don’t. But it simply isn’t believable that Jemma’s only family were lonely Carl and Mabel Barker. Families have, well, family. But here it’s as if the Barkers sprung forth out of thin air, fully formed and ready to be emotionally abusive parents. The Barkers’ extended family simply don’t exist; or perhaps, for the purpose of plot, they’ve been disappeared. Either way, a large part of Jemma’s psychology, too, feels consequently absent.
In adoption stories, many people don’t notice these details because they don’t see families with adopted children as “real” families. This comes from a common assumption that biological connections hold primacy for adopted children over their connections to the family that raised them. This doesn’t just cause pain to families; the idea that genetics and biology dictate “real” familial love can also be weaponized by opportunistic politicians, as it has been in the past decade against families with same-sex parents. I don’t believe amplifying this was the author’s intent. But sadly, that’s what the novel does.
It’s hard to overstate the damage that the term “real family” can inflict. That said, the terms “real family,” “real mother” and “real father” have their place in fiction. These are terms that many people carelessly use to refer to an adopted person’s biological family. They are terms that adopted people might out of anger or depression, also use to refer to their biological family. But there are consequences for their use. Saying someone’s biological family is the “real” one implies that an adopted child is growing up in a simulation, that their familial connections are artificial and will be easily broken if ever the “real” family comes back into the picture. This doesn’t just hurt the child, but also the parents, grandparents, siblings, and extended family. It also shames people who decide to have a baby that they’ll then put up for adoption.
An adopted person and their family can’t escape the psychological repercussions this language causes; a fully formed fictional character should be no different. But Jemma is. There’s no little voice in her mind that makes her hesitate to call the Duchons her real family, no memories of a grandmother’s smile to contrast with “real” Grandmère Duchon’s scowl. The Duchons say they’re her “real family” and she hardly needs a day’s reflection to agree. Not a hint of the guilt and obligation a real person would feel to the family that raised them is present. So Jemma’s character feels half-formed. She becomes a two-dimensional adoptee stereotype, a hangover from the orphans of Victorian novels, incomplete humans with only one desire: to return to the parents who gave them up. I’m not saying Jemma should love the Barkers. It’s fine if she doesn’t want to call them family. But that rejection comes with serious psychological implications that this novel doesn’t explore or recognize as real. Maybe the Barkers didn’t deserve Jemma, but they were present and the Duchons weren’t. Good or bad, that can’t be replaced. Only a fictional adoptee being used to serve the author’s plot points is able to whisk her emotional upbringing away by meeting her biological family. Real people are more complicated.
The incomplete adoptee is a simplistic, harmful trope that has been around since … well … the beginning of literature. So perhaps it isn’t fair for me to expect This Cursed House to deal with it any better. I have no doubt that the novel was written with an intent to heal and not harm. While Jemma’s desire to belong is certainly the driving force of the narrative, it’s tied into the importance of asking for and giving forgiveness. The novel addresses important themes and the Duchons are wonderfully passive-aggressive villains. Most readers will see the message of healing. They won’t think twice when, while Jemma reflects on the Barkers’ abuse, she thinks “Mama and Daddy weren’t her real family” (p. 149). Unfortunately for this adopted reviewer, I could only think about my family … my very real family with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But mostly, I thought of my parents, my only parents. The beautiful, flawed, loving people who raised me. It was hard to see anything else.
Endnotes
[1] This rhyme is also found in Big Bill Boonzy’s 1940s song, “Black, Brown and White Blues,” which is about Black war vets getting preferential treatment for jobs depending on the precise shade of their skin color. [return]