Julian Randall’s lyrical memoir uncovers the past to light a brighter future
“Mississippi is all arrivals. Mississippi is all beginnings. But Mississippi is also something we return to, again and again, to find where we started in hopes of catching a glimpse at how we might end,” Julian Randall writes in “Oxford,” the opening essay of his memoir, "The Dead Don't Need Reminding."
Comprised of braided essays that use key pop-culture moments to weave together stories of triumph and personal exploration, Randall writes about returning to Oxford, Mississippi, unearthing grief, deeply rooted family histories, and a resilience that has been shared through the DNA of his forefathers who emigrated from the smothering oppression and racial violence of the Deep South.
Randall, who refers to himself as a “noted Chicago supremacist,” spent his formative years in Atlanta and most of his life thereafter in the Midwest. While wrestling with the person he was becoming, Randall said he often theorized that “Southern familial roots were likely completely and forever lost.” However, while he didn't have the luxury of learning about his family through the oral storytelling that is pervasive in Black Southern communities, Randall always felt a profound sense of connection to the Mississippi soil on which his ancestors lived.
“It was important for me to concede from a very early standpoint [in the book] that I am of Mississippi, but not from there. Although I have been in the Midwest for the vast majority of my life, the farthest I can trace back my family roots begins and ends in the South,” Randall said, explaining how he identifies with the state.
In the book, Randall also seeks to liberate an often-skewed narrative of
what it means to be from the South. “I came out as a queer person right before I moved to Mississippi,” he said, “and [among outsiders], there's this presumption that I moved into this den of vicious hatred, but what [Mississippi] actually is, is a laboratory of Black liberation.”
“There is no way to speak about the progress that is made during the Civil Rights Movement and not speak about Fannie Lou Hamer, or not speak the names of countless Black Southerners who have led consistently the way forward. … I knew that I was going to write about [Mississippi], because this place knows me. I've lived there. And it changed me and it affects me to this very day.”
Representation informs the ways in which we think about ourselves, and in “#JULIANFORSPIDERMAN,” Randall takes the reader through the multiverse. In many ways, the evolution of Spider-man/miles Morales mirrors Randall's own coming of age story. In fact, all of Randall's literary work (for both children and adults) is an unabashed display of his full personhood, as well as a series of love letters to the queer, Dominican and Afro-diasporic communities that raised him.
“When I was a child, there was a certain level of interiority that I was presumed to simply not have access to,” said Randall of his motivation for writing with representation in mind.
“In The Dead Don't Need Reminding,
I'm attempting to right a historical record that has not only been incorrect, but has also been destroyed. I am also recreating the story of [as well as my understanding of] my great-grandfather. Doing both simultaneously is something that can only be achieved with a level of interiority, that public policy and public representation often do not afford to Black people — especially to queer Black people like myself,” Randall said.
The essence of the memoir is captured in its last sentence, where Randall writes, “In the glowing rain I exhaled and gunned the engine — I laughed my grandmother's laugh into the Mississippi sky until the clouds became a memory and I was finished haunting my own name.”
“The most satisfying part of writing The Dead Don't Need Reminding was writing the ending of the book. … The line came to me in the middle of the night and kept trampolining on my temples for days on end. ‘Haunting of my own name' is [kind of ] the theme of the entire memoir. Once I inserted this phrase, I knew the book was done — and it made me feel really proud.”
Reflecting on the type of readers Randall wishes to reach, he said, “Anybody who has or is in the midst of surviving the unsurvivable. I'm here to listen. I'm here to hold you. I'm glad you're still here.”
To read the full version of this article — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.