Specter on Her Shoulder:

The Past and Its Presence

In the Work of Carolyn Haines

 By Linda Fisher

 “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” Like Faulkner, contemporary author Carolyn Haines was born and raised in Mississippi, and as a consequence, perhaps, she shares with the legendary creator of Yoknapatawpha County a sturdy belief in the liveliness of the past. If we do not learn from the past, as historian Arnold Toynbee said, we are doomed to repeat it. It is unlikely that the characters in Carolyn Haines’s novels will suffer from déjà vu, for they have numerous occasions to learn from the past. Haines even goes so far as to use the past as one of her characters—in the form of Jitty, who was born enslaved, died a free woman, and now roams the halls of an antebellum home in the little town of Zinnia in the storied Delta region, a far sunnier, fictitious version of Mississippi than Yoknapatawpha County.

JITTY’S RELATIONSHIP TO SARAH BOOTH DELANEY’S FAMILY

In Haines’s popular mysteries, the Bones novels, Jitty is the “resident haint of Dahlia House.” She was the slave and nanny to Sarah Booth Delaney’s great-great-grandmother, Alice, and certainly knows her way around the house. By her own lights, she deserves to live there, even after death, and firmly believes that familial duty obligates Sarah Booth to take care of her. Better acquainted with Delaney history than anyone else, past or present, Jitty is perfectly equipped to be Sarah Booth’s conscience. As such, Jitty gives Sarah Booth unsolicited advice about everything, and occasionally, Sarah Booth even asks for Jitty’s opinion. When pressed, in a mock-interview on the author’s official web site, Jitty describes her function as Sarah Booth’s “sub-conscious . . . the little angel (or devil) sitting on your shoulder—your personal guide.” Sarah Booth, on the same site, sums up Jitty’s reasons for being:

“My past. My future. The traditions that define my boundaries. A good friend. My conscience. A little devil that sits on my shoulder. My dark side. Take your pick.” 

Haines claims to have learned the art of storytelling from her Swedish grandmother, who would recite to the young Carolyn and her brothers the delightfully dramatic James Whitcomb Riley poem, “Little Orphant Annie.” When Haines’s girlfriends would visit for spend-the-night parties, her grandmother often told ghost stories until everyone, as Haines recalls, was “terrified to even let a hand dangle off the bed.” Story-time ghosts were frightening, but somewhere along the path to adulthood, Haines developed a kindly attitude toward specters. Jitty may be stern, but she is never scary. She is Sarah Booth’s good friend, one among many, and the one who has traveled the farthest, in time and space.

WHAT JITTY REPRESENTS

As evidenced by the barrage of advice she offers Sarah Booth, Jitty is not one to hoard her talent for managing another person’s life, yet she never offered the same, after-death services to the previous four generations of women at Dahlia House. In her own niche in the author’s web site—Jitty’s Jilted Hearts—Jitty reveals that the first time she appeared to Sarah Booth came when the younger woman needed her most, just after her return home from living in New York. Sarah Booth was alone at Dahlia House without her mother or beloved aunt for guidance. Chiefly, for Sarah Booth as well as for the reader, Jitty serves to recall a woman’s place in history from the 1850s to the present. She is Sarah Booth’s vehicle to the past and its lessons.

One of the reasons that Jitty is believable as a living, once-breathing woman is her insistence on dressing in authentic clothing of practically any time period she chooses. The first time the reader meets Jitty, she is dressed in bell-bottoms and a polyester blouse from the seventies. The rose-tinted, granny glasses through which she stares down Sarah Booth hint at Jitty’s view of life in general: the past was better than the present. In Buried Bones, Jitty shows up in Sarah’s front parlor the day before Christmas, wearing a blue gingham dress and high heels. The former slave has gotten herself up like Jane Wyatt on Father Knows Best, all the better to hawk a 1950s mind-set of traditional family values. For all her improbable surrealness, Jitty is a liberated woman—literally. From slave woman to flapper to hippie, Jitty has lived through it all, though the word lived stretches the truth, as Jitty herself occasionally seems to do.

THE WAYS IN WHICH HAINES USES THE GHOST:

JITTY AS A PROD IN THE DIRECTION OF PRAGMATISM

Jitty, however, is not merely Sarah Booth’s connection with her past. The ghost often serves as the force responsible for turning the heroine toward pragmatic choices. Jitty is even the impetus for Sarah Booth’s entry into the world of crime—and, eventually, crime-solving. Very early in Them Bones, the reader learns that Sarah Booth is in danger of losing Dahlia House, which has been in her (and Jitty’s) family for a hundred and forty years. The ever-resourceful Jitty suggests that Sarah Booth kidnap Chablis, her best friend’s tiny, pedigreed dog. The ransom, when paid, will keep the old place in the Delaney family. Like Jitty in her slave days, Sarah Booth sees no alternative but to obey the voice of authority.

Sarah Booth’s foray into criminal activity is both hilarious and fortuitous; Tinkie, the owner of Chablis, is so grateful for her old friend’s role in rescuing the prized pet that she commissions her services as a private investigator in another matter. Since it will be as a PI that Sarah Booth will be able to make a living and hang on to Jitty’s home, one might make the case that Jitty’s motives are not entirely altruistic. Jitty, in fact, is ruthless compared to Sarah Booth, who is unexpectedly smitten with the fluff ball Chablis.

Jitty looked around the corner of the door. ‘I say cut off one of the dog’s ears and send it with the first ransom note. That way, Tinkie’ll know you mean business.”

It is ironic that Jitty, whose own mother was stolen from Africa, instigates the stealing of the dog. When Jitty accuses Sarah Booth of “snatching my mama from the soil of Africa,” Sarah Booth replies—in what she says is an ongoing argument between them—that she didn’t snatch anybody’s mama. Inside the creaking, old home, the two women co-exist in affectionate combativeness. Haines discloses in her website that the two characters appeared to her at the same time, “in tandem, arguing just as they do in the books.” As Sarah Booth’s conscience, Jitty is determined not to go down without a fight. And they do fight, about everything—from whether Sarah Booth should have another slice of fruitcake to which suitor would make the superior sperm donor. In an e-mail interview, Haines makes a revealing statement about her writing process. “…I listen to the story and let it be what it is.” In Jitty, Haines has most definitely created a character who is what she is.  

Haines employs Jitty to contrast the past with the present, specifically the reverence which the past held for tradition, as opposed to the seeming disregard of the present day for such values. Over and over, Jitty urges Sarah Booth to imitate her female forebears by marrying and having children, but the young woman is not bound by the fetters of tradition. In the unpaged afterword section of the first novel, Jitty herself conducts a comical interview with the author and reveals why she chose to wear clothing from the seventies when she appeared to Sarah Booth in the kitchen of Dahlia House that pre-Thanksgiving morning.

Sarah Booth was right on the verge of losin’ everything she ever cared about, including our home . . . It was up to me to do somethin’, and I figured that if she couldn’t catch her a man outright, then maybe she could at least get us an heir. The seventies were a time when women declared their sexual liberation. I thought I could give Sarah Booth a little nudge toward gettin’ us the baby we both need.

The past does manage to pull on Sarah Booth, however, and Jitty wisely heaps on extra helpings of guilt. Haines sets her series opener, Them Bones, during the Thanksgiving season, when thoughts turn to home and the past. As she shops for her own lonely dinner, Sarah Booth recalls an old memory: her mother placing a crystal dish of cranberries on the family table. “Tradition can mimic the past,” she thinks, “but it can’t make it real.” This unbidden blast from her past leaves Sarah Booth “poleaxed.”

During this same shopping trip, Sarah Booth encounters Tinkie’s husband, Oscar Richmond, the local banker who holds the note on Dahlia House. The old family home is headed for foreclosure, but Oscar has found a buyer. Seeing more ghosts than merely Jitty, Sarah Booth envisions a “long line of Delaneys standing beneath the leafless branches of the sycamores as they watched their family home leveled.”

The setting of each subsequent novel in the series is during a holiday, which serves to heighten the heroine’s nostalgia for what has been lost. Sarah Booth is more vulnerable at such times to Jitty’s barbs that her womanhood is dying on the vine. Here, at Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the changing of the seasons, Jitty is more devil than angel to Sarah Booth.

JITTY AS A COMIC FOIL FOR SARAH BOOTH’S ROMANTIC WOES

Carolyn Haines’s reputation for writing humorous stories is evident from reading only a page or two of any Bones book but also from perusing blurbs on the book jackets. This quotation from Dallas Morning News, reprinted on the back cover of Hallowed Bones, is representative: “Funny, ingenious, and down-home delightful.” In her role as nanny/matchmaker/fashion maven, Jitty provides a large measure of that humor. A murder mystery can be hard reading at times, what with blood, conflict, and—well, there’s no other way to put this—death. Humor lightens the reader’s weary burden. Any disbelief we may harbor about a talking (or even back-talking) ghost is willingly suspended because Jitty is completely charming. She nags Sarah Booth, it is true, about the need to marry and produce an heir, but she does so with dollops of wit, sass, panache, and love. Struggling to turn Sarah Booth’s rejection of a suitor into an acceptance, Jitty relies, for instance, on the power of understatement.

“He’s not that bad,” she said, following me up the stairs. “It’s not like he was asking to marry you. He just wants a little female companionship. Maybe once a week. Twice at the most. Sitting behind a desk all day countin’ his money, that’s all he could hold up to.”

JITTY AS A REMINDER OF THE GREAT CHASM

BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

Despite the familiar, almost cozy relationship between Sarah Booth and Jitty, a thoughtful reader will wonder “Why Jitty?” Of all the women in the Delaney line—strong pioneer types who survived the national calamities of the past century and a half—why is Jitty, who is not even a blood relative, more appropriate for reminding Sarah Booth of her womanly role? What does Jitty possess that these other women do not? The answer lies in her chains of slavery. Phyllis Culp even hears in the jangle of Jitty’s silver bracelets an echo of the old slave chains rattling. Jitty has progressed further from her beginnings than any other female in the history of the Delaney family. As a role model and spokeswoman for matriarchal tradition, Jitty knows whereof she speaks. And Sarah Booth realizes Jitty’s authority.

In Hallowed Bones, the fifth book in the series, published in 2004, Culp views Jitty’s role as lessened, compared to the earlier novels in the series, “. . . because the symbolic element of tradition and traditional women’s roles seems to be diminishing during the progression of the series and in contemporary American culture.” While it is true that Jitty’s scenes have decreased, her importance to Sarah Booth is still strong. At the beginning of this story, Jitty uses the tough-love approach to nannyhood when she tells the last living Delaney, “The blues, unless you’re singin’ ‘em, are a total waste of time, Sarah Booth Delaney.” After Sarah Booth has solved this difficult case, she remains doubtful about her own ability to endure the wounds of time. Jitty is there, however, with a consoling message. “There is no end. Not to what you feel for people, or what they feel for you. Have faith, Sarah Booth.”

CONCLUSION

            Almost every murder mystery contains at least one dead body, and many non-genre novels revolve around a puzzling death. In her mystery novels, Carolyn Haines is not frugal with dead bodies, nor does she insist that they stay completely dead. For her as for Faulkner, the past is never past. An influential figure from Sarah Booth’s childhood, the theatrical Madame Rosalyn Bell, finds solace in Faulkner’s words when an old lover dies. “The past is never dead,” the grieving woman says in Buried Bones. In Haines’s hands, the dead continue to serve. Jitty’s role is to nurture, educate, and prod the living to wise actions. A careful reader would not be guilty of overreaching to see a connection between the other-worldly goblins of Little Orphant Annie and the resident haint of Dahlia House. In the third verse of the old poem that Haines’s grandmother recited to her susceptible granddaughter are these lines:

                        An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,

                        An’ make fun of ever’one, an’ all her blood and kin;

                        An’ onc’t, when they was “company,” an’ ole folks was there,

                        She mocked ‘em an’ shocked ‘em, an’ said she didn’t care!

                        An’ thist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,

                        They was two great big Black Things a-standin’ at her side,

An’ they snatched her through the ceiling’ ‘fore she knowed what

she’s about!

An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you

                        Ef you

                                    Don’t

                                                Watch

                                                            Out!

The Gobble-uns in “Little Orphant Annie” stand ready to terrify little children who kick up their heels at tradition and make fun of their elders and kin. Jitty’s purpose throughout the Bones novels is similar: to remind the mocking, shocking Sarah Booth of her duty to her ancestors to carry on the Delaney line. Carolyn Haines has achieved what every writer sets out to do: to create a separate universe with its own time, place and inhabitants, a universe into which the reader slips willingly, eager to accept the reality of  every word, action, and character—even if a character happens to be a ghost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Haines, Carolyn. Buried Bones. New York: Bantam, 2000.

---Hallowed Bones. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.

---Them Bones. New York: Bantam, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Culp, Phyllis L. Form and Purpose in the Detective Fiction of Carolyn Heilbrun and

Carolyn Haines. MLA thesis. Auburn University Montgomery, 2005.

Faulkner, William: Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951.

Haines, Carolyn. E-mail interview. 27 February 2006.

“Haines, Carolyn.” The Official Mississippi Delta Mystery Website. Accessed 29 April

            2006. http://www.carolynhaines.com/Biography.htm.

“Riley, James Whitcomb.” The Academy of American Poets. Accessed 29 April 2006.

            http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.pho/prmMID/15240.

[Linda Fisher  lcfwrite@aol.com