Ghouls and goblins are scary enough, but the real horror draws heavily from the worst parts of real life. That’s certainly the case in The Keeper, a graphic novel from power couple Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes that gives form to the amorphous threat of racism and generational trauma.
Aisha’s luck could hardly be worse. After her parents are killed in a car crash, she has to move in with her grandma and start at a new school where she immediately gets targeted by the class bully. But she does like getting closer with her grandma and her grandma’s cat, even if she has to sleep on the couch in the one-bedroom apartment. And there is another apartment with kids like her who have lost too much too young. Things could be worse.
And then her grandma dies. But before she does, she makes Aisha promise not to tell anyone about being alone now—”Only trust family,” she warns Aisha. Aisha does her best to honor her grandma’s dying wish, even though it is getting creepy to have her grandma’s body still in the bedroom like that. There’s something creeping in the shadows, too, that one of the neighbor boys describes as the Keeper. Whatever it is, it comes after the cat, and anyone who threatens Aisha. Only trust family, Aisha knows, but not even the people who care about Aisha seem to be safe from the Keeper, and she begins to think she can’t trust it, either.
The Keeper is rife with trauma, much of it generational, and most of it stemming from racism. Aisha’s grandmother’s insistence to only trust family is a well-earned lesson from her youth when her father was killed in a racially motivated attack. The keeper’s origin extends even farther back to another race-based death. Aisha’s grandma might not have been killed because of the color of her skin, but there’s enough racial aggression in an average day to keep her from reaching out to people she can’t count on to have her—or Aisha’s—best interests at heart.
The Keeper as a force at once protective and destructive is a sharp projection of the kinds of ways trauma defenses can heal and hurt at the same time. Take the stereotype of grandparents who lived through the Great Depression hoarding take-out containers and rubber bands seventy years after the economy improved, for example. The Keeper’s motives to protect Aisha are pure, but their execution isn’t quite benevolent. They’re heavy-handed, too, and in a modern world with public schools and rent due, Aisha’s physical safety is only part of the equation. Still, the Keeper, while scary, isn’t quite a villain; rather, it’s the web of injustice, past and present, that has made something like a Keeper seem like the best solution that is under the microscope. Given that that injustice is the nonfictional element in this story, it’s the most frightening thing, too.
Ring Reads 