Uncovering the Dark Secrets Beneath the Surface in Matthew Morris’s The Tilling
The collection culminates with “Till” a reference to the titular action of tilling, and also to Emmett Till. In this closing essay, Morris exploring the idea of a “bone-home”—a place you are buried, a place you return to, a place that ties you to your ancestors, by opening in South Carolina, his grandmother’s bone-home. He then zooms out, cataloging the number of Black (and white) bodies that were “lynched till inert, between 1882 and 1968.”
Tilling is an act of transformation. In the case of lynching, it is a brutal act that maintains and is built upon a system of white supremacy. In evoking those who were murdered this way, and Till himself, Morris signals how his lineage can be traced back to both victims and perpetrators of racial violence, hitting home one final time the way his ancestry cannot lead to one crisp conclusion, a reality for many Americans. “I’m pretty sure some of her ancestors were slaves. That some of them were enslavers,” Morris writes of his grandmother. A personal history, but also an encapsulation of the racial violence that was (and remains) foundational to this country.
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