Gothic debut explores trauma in lush, visceral language

In lush and beautiful prose that describes some awful and disgusting things, Atlanta-based Yah Yah Scholfield examines the intergenerational trauma of slavery and familial abuse by way of a haunted house in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp in the gorgeously gothic and surreal debut novel On Sundays She Picked Flowers.

In 1965, 41-year-old Jude lives with her abusive mother, Ernestine. After her mother smashes Jude’s head into the wall, she decides it is finally time to leave.

When she tells Ernestine she’s leaving, the confrontation turns violent and, in a rage built up from years of abuse, Jude kills her mother. After trying to tell her aunt what she’s done, Jude then flees into northern Georgia, settling in an abandoned house in the forest outside of the tiny town of Whitnee.

Though the house is abandoned, it has a storied history in the town, and Jude finds the house teeming with ghosts and haints, spirits that have chased off anyone else who has attempted to stay in the house. Jude manages to calm the spirits in the house into a kind of truce and settles inside, carrying out repairs and living mostly by foraging in the woods with occasional trips into town.

But the forest outside the house is not empty; rather, it is home to a mysterious beast that has taken a particular interest in Jude, leaving her offerings of meat on the porch.

After Jude flees, Ernestine’s two sisters find her body and must come to terms with what Jude has done. Without any better options (the police being an unsafe option for two Black women in 1965 in Georgia), the sisters decide to bury Ernestine alongside their father on the abandoned plantation where he was born as a slave.

This all happens in the first of the novel’s four sections. To share more would verge into spoiler territory, and this is the kind of novel that works best when the reader doesn’t quite know where it’s headed.

The plot does take a bizarre turn, but one that works exceptionally well in the southern gothic setting, and which is aided by Scholfield’s luscious and visceral language, which never tips into purple prose.

Descriptions of the lush and green Okefenokee swamp in Georgia, the sweaty and visceral sex scenes and the surprisingly gorgeous descriptions of gore and cannibalism fill the novel with hauntingly beautiful descriptions of some truly terrible events.

On Sundays She Picked Flowers is an amalgam of Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. In this short novel, Scholfield explores the intergenerational trauma of slavery, familial abuse, body horror, cannibalism, queer relationships and even a bit of a monster story.

It is an incredibly ambitious debut novel, one that should cement Yah Yah Scholfield as an important rising talent.

Keith Cadieux is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His latest story collection Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is out now from At Bay Press. He also co-edited the horror anthology What Draws Us Near, published by Little Ghosts Books.