The Curse Beyond the Material (Landres)

 April 30, 2021

We criticize Isaac for spiritualizing his situation and for his need to physically extract himself from the McCaslin lifestyle, and for which reasons giving up the estate, expressing his disavowal of the McCaslin family line’s past. These material renunciations seem non-effectual for his spiritual ends, irrelevant to them. So we condemn his attributions of the evils of propertyship and slavery to this abstract, spiritual “curse.” But if it is better to think about inequalities and their remedies in material terms, we cannot think of them in only these terms. White supremacy, slavery, and propertyship shapeshift in their material form, but they persist in often unidentifiable, insidious ways. This is the truth and the relevance, I believe, in Issac’s idea of the curse. If we should think about these ills in material terms, we also must remain wary of their spiritual, psychological persistence, as Isaac tries to be.

The confusing, eerie, transmutated effects of the ills are manifest, for example, at Fonsiba’s new house when Isaac visits her in her desolation, and even at the introduction of “Go Down, Moses” with the description of Samuel Beauchamp’s hair.

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