The genealogy of Morrison’s four novels appears through relations that no longer possess the conditions for a secure inheritance. A place exists after having been destroyed; a clerical error by a Union Army official produces an enduring genealogical line; an absent child reigns over a household; and the narrator takes ownership of another woman’s story before giving her name. Sula starts from the erasure of the past, recollecting that “there was once a neighborhood” on the site being cleared for the Medallion City Golf Course (Morrison 1975, 3). “Once” provides the Bottom with the distance of folklore; however, “neighborhood” holds onto the social intimacy that redevelopment is trying to erase from the landscape. The expectation that “[t]here will be nothing left of the Bottom” makes disappearance the narrative condition that makes the place available for recollection (Morrison 1975, 3). Even the name change carries with it the memory of dispossession: the hill “is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom” (Morrison 1975, 3). “Now” confers authority on the language of development, while “when” holds onto the memory of the displaced habitation of Black people. Thus, the novel begins genealogy as the narration of a social world that is being destroyed.

Introduction: Haunted Genealogy and the Limits of Repair
Chapter One: Community, Refusal, and Violent Kinship in Sula
Chapter Two: Genealogy, Women’s Knowledge, and the Archiveof Flight in Song of Solomon
Chapter Three: Maternal Counterhistory: Possession, Rememory,and the Unfinished Dead in Beloved
Chapter Four: Improvised Descent: Urban Memory and NarrativeRevision in Jazz
Conclusion: Haunted Genealogy and the Ethics of IncompleteRelation