There once was a time when one could eat the oysters of Jamaica Bay. In 1891 the wetland estuary located on the southwestern tip of Long Island was so renowned for shellfish farming that The Cosmopolitan ran an illustrated article titled “An Oyster Village,” which documents daily life in Inwood, a sleepy but prosperous coastal town sitting across an inlet from where John F. Kennedy International Airport currently stands. It describes the quaint existence enjoyed by a flourishing tight-knit community around the bay, “the freedom of the oysterman’s life, which, notwithstanding its hardship and exposure, is full of that poetry of the picturesque always furnished by water and sky.”

In one of the many overlapping timelines in Tyriek White’s arresting debut novel, We Are a Haunting, a woman standing on the banks of Jamaica Bay in 1990 encounters a spirit who tells her a story about growing up long ago in a community of enslaved people living on farmland just northwest of Inwood. In this dead woman’s memories of enslaved life, oysters largely figure as shells thrown onto the ground after white farmers had eaten the mollusks inside. But some of that refuse, the ghost recalls, found a second life in the hands of a woman named Cara. “Up in the house they called her the Oyster Woman,” she says. “She’d make an altar to her ancestors out of bone and hemp and the best oyster shell.” Cara could hear the dead, including the cries of her infant son calling her to visit the bay’s shores every night.

We Are a Haunting overflows with characters like these—Black folks dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded. The novel, which jumps around in time from spectral reminiscences of the nineteenth century to the late 1980s and early 1990s and into the twenty-first century, follows the members of a Brooklyn family attempting to find stability while struggling with their strange attunement to the dead. It is primarily set in parts of New York that are relatively unknown to gentrifiers, neglected by city officials, and rarely treated in literary fiction—East New York, New Lots, Canarsie, the Hole. By probing deeper into outer-borough New York and its agrarian history, White complicates our traditional understanding of slavery as rural and southern, showing how memories of that peculiar institution shape contemporary urban life as well.

At the center of the novel are a Black woman named Key and her son, Colly, both intermediaries between the spiritual and physical realms. In the waning years of the cold war, before she gives birth to Colly, Key finds her calling as a doula. At the same time, her life becomes increasingly pervaded by ghosts: a mother who killed herself because “everyone loved me wrong,” another mother from the neighborhood who died under mysterious circumstances and wants to communicate with her children one last time, disembodied women (or is it their babies?) who haunt hospital delivery rooms with screams and wails from beyond. When Key herself dies of cancer in the mid-Aughts, grief sends her child falling “backward into a scar in the world, a fall sudden and lasting.” From this black hole, Colly must navigate adolescence and teenage love, a father and a sister staggering through their own mourning, an internship at the Museum of Modern Art, the shooting death of another Black boy in the neighborhood, and the growing realization that he, too, can sense the past in the present.

In the novel’s prologue, Colly accuses Key of leaving him unprepared for how disorienting seeing the dead can be, of passing on “without telling me what it was like to be in two places, without designation, without home, no matter how hard you try to make one for yourself.” But Key never seemed comfortable moving between worlds either. “Do the dead still have a right to this world? Is it fair that I can see them, or hear their near absent padding across dirt, displacing grass and earth like a wind across the inlet?” she wonders at one point. “How can I live my life when all I can see is death?” she cries out at another.

Key is Colly’s first ghost. Initially, he merely feels her presence as he occupies the spaces and touches the objects that she left behind. That is, until he begins hearing her voice, “like she was behind a wall I couldn’t find the door to.” Then one night, he brings home a girlfriend who asks about the books that fill the apartment, stacks of Black feminist classics that had belonged to his mother, like Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. He recounts the plot of Key’s favorite, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and quotes Sula’s words from her deathbed: “My lonely is mine.” The girlfriend interprets the line as a comment on ownership—to be Black after slavery, an institution that told us our own personhood could be stripped from us, requires us to be fiercely possessive over even the painful parts of ourselves.

As if on cue, Key appears to Colly later that evening as he tries to fall asleep:

You were standing over me like you wanted to tell me something, Ma. I felt like I could never seek you out yet there you were, hiding right in front of me. You came to me and I swore I could smell sweetened cornmeal.

Though Colly speaks to his mother’s spirit regularly, this time he can see her face, arranged in a melancholy smile. She wants to reach out and comfort him but knows she cannot. The best she can do is to yearn for his survival through the difficult future she has already foreseen, “speak his name, have it break through the sodden, temporal wall between us like the hook of a rod through the bass’ cheek.” She knows that loneliness, as personal as it may be, can become destructive if not shared and understood.

Later, in one of the novel’s richest scenes, we see one of these visits from Key’s perspective, as she projects herself from 1991 into the twenty-first century to watch her child trying to make it on his own as a high schooler, living in a home that his father has largely abandoned because of his own grief. “I roam the house, years from now,” Key intimates. “It is fading into the gray slate it was when I first rented and spent years cleaning, scrubbing, and hiding things.” She fears that Colly will inhabit a future of social and environmental decline, that he will “be given a city emptied, cracked in half—the air will be full of lead and settle at the bottom of your lungs, pulling you down as you move through the world.” To counteract this sense of loss, Key urges her son to engage more closely with the people and places around him:

Being from a community means contending with the history of a space; it reflects every move, every choice you believe to exist in a vacuum. Every institution fails us until, finally, the land will too. Being a family just means we can’t fail each other.

Earlier in the novel, Key receives similar advice from the ghost of the Oyster Woman, who eventually speaks with her in the basement of a church that the enslaved community once built. There, the Oyster Woman tells her that to perceive the past in the present is not a unique ability:

What is a graveyard but a place of future lives and deaths? They both commune in a place, try to cross a border or chasm that doesn’t really exist. You are confronted with it every day, but it’s easier to close your eyes when you are blinded by it.

The past is never dead. It’s just buried, right beneath every surface.

Much Black writing has reflected on how death subtends Black American life. Octavia Butler’s Kindred imagines how a Black woman living in the 1970s would respond to being hurtled into her own family’s slave past. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora traces how the death of a Brazilian enslaver who raped the enslaved continues to mark the bodies and music of his Black descendants for generations. Toni Morrison’s Beloved uses spirits and the uncanny to call attention to slavery’s continued presence. To be Black in the nineteenth century or during Jim Crow or during the war on drugs or during Ferguson or during the protests for George Floyd is and historically has been to form an identity under the immense pressure of cruel and racist histories. Though reviewers have noted the lyrical quality of White’s writing, what sets his style apart is the way it asks us to consider the very function of what we call “lyrical prose.” “Lyrical” is often taken to mean “mellifluous” or merely “poetic,” but White borrows not just the sound of the lyric but the form’s refusal of linearity and straightforward description in order to emphasize the multiple layers of meaning and history that make up a life. All of White’s characters acutely feel that history does not linger passively in museums but lives and breathes in our bodies, in our selves. “Maybe the only way to escape history was to not have a body at all, do away with it completely,” Colly says to his mother in the novel’s final scene.

Even when there are no ghosts around, Key and Colly can hear the sounds of the ocean everywhere—in fifth-floor walk-ups nowhere near the water, while browsing Gordon Parks’s photographs and Yinka Shonibare’s sculptures on the Internet and in museums, while touching lovers and smoking weed in bathrooms, in dreams that feel more real than life itself—reminding them and readers that the Atlantic will always be a site of racial trauma. In Beloved, a clear influence on White’s novel, the ghost of a child killed in a radical act of maternal love materializes from the ocean’s depths as an incarnation of the “Sixty Million and more” Africans murdered during the transatlantic slave trade. In We Are a Haunting, set more than a century later, Key’s spirit speaks to Colly from the banks of the ocean alongside other lingering spirits, emphasizing how many Black people—sixty million and many, many more—have perished but have not been lost. After learning of the death of an unnamed young man whose circumstances closely resemble those of Kalief Browder, who hanged himself in 2015 after having been held for three years as a teenager on Rikers Island without trial, Colly thinks of “an island, the men who drowned or lost their breath and the boys who were lost at sea. I thought of the women who waited at the shore…who would wait and wait and wait for the tide to come in, not knowing we had disappeared completely.” While many have left the mortal world, they wait to be called for guidance. They wait for our return.

In this way, grief becomes life-affirming. White dissents from the long-standing idea that a sustained attachment to a lost object, what Sigmund Freud would call “melancholia,” is unhealthy. For Freud, melancholia induces an “inhibition and circumscription of the ego,” a condition that provokes “an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests.” For Colly, his mother’s appearances throughout his life offer something to count on in an unstable world. As Key tells him after she dies, “You are where we have always existed. Where I falls away from You and the welling you’ve felt all along, all from living, spills out. You are home, and we are with you.” This is the Black diaspora transcending time and space. It suggests that the Black “I” cannot precede the Black “we”—nor should it.

Before Colly can fully absorb this lesson, he moves to Southern California for college. There, he reconnects with his first girlfriend, falling in love again and breaking up with her again because he fears the intensity of their connection. Nonetheless, this enduring love helps him to reckon with what he could not see from inside the depths of his grief: a future in East New York, the community that sustained him even as the neighborhood deteriorated from a lack of city funding and attention. This future brings Colly back to his old neighborhood and to Jamaica Bay, still deeply marked by memories of his mother. He gets a job as a grant writer for a local community organizer and describes a trip to the bay that he takes with her while thinking of Key:

Combs of grass and thick rush stuck together; dragonflies exploded through meadow and over the water like a flash of a wind-up camera. What I thought was mud slicked down licks of foliage, oil and sludge along the inlet. It was dark rust, more dark brown than the crimson it took on in the light. For the most part we wandered the shore, ears buzzing from the gnats. You used to appear to me and I knew it was real. I followed you back in time to learn how it began for you.

The last section of the novel takes place after the first election of Donald Trump, as the ascension of a megalomaniacal president ushers in a new era of antisocial behavior on a national scale. Colly quickly becomes disillusioned with the fraudulent beau monde of nonprofit fundraising. Instead, he founds the East Brooklyn Rescue and Reclamation, a small-time operation he manages with a childhood friend that helps their neighbors find adequate housing when the New York City Housing Authority, facing a $30 billion deficit, effectively dispossesses people of their homes. This political awakening helps him understand what seeing the past provides: new ways of recognizing “others suffering along with me, that the world and the human condition were threaded around the work of community, our care for one another.”

In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s 1956 novel of queer desire and expatriation, David, a man who has fled from New York to Paris to fuck around and find himself, describes the American city he left behind as feeling like it contains “all the time to come.” Giovanni, the handsome bartender he desires, retorts that only Americans think about time as progress toward some inexorable end: “Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish…. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.” In We Are a Haunting, the depths of Brooklyn are that ocean, a place where history is pressing in on the little fish from all sides.