Haunting Holiness, the Haunting Fantastic: Brief Notes from a Black Texas Writer

Mantra
The past doesn’t pass. It flickers, unsettles, and opens new ways of sensing what still matters.

Centering Thought
The fantastic is not fantasy. It is not about escaping reality, but about sensing where reality fractures. It’s a crack in the familiar. A tremor in the structures we’re told are fixed. It’s what happens when the world, for just a moment, reveals it is not as stable or singular as we’ve been taught. The fantastic is an experience, a mood, a signal—often felt before it is understood. It’s the feeling that something’s off, but also alive. It’s when the world we’ve been given cuts open and something else—a question, a possibility, a disruption—steps in.

Political theorist Richard Iton gave me this language. In his classic book, In Search of the Black Fantastic, he shows how Black artists—especially in the wake of the civil rights era—never stopped imagining life beyond the domain of formal politics. Even as institutions began to open their doors, Black cultural workers kept creating, kept experimenting, kept making space for something deeper than inclusion: a shift in how life could be sensed, shared, and shaped. Iton called that shift the fantastic—and for him, it wasn’t decorative or dreamy. It was haunting. It was serious. It mattered.

But what does it mean to dwell there—to not only inherit Iton’s insight, but to tarry with it?

As I linger within the wake of his work, I find myself drawn to what I call the haunting fantastic. Iton opened the portal, and I am walking further into it—bringing with me the ghosts, the memories, the textures of a life lived on the underside of modernity. When I speak of the haunting fantastic, I am accounting for haunting not as mere metaphor, but as the lingering presence of the unreconciled past—what social theorist Avery Gordon reminds us still courses through our nervous systems and demands something to be done. Haunting is the trace of what wasn’t resolved, what was buried too quickly, what still stirs beneath the surface of the present.

It braids itself with the fantastic, which I define—following literary scholar Eric Rabkin—as the anti-expected: that which ruptures the predictable and fractures the frame. The fantastic haunts precisely because it reveals that the discourses which produced our past—about race, gender, sexuality, value, and the human—were never complete, never fixed. Haunting insists on their incompleteness. And in doing so, the fantastic becomes a re-articulation of the very terms of order that once stamped us, categorized us, and confined us within the so-called “order of things.”

Our emergence—however we emerge in the world—is fantastic because it was never supposed to happen. And yet here we are.

The haunting fantastic is the name I give to this coiled, disruptive attunement. It’s how I make sense of the past that didn’t end when I left it behind. It’s how I recognize that some disruptions don’t destroy us—they show us new ways to feel, to remember, to move, to live. The fantastic doesn’t give closure. It gives texture. It cuts through the fabric of disciplinarity. It opens space where something unexpected—something anti-expected—can begin to breathe. When the anti-expected appears, the haunting fantastic is among us.

But lately I’ve come to understand something else:
To be a Black boy raised in Central and North Texas who dreamed of becoming a writer was already an instantiation of the haunting fantastic. It was a break in the acknowledged order. It was something the world I grew up in didn’t know how to make sense of.

Black boys who become Black men in Texas—and who dream of becoming writers—are the anti-expected.

Especially when we choose to love the land and honor the indigenous people who loved it first—not just live on it and extract from it.

When we choose to tarry with the place signified as Texas: its histories, its wounds, its people, its beauty.

When we choose to write toward what the land carries—its miracles and its hauntings.

When we choose to counter the strategies implemented by the powers that try to conceal those things.

When we choose to do all this through language, through story, through the written word—
that is the anti-expected.

As a child, I didn’t turn on the television and see Black men known as Texas writers. I didn’t open school books and find the names of Black men who spoke of Mesquite or Garland or Temple or Dallas with lyricism and pain and love. To be sure, there have always been Black Texas writers. But you had to search for them. You had to be diligent. No one handed them to me on a syllabus. No billboard in Dallas read:

Here is your future, here is your inheritance.

Write the vision. Make it plain.

But from the beginning, writing was my first calling. The first artform that held me.

I remember sitting at a school computer in kindergarten. Teachers gathered around me, peering at the screen, saying to one another, "This is really a good story. I'm serious. This is a good story." Even then, something about storytelling called to me. But it was in second grade that the call became clearer.

That year, I was handed Alvin Schwartz’s More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and I was instantly hooked. Those eerie, uncanny tales stirred something in me. I didn’t just want to read stories—I wanted to write them. Not sermons. Not speeches. Stories. Stories that made people feel the strange, the unsettled, the marvelous shift in the world that good writing can provoke.

That same year, my teacher—an older woman from the U.K.—introduced me to the world of Roald Dahl. I devoured Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The BFG. Dahl’s stories were full of children hurled into the fantastic, into uncanny and wondrous circumstances that adults either refused to see or could not survive. His books (troubling elements notwithstanding) insisted that children could sense what others missed, could see what others refused to name.

As a child, I found myself drawn to both the haunting and the fantastic—not simply because they were entertaining, but because I carried elements of both inside me. At seven years old, I already held burdens in my small body that no one around me knew how to name, let alone help me lay down. At the same time, I could linger for hours in the company of birdsong, watching the leaves dance in the Texas heat, marveling at the beauty others passed by without notice. The haunting and the fantastic weren’t just genres I read—they were the emotional and spiritual languages of my inner life. All of it coiled within the soft body of a Black boy living in Dallas. Looking back, I think I was drawn to those stories because they mirrored something already alive in me: a sensitivity to what others couldn’t quite acknowledge, a sense that the world shimmered with things both terrifying and beautiful. But there was no grammar in 1996 for a Black boy in Dallas, Texas, who loved Roald Dahl and dreamed of writing haunting, fantastic stories—stories that dared to tarry with the things most people rushed past.

Throughout elementary school, I was blessed with teachers who poured into me—not just academically, but spiritually. They saw me as a soft, inquisitive, tender Black boy and gave me tools to honor that tenderness. They taught me about Claude Monet’s garden. About impressionism. About Broadway plays like Cats. They asked me to write screenplays. They made me keep a nature journal in fourth grade—nine years old and already required to study the tilt of light, the movements of birds, the stories told by seeds and soil. They taught me to pay attention to what the world tries to ignore.

And then came the stretch. The gap. Middle school. Most of high school. A time where I kept writing, but fewer adults noticed. Teachers, exhausted and overwhelmed, didn’t always see the quiet Black boy in the back of the room reading and writing for his life. The one with the varsity sweats, the Town East Mall kiosk earrings, and the deep ache to be seen.

Until Mr. Greg Bower, my 11th grade English teacher.

One day he stumbled across a throwaway essay I scribbled on crumpled notebook paper for a substitute. He saw what had been hiding in plain sight.The alliterations. The metaphors. The similes inspired by religious figures. Poetics from the back. Poetics in the Black. He placed quotes from my essay on the board the next day and told the class:

"Ladies and gentlemen, my sincerest apologies. We have been in the presence of a writer all year and we did’nt know it. I apologize because I didn’t know it!"

When he named me, students looked around in shock. Him? James?!

From that day forward, I wasn’t just the shy basketball player. I was El Jefè. The Writer Mr. Bower always talks about.

And that’s the haunting fantastic, too. The way a world that misnames you suddenly cracks. The way someone looks through the wrinkle and feels compelled to call you by your true name. The way you remember: I’ve been a writer all along. Even when the world couldn’t see it. Especially then.

To be named rightly in that moment was more than affirmation—it was a kind of awakening. A lifting of the veil. It reminded me that identity is not bestowed by institutions, but revealed in the quiet persistence of becoming. It was then I began to understand: I am, first and foremost, a Black Texas writer. That identity precedes and exceeds any professional title that might follow my name.

And to be a Black writer from Texas is no small thing. It is not a contradiction. But it is contrapuntal. Dissonant. Dadaesque. A haunting refusal to play the role others had written for me. It interrupts what Black male life in Texas is often presumed to be. It sings a new song from within the familiar—one made of soul food and screen doors, of Juneteenth parades and coolers full of Capri Sun, red Kool-Aid Bursts and Grape Drink, of Friday night dominoes and Saturday afternoon car washes in the driveway with music blaring from an open garage.

Writing about such things—about the sweetness and ache of memory, about places and people that once held you—requires one to tarry with the haunting fantastic. Especially when you live and breathe from the underside of modernity, these experiences, for many of us, were not sustainable or lasting. They are vaporous.

These experiences are vaporous—not because they lacked meaning, but because they could not last. Like the mist the writer of Ecclesiastes spoke of, they appear for a moment and vanish before we can name them. They slip through our fingers precisely because we try to hold them. Their beauty is not what preserved them, but what made their passing all the more piercing. The memories are haunted not because they were all painful, but because so many were good. Too good. They gave us something no language could capture—feelings that shimmered beyond speech, joys that left no traceable path behind. As children, many of us did not yet know that all things pass. We did not yet know that even the most sacred laughter will fade. That love, no matter how fierce, cannot always keep the house warm or the people near. We could not see the vapor rising until it was already gone.

And so we waved goodbye on what we believed to be a regular Saturday evening. We walked our family to the driveway and waved, not knowing that this summer—that summer—would be the last time Heaven descended like a dove and rested upon a Black family gathering unbothered, unburdened, becoming in Central Texas. We did not know that the elders would soon become ancestors, that the boys in the yard would become raptured by the state, that the homes would be lost not to fire but due to someone being laid off. We did not know. And that not knowing—that awful innocence of childhood—makes the haunting all the more visceral, all the more profound.

To write from this place is to tarry with the haunting fantastic. It is to feel for the outline of what once was and still is, even if it lives now as ache, as shimmer, as breath. It is to honor what the world refuses to archive. To refuse the erasure that comes when memory is expected to be orderly, safe, or silent. It is to remember that sometimes what haunts us, ultimately is not pain in and of itself—but haunting holiness, a different quality of pain altogether. A holiness that passed too quickly. A fleeting paradise we didn’t know we were in until a For Rent sign was planted in the middle of our Eden.

To write out of that place is to tarry with the haunting fantastic.

And now, I ask you:

Where in your life did something flicker—brief, beautiful, and gone before you could name it?

What sacred moment passed before you recognized it as holy? What paradise did you only realize was paradise once it disappeared?

Can you still feel the echo of a summer evening, a backyard game, a voice calling your name through a screen door—now just vapor rising from the ground of your memory?

What laughter do you still hear in your body that the world has tried to silence or forget?

Which of your longings were never affirmed because they didn’t fit the script? Which of your joys were too tender, too strange, too fleeting for others to notice?

What did you observe in childhood—about nature, about people, about God or gods or Life—that no one else seemed to see?

What filled the pages of your fourth-grade notebook? What was your backyard Eden? What was the holiness that passed too quickly, leaving behind not just grief, but awe?

Where have you felt the haunting holiness—that dizzying ache of having touched something sacred only to lose it before you had the words?

And finally: What flickers still? What haunts you not to harm you, but to remind you that something real, something radiant, once held you?

Let these questions linger. Let them live with you. You don’t need to answer them all at once. Just don’t rush to forget what flickers.

The fantastic is not fantasy. It’s the crack where a different kind of life—your life—leaks through.

Affirmation
I carry stories that matter. I honor the strange and sacred moments that shaped me. The world may have overlooked my brilliance, but I have not. I am not bound by the titles others give me—I am becoming who I’ve always been. I welcome the flicker, the fracture, the fantastic. I do not fear the haunting. I write, remember, and reimagine my way home.