White Is for Witching

Part 2 is called “And Curiouser,” a fitting title for chapters that depict the unraveling of Luc’s project at the Silver House and the Silver children’s departure from Dover. These chapters reinforce the evil character of the house and its pull on Miranda. Chapter 6’s focus on Cambridge offers a way to examine how privileged spaces in England reinforce exclusion, and how exclusion can be self-inflicted. Chapter 7 details the Silver House’s pull on Sade, as the house speaks to her in Yoruba and turns her own gifts against her. These chapters also expand on Miranda’s doppelgänger, suggesting that exclusion can create a shadow of a person who doubts themselves. This shadow attacks its reflection, the real person, just as Dover’s racist culture leads to the harassment and deaths of people of color.

Ore’s parents adopt her and attempt to make her feel at home in her identity and culture. Her mother’s attempts are clumsy but well intentioned as she hides a book of Caribbean legends in Ore’s luggage. Although Ore has already read the book, it contains her favorite story about the soucouyant. A soul eater, the soucouyant’s spirit flies out of her old body but must return before sunrise, with salt and pepper being her weakness. In other words, only salt and pepper, a union of white and black, can stop the house and other soul-killing racist forces.

The novel’s references to vampires and the soucouyant, a kind of vampire, become more frequent. Tijana cries and discusses Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a graphic novel and television show about a chosen girl who has the strength and skills to defeat monsters. As Ore and Tijana get to know each other, they stay up late and “talked and measured each other’s Nosferatu-like shadows while the camera clicked serenely and independently” (176). Their nocturnal habits and the allusion to Nosferatu suggest that whiteness continues to leech off others’ energy, not just that of Miranda, but Ore.

Tijana’s cousin Agim drinks bleach to escape his pain over the summer, and the house threatens to turn sugar bitter. These substances, either white or whitening, convey just how dangerous an unchallenged notion of “pure” whiteness can be. At Cambridge, Ore struggles with being an outsider. She sees her inability to belong in buildings that date to the 14th century. She notices these old buildings and their Gothic architecture, confessing that she “could see we had made our beds in a tomb” (168), and wonders whether or not she would survive the night. Ore’s fears go beyond physical survival, as the buildings are hostile to her emotional and mental wellbeing: “Walls and windows forbade me. They pulled at me and said, You don’t belong here…Everyone else seemed to blend into the architecture” (181-82). The spaces of Cambridge absorb the whiteness of her fellow students, so when she sees her reflection, she feels her otherness. The school absorbs white faces, producing people who, like vampires, can’t see their own reflections.

Despite salt and pepper being means of protection against the soucouyant, the Silver House attempts to convince Sade that her kitchen skills are powerless against its magic. After the house forces Sade to eat a poisoned apple, in red and white, her mind is rendered powerless. Speaking to Sade in Yoruba, the house tries to force her to recognize its victory and leave Dover. Embracing the role of soucouyant, the house appears to have eaten her soul, because she ate its apple.