These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card *** (of 4)

In a series of interconnected short stories the history of a Jamaican family and the culture of Jamaica come together in a kaleidoscope of island imagery. The family includes a British slaveowner in the early 1800s whose white seed lives on among his enslaved (and raped) Africans. Characters from the 1820s are rediscovered decades and centuries later in Jamaican villagers struggling to make their wayi n the poor hill-country of the home island or the isolating islands of immigrant poverty in twentieth-first century Brooklyn. 

Each story is a self-contained shard of colorful glass whose light interacts with sights, sounds, and smells of its neighbors, and though the author's decision to forego a traditional, chronological narrative feels foreign, there is something that feels authentically Jamaican in meeting each segment of the family in her or his own era and dwelling. Some ghosts of plantation ancestors hover on the edges of New York City apartments where overworked health care aids and disgruntled teens live cramped together. The living living ghosts of three lost girls continue to wreak havoc on the uneducated descendants of a remote Jamaican community whose understanding of ancestor veneration is but one step removed from African indigeneity.