We are ready to wrap up our 106th Lite Reads selection, The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson. There were questions as food for thought on social media as people had the chance to read it and think about it. I will be sharing my own thoughts here. Spoilers ahead for those who have not read the story yet. Content Warning: We will be discussing potentially upsetting content in the story, including pregnancy, sexism, colourism, anti-Blackness, violence against women.
The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson is a dark fantasy short story that was originally published in 2000 in the anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, edited by Nalo Hopkinson. The story centres Beatrice, a young married woman anxiously and excitedly waiting to tell her husband that she is pregnant. During her preparations, we also get flashbacks to the development of her relationship with her husband. Beatrice’s husband Samuel is older than she is, well-off, and twice widowed, so when they married she became a housewife in the home he shared with his previous wives. Outside, Samuel keeps two glass bottles in a tree, a superstition that holds the ghosts of his wives to protect the household from them, with the glass coloured blue to keep their spirits cool rather than allow them to heat in anger at being dead. As Beatrice prepares for Samuel to get home, she accidentally knocks these bottles out of the tree, breaking them, but thinks nothing of it. Waiting for him to return home so she can make her pregnancy announcement, Beatrice prepares Samuel’s favourite food, knowing that he had previously stated he did not want children, with her being light-skinned and his complexion being much darker, he had commented “no woman should have to give birth to his ugly black babies.” As she prepares everything for his arrival home, the normally very air conditioned house grows hotter and hotter and she looks for the control panel, eventually coming to a room he always keeps locked because his wives had both died in it and he felt superstitious about it. When Beatrice opens the door, she finds the room icy cold, with his two previous wives dead in the room, their light skin frozen and their pregnant bellies gutted. The duppies (malevolent ghosts) released from the bottles begin to feed on their own blood to gain strength. The story leaves us with the uncertainty of whether Samuel will kill her, or the duppies will kill her, or the duppies will only take their vengeance on Samuel.
The Glass Bottle Trick offers up Caribbean folklore that can often be difficult to find in fantasy and horror fiction, so it’s really interesting and refreshing to see that folklore melded into both genres for this story (and it personally serves as a great reminder to read more authors from the Caribbean, since it’s an area of literature I have unfortunately limited experience in, and I know that Nalo Hopkinson herself has repeatedly written stories that reflect Caribbean, and especially Jamaican, folklore). The main element of folklore included here is the duppy, a malevolent ghost. Beatrice doesn’t actually seem to believe in duppies at the start of the story, and even seems to see Samuel as superstitious for using the glass bottle trick to keep duppies at bay or for not allowing her entry into the room where his wives died, which she finds particularly notable since Samuel isn’t normally superstitious. That said, while many of the ghost stories (including both short stories and novels) I’ve read have featured characters completely rejecting the notion of ghosts being real, even when ghosts are right in front of them, so I found it especially interesting to see that Beatrice completely acknowledged the horror of the duppies before her, even after wondering about Samuel’s superstitions regarding them, and I thought it really had something to say about how different cultures view concepts of ghosts.
I think the way The Glass Bottle Trick explored how misogyny and colourism lead to explicit violence was disturbing, chilling, and apt. Samuel hates his own Blackness and fetishizes whiteness to the extent that he has repeatedly married light-skinned women for their proximity to whiteness and then murdered those wives rather than risk the possibility of having a child with a darker skin colour. His own internalised hatred of Blackness prevents him from wanting any child, but it is also Black women that he also sees as being so disposable that he can murder them rather than have them go against his wishes by becoming pregnant. He may see himself and other Black people as being beneath white people, both in the way he acts stereotypically subservient around white people and in the way he marries light-skinned women he can pretend are white in the right light, but ultimately, it is misogynoir that allows him to treat his wives like he can throw them away.
The setting and mood in The Glass Bottle Trick is honestly a treasure. The oppressive heat, the impending storm, the unsettling house, and the threat of ghostly rage feels like something out of a work of Southern Gothic literature, even though this regionally doesn’t fit the genre. Something about a story that can make a tropical setting send chills up and down your spine is just great, especially since the tension increases as the setting gets hotter. At a certain point in my life, I think I got used to the idea of a cold chill when ghosts appear, so the hot rage of the duppies heating the normally cold house struck me especially hard, even if the coldest room in the house was the one that held the bodies. The way the setting and mood play off of one another to create the perfect blend of fantasy, horror, and gothic, all within a Caribbean setting, felt incredibly fresh to read, even if the story is twenty years old.
Overall, The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson was an absolutely engrossing story that really had me hooked all through it. I really found myself eager to guess what was going to happen next and to see if it was going to be true. It has me eager to read more from the author, and it has me eager to share the story with my friends.
I hope everyone who participated by reading the story and following along on social media has enjoyed themselves. If you have more thoughts to add, you can leave a comment here, or join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. You can also join in on the discussion at Litsy by following @elizabethlk and the #litereads hashtag. The next selection, another chosen for Black History Month, will be available shortly, Sunday, February 7.
The Feminist Bibliothecary 