The Weight of Blood

Springville, Georgia, the fictional setting of The Weight of Blood, is isolated from progressive metropolitan areas and has been populated by the same families for generations. Longtime residents proudly pass down racist ideology as if it is something to be celebrated, and the town still holds segregated proms. The novel explores how, even decades after laws were enacted to ensure racial integration of schools, residents still find loopholes that allow them to uphold inequality and social injustice. In The Weight of Blood, the school district does not hold prom as an official school event; instead, the community holds an unofficial event, which allows organizers to evade the school rules and segregate it as they did before integration. While Springville is fictional, segregated proms in the South are not (Chen, Grace. “Segregated Proms: An Ongoing Controversy in Georgia.” Public School Review, 5 Nov. 2020). Once desegregation occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, many schools stopped hosting an official prom because they feared racial tension would occur at an integrated event. Some schools “discovered that none of the white students would come to the prom; they would have their own separate, private prom. So then the schools just opted out and stopped being involved in the organizing of the prom” (City Lights Staff. “Atlanta Contemporary’s New Exhibit Showcases a Segregated Georgia Prom from the Mid-2000s.” WABE, 18 Nov. 2022). When students and the communities hosted their own invitation-only proms that were not officially connected with the school, these events were often racially segregated. In the recent decade, students have fought to integrate proms that have long been segregated in certain rural Georgia schools.

Like in Jackson’s novel, the main part of which is set in 2014, students in 2013 from Wilcox County High School in Georgia created the first integrated prom for their school, but there was still a private, white-only prom, and the high school’s Black homecoming queen wasn’t welcome at the white homecoming party (Gumbrecht, Jamie. “‘New Tradition’ for Georgia Students: Their First Racially Integrated Prom.” CNN, 5 Apr. 2013). Throughout Jackson’s novel, some characters express shock that segregated proms still exist, but segregated proms still exist in the guise of private events. Racist ideology persists despite laws meant to temper it; for racism to be eradicated, communities must commit to change traditions as well as beliefs.