I first am prompted in a manner similarly to what I believe Shange is to mention the death of Keenan. As she says, he “haunts the ethnographic text”. I believe her footnote about his death and the complexities surrounding it frame the very points she wishes to make in this chapter. The demands of abolition are a result of the deaths and dismissal of countless bodies deemed disposable. They are rooted in the way people feel haunted by the failures of these systems. As an ethnographer, in many ways Shange becomes integrated in the community she works with in this text. It is why the manner in which she addresses these deaths, stating plainly and without delicacy that he and the child she mentions later “is dead” is almost jarring. It is factual in nature and almost feels void of emotion. This is done with the intention I believe of aligning their deaths with the data presented in the book. Keeenan’s misbehavior and Bryan’s enrollment into college did nothing to protect them from the violence that resulted in their deaths, and Shange makes this alarmingly clear. Shange claims that Robeson, the school both these boys attended, failed to meet abolition’s demands for the end of captivity. She also claims that in their attempts to disrupt the school to prison pipeline, “young people of color are rendered as raw materials like water or oil to be shuttled to a putatively prosocial destination” (55). To infringe upon the autonomy of these Black students is to hold them captive. To move them towards higher education rather than prisons, while considered a good, comes with its own consequences. It does not begin to address the other things that impact students of color. A high school diploma is not a saving grace from the oppression and violence faced by Black children. That is what Shange asks us to grapple with. We must hold the truth of confinement, whether it is deemed beneficial or oppressive, as what it is. Sitting in the discomfort of this truth I feel the haunting just the same. I am haunted by my friends who have been forced to leave college to take care of children while they are still one themselves. I am haunted by the deaths of “educated” Black girls like Breonna Taylor, who was not saved by her status as a registered nurse. When we dismantle pipelines to build pathways, we must remember that reworking a system of oppression does not fully disrupt the effects of the oppression.