A Haunting in Jamaica

René Johannes Kooiker explores Marlon James’s series “Get Millie Black,” in which detectives chase ghosts as well as criminals.

By René Johannes KooikerMarch 5, 2025

• Television

• Cultural Studies

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL essay “One Day I Will Write About My Mother,” the prizewinning Jamaican novelist Marlon James remarks that his “mother’s story resists story.” Now James has fulfilled the promise of that essay’s title, if in a different medium. Get Millie Black (2024), a five-part noir procedural written and created by James for HBO, is his most explicit homage to his mother, one of the first women to earn the rank of detective in a Jamaican police department. It was she who gave him his sense that stories are “a mystery to be solved,” an obsession James passes on to the show’s titular protagonist Millie Black (Tamara Lawrance), who at the series’ start has quit her successful career as a Scotland Yard detective in London to return to her home island and join the Jamaican Police Force (JPF).

In the show’s opening voice-over, Millie explains the mysteries she has come home to solve. This is a “ghost story,” she says, and like “every story” about Jamaica, things “won’t add up” and “won’t make sense.” A year into her new life, Millie becomes obsessed with the case of Janet Fenton (Shernet Swearine), a missing teenage girl. During her investigation, she runs up against the machinations of Scotland Yard detective Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), who pursues the main suspect, the wealthy white Jamaican failson Freddie Somerville (Peter John Thwaites), for his own ends.

But detectives, try as they may, can’t solve ghost stories, and Get Millie Black draws dramatic tension from its characters’ inability to lay ghosts to rest. Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, may be internally divided by race and wealth, but all who live there operate under the yoke of a bigger system and a history they can hardly name.

Get Millie Black tries to resolve this dilemma. If a crime show can’t fully address Jamaica’s present, because it has trouble dealing with the crimes of the past, James’s innovation is to graft a gothic overlay onto the procedural plot, giving the ghosts themselves a chance to speak. Too often, however, the living don’t listen. Detective work relies on evidence, causality, and attributing actions to agents in specific times and places. But from the start, Millie makes it clear that these strategies alone are insufficient. “This crime story is old,” she says. “But people make it new every day.”

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Since his 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, the first-ever won by a Jamaican writer, James has been thrust into the role of his home country’s unofficial ambassador of world literature. (That novel, too, was optioned for the screen but, having been passed from HBO to Amazon and finally Netflix, now sits in limbo.) Since this show is the first major streaming drama shot on location in Jamaica, by a Jamaican writer, and with a largely Jamaican cast, James carries the burden of several “firsts.” The show opens with Millie’s narration—“This is just another story about Jamaica”—and the layered “just” tells the viewer, depending on who they are, that Get Millie Black is either not the story of Jamaica they might know or it’s all too familiar.

Millie’s extended voice-over in the pilot initially seems to position her as a mouthpiece for James, and her story as symbolic of Jamaica today. In opening flashbacks, she adopts the universalizing perspective of a fable, the better to distance herself from the hurt: “Call the girl Millie Black. She is me. Call the boy Orville Black, my brother.” Millie’s inscrutability—both to the viewer and to herself—drives the show just as much as the murder-and-disappearance plots that preoccupy her later. The show’s title dares us to get Millie Black while it makes it difficult for viewers to do so.

The remaining four episodes further complicate Millie’s reliability as a narrator by giving other major characters monologues as well. In a kind of epistolary form, they address their comments directly to Millie. This device doesn’t anchor an entire episode around that character’s point of view, as you might expect from James after reading his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. Tempering that novel’s cacophony of voices, Get Millie Black has its satellite characters orbit Millie to question her self-image and express what has remained unsaid.

Put another way, James doesn’t use voice-over as a crutch for exposition, but rather to probe and prod at the stories these characters tell themselves. It is in these monologues, then, that ghosts appear—speaking from an unmarked place and time, from somewhere beyond the world of the show itself.

At the same time, James applies the veneer of a police procedural to the show, luring in the non-Jamaican viewer by trading one kind of familiarity for another. Jamaica has rarely been represented with this degree of realism in mainstream entertainment. Too often, depictions of Jamaica have been weighed down by the same old clichés: Reggae music and Rastafarians, sunshine and white beaches, images popularized by Hollywood films from How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998) to Cool Runnings (1993). Alternatively, there are drugs, violence, objectified women—the kind of “ghetto voyeurism” perpetuated even by homegrown Jamaican productions like The Harder They Come (1972), Third World Cop (1999), and Ghett’a Life (2011). James has been accused of indulging in it too. Such stereotypes remain an unfortunate feature of many recent foreign productions, including Bob Marley: One Love (2024) and Idris Elba’s pulp novel adaptation Yardie (2018). (One exception is the 2018 three-part BBC miniseries The Long Song, based on Andrea Levy’s 2010 historical novel about slavery; it’s a clear precedent for James’s show and, not coincidentally, features Tamara Lawrance in a leading role.)

Get Millie Black offers a bold revision. The show buzzes with patois and features a breakout Jamaican cast, including national celebrities of the 1990s who here—in a wink to James’s home audiences—play minor characters: Patra, a dancehall icon, appears as the strip club’s manager Hit Girl, while Dorothy Cunningham, known for playing Miss Zella in the sitcom Lime Tree Lane (1988–97), is Sister Agatha, the head nun of Janet’s school. As The Wire (2002–08) did for Baltimore, Get Millie Black uses an ever-widening web of crime and corruption to paint a picture of a Kingston we’ve rarely seen before.

For all this innovation, James mostly colors within the lines of the detective genre. It’s clear that his writing instincts are for character and scene rather than plot and banter. Some good twists aside, the episode-ending cliff-hangers are predictable. The show barely develops a JPF–Scotland Yard rivalry and quickly drops a cursory subplot about Millie’s bartender love interest. The JPF beat cops are easy antagonists, and Millie frequently goes rogue against the better judgment of, well, everyone, in the tradition of countless maverick TV cops before her. We’re left wondering how Millie outranks almost everyone in the Jamaican police in less than a year despite this behavior. This doesn’t make Get Millie Black a bad show, but it does reveal its limitations.

The series also misses an opportunity to more directly address the haunting effects of its colonial and plantation-slavery past—as Jamaican literature, including James’s own plantation novel The Book of Night Women (2009), has previously done. Get Millie Black’s central conspiracy involves a gang luring Romeo (Tijhon Rose), the nine-year-old boy of middle-income parents, to a fancy boarding school with the promise of a scholarship and upward mobility, only for the child to be kidnapped and sold in London. Human trafficking, James seems to argue, is merely an extension of the triangular trade in slaves. However, some of the ham-fisted lines about colonialism—Millie’s deadpan joke to Holborn that he is there to “colonize [her] case”—fall flat, even if the intent is satirical. Similarly pointed is James’s decision to make the human trafficking ring at the center of the show’s conspiracy a travel agency, owned by Freddie’s white upper-crust family. To what they owe that power is never clear, exactly. The show only hints at generational wealth and properties dating back to slavery. The injustices perpetrated during Jamaica’s post-abolition history are ones that Millie can’t investigate but the series could have.

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Like most ghost stories, this one has a haunted house. As we learn in Millie’s opening voice-over, their father left Millie and her brother Orville (Zolé Onuora) as children in a broken home with the rage-filled “Mama” (Shanique Brown). At first, we glimpse the siblings’ little bubble of magic and play as Millie paints her brother’s toenails. But that world is punctured when Mama discovers that Orville has been dressing up in girls’ clothes: “You dirty little f*****,” Mama roars. Protecting her brother, Millie shoves Mama, who retaliates by sending Millie to England; later, she tells Millie that Orville has been killed in a riot in a slum. It’s only when her mother dies that Millie learns her brother is in fact alive, and that Orville is now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), a trans woman. Orville “died” only for Hibiscus to be born.

In the present day, the family home to which Millie has returned has once again become a source of conflict. Hibiscus, an outcast in homophobic and anti-trans Jamaica, relies on sex work for her living and won’t accede to her sister’s requests that she come “home.”

What Millie refuses to see, however, is that Hibiscus already has a home. Since their mother’s death, Hibiscus has lived in what Jamaicans call “the gully,” a network of paved storm drains originally built as part of 1950s and ’60s urban renewal projects. Channeling runoff from elite “brown” neighborhoods in the hills to the city’s “black” and impoverished seaside downtown, the gullies came to symbolize the economic and social stratification of postindependence Jamaica. The canals would frequently clog up with garbage as poorer citizens built ramshackle houses on the banks. Some gullies even cut through the city’s business district, New Kingston, defying the segregation. Gullies became synonymous with vice and sin: prostitution, drugs, gang warfare, and queerness.

It’s one way the show engages with LGBTQ+ experiences that, to date, Jamaican media has largely steered clear of. Those documentaries that have explored it—like Young and Gay: Jamaica’s Gully Queens (VICE News, 2014) or the Unreported World episode “Jamaica’s Underground Gays” (Channel 4, 2014)—drew mainstream attention to queer lives in the gully only to sensationalize them. It’s true that Jamaican literature, by contrast, has explored the gully for decades, as evidenced in Roger Mais’s classic novel The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), Kwame Dawes’s story “In the Gully” (2003), and Hazel Campbell’s story “The Buggu Yaggas,” from Jamaica on My Mind (2019). But transness has remained largely absent from or marginalized in even celebrated queer novels like Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987). Except for his viral coming-out essay in The New York Times Magazine, James himself has addressed these topics only obliquely in his fiction.

James’s most radical move with Get Millie Black, then, is to authentically portray contemporary gay and trans lives in Jamaica on-screen. James deserves credit not just for taking audiences there on a major streaming platform but also for featuring Chyna McQueen, herself a trans woman and a first-time actress, in a breakout role as Hibiscus.

In addition to Hibiscus, we meet Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jr.), a gay man and a colleague of Millie’s who lives a clandestine life with his partner Daniel (Jomo Tafari Dixon). On the face of it, Curtis’s life couldn’t be more different from Hibiscus’s, as he and Daniel occupy a high-rise facing the Caribbean Sea. But like Hibiscus, they face a precarious existence. (In an elegant piece of production design, their apartment is the only thing in the show that faces away from Kingston.)

Repeatedly, Get Millie Black highlights the ways class divides queer lives. At one point, Hibiscus hears Curtis use her old pronouns when speaking to Millie, and Hibiscus bites back with a slur she knows all too well: “Hold on, what your batty boy detective friend just say?” Defending himself, Curtis reasserts their differences: “Me look like nuh batty boy to you?” At another point, Millie wears a T-shirt with the slogan “The T in LGBT is not silent,” likely to make up for Hibiscus’s comment that “police” usually “punish” people like her—but perhaps also to draw attention to the sidelining of transgender people in Jamaican gay rights activism. (Even if it doesn’t go so far as to reference organizations like J-FLAG.)

A comparison with the source material for Get Millie Black, however, shows exactly how far James has dared to go. Press for the show has made much of the fact that James “adapted” the screenplay from his own writing, but such reporting omits the specifics. Evidently, James did adapt some plot elements and names from his short story “Immaculate,” first published in the 2012 anthology Kingston Noir. The story’s title refers to “Immaculate Conception High School,” a fancy private school attended by the missing and murdered girl at the center of the story, Janet Stenton. Set in 1993, the story, in turn, takes inspiration from the case of Dianne Smith, a 14-year-old Immaculate student whose 1983 murder sparked a media frenzy and nearly resulted in a wrongful conviction.

Having read the story, you’ll discover several Easter eggs in the show, but Get Millie Black has developed far beyond its source material. An experiment with fractured perspectives and discourses in a postmodern mode, “Immaculate” has an entire paragraph listing technical specifications of a suspect’s car. It lacks both the suspense and the character complexity of Get Millie Black. While it satirizes casual homophobia and its entanglement with violent misogyny, the story has no explicitly queer characters. In “Immaculate,” Janet is simply a victim without a voice; in Get Millie Black, she’s a tragic figure, caught in her own trap.

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If Get Millie Black is pessimistic about changing Jamaican society, Hibiscus and Millie’s evolving relationship offers glimpses of hope. Hibiscus and her friends in the gully live like maroons, runaways from the plantation who survive on the margins of society but do so on their own terms. The threats are real; Hibiscus is serially arrested for prostitution and narrowly escapes a group of rabidly homophobic men who beat her friend Deltreece (Shaunak Antonia Wilson) to death. But they also live ordinary lives, doing TikTok dances and hanging up laundry. As Curtis and Millie canvass the seedy strip club owned by Freddie, Hibiscus comfortably banters with a pole dancer about her “wicked” boots, reveling in their shared hyperfemininity: “Would look wickeder on me,” Hibiscus shoots back. As the detectives leave, the club’s manager insinuates that Hibiscus would be welcome to work the pole: “Pretty girl,” she says to an offended Millie. Owing to the campy excess of its gender roles, dancehall culture provides Hibiscus a space to perform. To put it in her own words: “Better to be Hibiscus out here than Orville everywhere else.”

One of the most revelatory scenes in the show might fly under the American viewer’s radar. In the wake of Deltreece’s death, Hibiscus and her “gully sisters” organize a wake ritual called Nine Night. This traditionally Afro-Jamaican all-night-into-daylight celebration is held on the ninth night after someone’s passing to send their spirit on to the next realm. With offerings of rum, plentiful food, storytelling, and dance, present-day Nine Nights usually incorporate aspects of dancehall culture in addition to more traditional drumming. It’s one of the most vital African-derived traditions in Jamaican culture, and one that frequently features in its literature.

For James to portray the gully as the site of this tradition is a significant move, casting LBGTQ+ Jamaicans as the inheritors of an important piece of national culture. This, too, he argues, is Jamaicanness.

Moreover, James portrays the Nine Night ceremony not as an exotic anthropological artifact but rather as a shared custom and a source of endurance in everyday life. In a show about loss, it’s the only time we witness mourning.

Then there’s the matter of Hibiscus’s name, which evokes transplantation and rebirth. As one of the African plant species brought to the New World during the transatlantic slave trade, hibiscus survived on provision grounds, little plots of plantation land set aside for enslaved people to cultivate. There’s a folktale about the trickster figure “Anancy” that explains the origins of sorrel, the blood-red Jamaican Christmastime drink made from hibiscus. Left empty-handed for the market on the morning before Christmas Eve, Anancy gathers the rejected red stalks from the stubble fields. Attempting to trick a hominy merchant with this unknown plant, Anancy tosses a bundle of hibiscus in a boiling pot, calling the result wine. Tasting the flavorless red liquid, he adds the hominy merchant’s spices. Thus, sorrel was born.

Viewing the childhood flashbacks of Get Millie Black a second time, you’ll notice the ghostly presence of Millie’s sister in the hibiscus-red accents that appear throughout—in the young Orville’s nail polish, in Millie’s hair accessories as she arrives in London, and in the phone she picks up. Right as Millie receives the devastating call about Orville, there’s sorrel on the table for the family Christmas dinner. Hibiscus was there all along. Millie just didn’t see her yet.

To create an open ending, James often concludes with a phone call. At the end of Get Millie Black, Hibiscus has once again disappeared, but instead of tracking her down, Millie calls and leaves a voicemail. This time, we realize, Millie’s message reaches across the show’s reality and the ghostly realm of the monologue. The opening of the show splits Millie’s story from her voice; by the end, Millie has reconciled them. It’s up to Hibiscus to find Millie there.