It is
especially disturbing to read a story like Black
Canaan these days. Robert E.
Howard’s nightmare about a black uprising in the deep south is unpleasant
reading not so much for the horrible and violent events it depicts—which are
typical of a “shudder pulp” circa the mid-1930s—as for the racist attitudes
everywhere on display, and the realization that such attitudes are still ours today.
Which
attitudes are overtly expressed in the story:
the “N-word” is virtually the only
word used to refer to African-Americans and their local community throughout Black Canaan. Howard’s language and assumptions about
African-Americans easily compete with H.P. Lovecraft’s and H.S. Whitehead’s at
their most virulent—a disappointment for this reader. The story appeared in Weird Tales in 1936. Current
readers may speculate: how did the
magazine’s editors view this story? How
was it experienced by the magazine’s readership at the time? What fears was Howard trying to exploit in
his fans?
The contemporary
erasure of this type of hate speech from public
dialogue has not removed the racial fear and hatred it signifies. I read Black
Canaan just a few days after a grand jury decided not to indict a white
police officer in Missouri accused of shooting to death an unarmed black
teenager. As a middle-class Caucasian I admit
that my eyes lingered too briefly on the specter of racial injustice and police
brutality; my eyes were soon drawn to scenes of rioters in Ferguson burning
down numerous businesses in the wake of the court’s decision. Though an expression of frustration and
outrage, it looked more like a black uprising, a threat to order and safety and
privilege.
This is
the theme of Robert E. Howard’s Black
Canaan, set somewhere in the lowlands of Louisiana near the end of the
nineteenth century. Kirby Buckner, the
narrator, a son of the local gentry, is drawn back to his hometown of Grimesville. The village is in a dark, isolated region
called “Canaan”, an hour or so outside of New Orleans. It is anything but a Promised Land. The people struggle to make a living at
farming in a poor swampy backwater that Howard intentionally depicts as a
jungle, as in African jungle. The white people live in Grimesville, a
supposed outpost of civilization; the blacks live in Goshen, which lies deeper
in the swamps and overgrowth. The racial
metaphor is clear, as skin color darkens, the land becomes more primitive and
treacherous, more like Africa.
If there
is any cleverness in this story, it is in the author’s choice of the two
Biblically resonant names of Canaan and Goshen.
Canaan of course is the Promised Land, given to the wandering
Israelites. Goshen is the older
location. It was an agriculturally rich
area of Egypt given to Joseph’s family, who were allowed by Pharaoh to migrate
there to escape a terrible famine. In Black
Canaan, Howard overturns these allusions and makes them terribly
ironic. Canaan becomes a vortex of evil,
racial hatred and pagan idolatry, drawing its inhabitants into the dark waters,
towards violence and primitiveness.
When Kirby
Buckner arrives in Canaan, he discovers that people are fearful of yet another black
uprising. “The blacks had risen in 1845,
and the red terror of that revolt was not forgotten...” Terrified whites are fleeing their farms for the
relative safety of Grimesville. This
time the trouble seems different in quality and potency. There have been murders and disappearances,
and talk of a visiting Voodoo priest named Saul Stark. Buckner also has an encounter with a
sorceress in league with Stark, who casts a spell on him—the “Lure of the Bride
of Damballah”—drawing him against his will to attend the “Dance of the Skull”. It is clear that the insurrection is powered
by voodoo and black magic; Buckner’s enthrallment to the sorceress also invokes
the supreme horror of miscegenation.
Using his
knowledge of diabolical magic, Stark is able to “put people in the swamp”. That is, through a series of tortures and
invocations he is able to convert his opponents to grotesque frog-like servants
who lay in wait in the dark waters of the swamp. This may be Buckner’s fate unless the Dance
of the Skull can be disrupted in time.
At this point, shadowy Canaan, the whites and blacks that live there,
and the amphibious mayhem that is being unleashed are clearly figures in the realm
of the unconscious, of unassimilated fears and barely repressed hatreds of ‘the
other’. Howard’s nightmare is that
blacks may someday prevail in their struggles, and drag familiar white society
into the dark waters of their strange beliefs and evil ways, and drown it
there. That there may some justice in
this, or at least legitimate revenge for centuries of enslavement is not one of
the author’s insights—other than unending fear of retribution by aggrieved
blacks.
In
1936, when Black Canaan was
published, there were still people alive who had witnessed the American Civil
War or its immediate aftermath. There
were also people still around who had experienced slavery first hand or knew of
the enslavement of family members. Not much
more than a human lifespan separated modern America from the horrors of slavery
or the Civil War that ended it. It does not seem too far a stretch to see that
early twentieth century weird fiction like Black
Canaan was in some sense still processing the trauma of that experience. Dark fantasies
like Black Canaan, as well as the
disturbing events just last week in
Ferguson, remind us that we are still asleep, and that the nightmare continues.