Darkly Read online

  Published by Repeater Books

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11 Shepperton House

  89-93 Shepperton Road

  London

  N1 3DF

  United Kingdom

  www.repeaterbooks.com

  A Repeater Books paperback original 2019

  1

  Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc.,

  New York.

  Copyright Leila Taylor © 2019

  Leila Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN: 9781912248544

  Ebook ISBN: 9781912248551

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

  Dedicated to

  Rita Megerle, Joan Newby, and Joyce Taylor

  Within the Veil he was born, said I; and there within

  shall he live, — a Negro and a Negro’s son…

  Blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the

  Veil, — and my soul whispers ever to me, saying,

  “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.”

  — W.E.B. Du Bois,

  “Of the Passing of the First-Born”,

  The Souls of Black Folk

  Call me a bruise, but I can’t have black without a little bit of blue.

  — Dazia

  CONTENTS

  Goth-ish

  Based on a True Story

  American Monster

  Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair

  When Doves Cry

  Screaming It to Death

  The House on Boston Boulevard

  Fear of a Black Planet

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  GOTH-ISH

  Goths reject the bourgeois sense of human identity as a serious business, stable, abiding and continuous, requiring the assertion of one true cohesive inner self as proof of health and good citizenry. Instead goths celebrate human identity as an improvised performance, discontinuous and incessantly re-devised by stylized acts. They like carefully staged extremism, and vicarious or strictly ritualized experiences of the dreadful Other.

  — Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin

  If the funny T-shirt slogans and crisp khaki pants of the average American tell the lie that everything’s going to be OK, the black lace garbs and ghoulish capes of goth tell the truth — that you suffer, then you die.

  — Sarah Vowell, “American Goth”, This American Life

  The brochure from the New Orleans Haunted History Tour company promised a “leisurely daytime stroll through St. Louis Cemetery #1.” I’d been on the French Quarter tour that ended with Hurricane’s at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, where a pirate from the 1700s hung out in the back corner. I’d been on the house tour where the ghost of a love-stricken octoroon woman froze to death on a hotel roof waiting for her French lover who would never come. I’d been on the vampire tour that was similar to the others only with more references to Anne Rice. They all tell the same stories in slightly different ways, but this particular tour guide had an agenda.

  I was expecting to see houses where ghosts could be spotted in windows on dark nights, or corners where someone was horribly murdered decades ago, but instead the guide, who was Black, herded his group of white tourists (and me) past Congo Square, the park which in the 1800s was the one place where Africans were allowed to congregate freely. He told us about the system of plaçage, a quasi-civil-union between European men and Black1 women that allowed their children an inheritance. We walked past Tremé and he told us about Storyville and jazz and showed us a map of where we were in relation to the Lower 9th ward, the mostly Black neighborhood that suffered the most from Hurricane Katrina. When we finally arrived at St. Louis Cemetery #1, he showed us the grave of Vodou queen Marie Laveau, where tourists scrawl X’s in groups of three on her tomb. He reminded us that her power was less about the supernatural and more about her access to the wealthy and connected. He pointed out the grave of Homer Plessy, of the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case that said segregation was perfectly legal and which opened up the floodgates for Jim Crow.

  While I could have used a few more ghost stories, I got a kick out of this unexpected tour of Black New Orleans history, but when I looked around the group everyone else looked bored and a little annoyed that they were not getting what they paid for. But it was a ghost tour, just not the kind they were expecting. These weren’t poltergeists and spirits trapped in hotels, bars, and brothels, these were the ghosts of our history, the spectral remnants of our nation that were too often forgotten and dismissed. We were all hoping to be a little bit frightened, to stand in the spots between the past and the present where the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. We were expecting to be entertained by macabre tales with a patina of historical truth. But as the tour guide understood, America’s haunted history is Black history. At the end he suggested we visit the Museum of Free People of Color and I gave him a $5 tip.

  I Am Darkness

  My name is Leila, pronounced “lee-lah,” which is not the way most people pronounce it. In Arabic, it means “night” or “darkness” or “dark beauty.” I asked my father once where the name came from, why my parents chose a name so much more exotic for me than my siblings Jeff and Leslie:

  He said, “It’s your name.”

  “Yeah, I know, but where did it come from? Why did you pick it?”

  “You were born, and it was just you.”

  Whatever.

  I never got an answer to my question, but I quite like the idea of me emerging from my mother’s womb and handing my dad a calling card reading I AM THE NIGHT in blackletter. It makes my morbid predilections inevitable, genetic even — a predisposition to horror movies, black nail polish and a preference for the Cure. I was destined to smoke clove cigarettes and write bad poetry under bridges in the rain. I am Darkness.

  Even my birthday was shrouded in supernatural mystique. According to family lore, the obstetrician told my mother that she was carrying a boy due in April. Perhaps they were unsatisfied with that answer, so she and my sister asked Ouija for a second opinion. The talking board spelled out G.I.R.L. (which I am) and M.A.R.C.H.2.8. (I was born on 29 March). Close enough.

  As a youth, I would say I had two main influences: Siouxsie Sioux, lead singer of the post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Denise Huxtable, the fictional daughter of Cliff and Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show. Siouxsie and the Banshees were the musical equivalent of the macabre, nightmares I could dance to, and Siouxsie Sioux represented a kind of dark glamor that I appreciated — a femininity that eschewed pink and politeness. She never seemed to smile, and I appreciated that. But Siouxsie was never aspirational for me, my idolatry stopped at the music and the Cleopatra eye shadow. I loved Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I wanted to BE Denise Huxtable. With her layers and layers of oversized clothes, floppy hats, and her fabulously mutable hair, she exuded an alternative New York City cool that I could only try my best to emulate. Her voice sounded like mine, her parents were like my parents — they were professional (my dad is an architect a
nd my mother an anthropologist) and listened to jazz. She was smart, creative, and, like me, the family’s designated weirdo. She sometimes got into trouble, but like me, she was ultimately a good kid. Denise didn’t have a vaguely offensive pseudonym and never wore a swastika as a symbol of rebellion, and the worst thing she ever did was get a D on an English paper. Her life seemed attainable, and most of all, I looked like her. Siouxsie represented how I felt on the inside and Denise was who I could be on the outside.

  Like teenagers everywhere, the walls of my room were a gallery dedicated to the music I loved, an environmental mood board of maudlin teen angst. I didn’t have to talk about my feelings; the poster for Joy Division’s Closer did it for me. I surrounded myself with a collage of white faces and spikey hair immaculately torn from The Face, Interview, and i-D magazines, and I would bend the spines as far as they would go until the pages could be plucked out neatly and intact. There were black-and-white Xeroxed copies of Caravaggios overlapped with pale blue concert ticket stubs, and photos of gothic spires and tombstones from Highgate and Père Lachaise cemeteries. There were snapshots of my friends posed dramatically in the archways of the Detroit Institute of Art with way, way, way too much eyeliner, blood-red lipstick, and frantically teased up hair like Robert Smith. I’d look at the photos of my idols in Smash Hits and my white friends with their vampiric pale skin, and I will admit that I was sometimes envious at how effortlessly they could present as goth. Mark Fisher called Siouxsie’s look a “replicable cosmetic mask, a form of white tribalism.” I never wanted to be white. Whiteness was never something I aspired to, but I considered myself a member of this tribe, and that mask never fit me. I’ll admit, I sometimes felt a bit Blacula-ish in their presence — a Black version of a white story.

  Still life with Bauhaus on window sill, photo by L. Taylor

  One evening, my dad knocked on my bedroom door. “Hey, kiddo,” he said looking around at my walls plastered with white faces. His eyes landed on a photo of a Black woman — a close-up of her face looking right into the camera, high contrast black-and-white, her head shaved. He said, “Is that your token black person?” with a breezy laugh, told me dinner was ready and left. A whole new kind of shame came over me, and days and even years later I would wonder if maybe I did only put that picture up because of some deep-seated guilt that I was betraying my race, that I was overcompensating for some unconscious desire to be white. The model wasn’t just Black; she had a defiantly dark Black face, three shades darker than mine. I thought a bit meekly, “I just thought it was a cool photo,” but now her dark eyes followed me across the room in stoic judgment, so I reluctantly taped up a photo of Terence Trent D’Arby.

  I grew up in Detroit and there are few cities in America as unequivocally Black. According to the 2010 census, Detroit is the Blackest city in the country, with almost 83% of the population identifying as African American. I went to a very small Quaker school where the students were Black (mostly Black), white, Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern. There were Christians, Jews, Hindus, and a few actual Quakers. There were rich kids from Grosse Pointe and poor kids from the Black Bottom neighborhood, and kids like me from Boston-Edison whose families lingered in the economic middle. Sometimes we dipped a little lower. It was a somewhat bougie, NPR type of upbringing and my cousins in the suburbs and my Black friends had similarly comfortable lives. I took classical guitar lessons, rented arthouse movies and read Sartre well before I could understand it. In the summers, I spent my days at Heritage House, a multi-culti enclave where I took African dance classes and learned about my “culture” in a large, redbrick Victorian House with polished wood floors and stained glass windows.

  Then there was the summer when I was sent to the YWCA day camp downtown where I had lessons in swimming and social ostracization. It was in “the hood” and the girls terrified me. They banded together in cliques and looked at me from across the room, side-eyes full of the bitter judgment that only a group of preteen girls can invoke. They got into fights, real physical fights, not the psychological warfare typical of the cool girls at Friends. It was the first time I was called an “Oreo” and made fun of for talking white and acting rich (I thought to myself, if my family is rich why am I at the same shitty Y as you guys?). They listened to New Edition instead of Depeche Mode and we might as well have been speaking two different languages, so I spent the summer with my head down and my mouth shut. It was my first experience of a culture shock within my own culture, and again I was assessed that my Blackness was somehow not Black enough, that I listened to the wrong music and liked the wrong things, and I was hit with a commodified identity crisis in which the things I consumed were indicative of my class and race. Before, the clothes I wore, the posters on my wall and the albums I listened to, categorized me as a person who liked a particular kind of music (unlike the girls into R&B or the boys into heavy metal). It was segregation based on taste not race. It was to my disappointment that those two things are more often than not considered conditional to each other, and of all the subcultures I could have picked to identify with I had to pick the whitest: goth.

  In 2016, I went to Whitby Goth Festival in the UK, one of the largest gatherings of goth folk in the world, where twice a year throngs of the black-velveted, top-hatted and corseted gather under the skeletal remains of Whitby Abby, and where Count Dracula’s ship, heavy with Transylvanian soil and light on rats, first landed in England. I started my trip with my friend Sarah in Manchester, and with the Smiths & Morrissey guidebook in hand I posed for pics in front of the Salford Lad’s Club and the gates of “Cemetery Gates.” Then we made our way south to Macclesfield. It was a cold and drizzly day and as we stood shivering at Ian Curtis’ grave, I was more moved than I expected to be. We stopped briefly at his house on Barton Street, but it felt a bit ghoulish to be so close to the kitchen where he hanged himself. My other goals on my goth vacation were to: 1. Walk on the Moors, and 2. Stand on cliff, wandering above a sea of fog with Caspar David Friedrich-like contemplation.

  I did manage to stand across the road from the Moors and I did stand on the roof of Whitby Pavilion, bracing myself against the wind above the roaring North Sea, while Victorian-ish gentlemen tightly gripped their top hats and women teetered cautiously in fetishy high heels down the stairs. We went to the Abbey where I posed for obligatory pictures among the ruins, and to the Bram Stoker’s Dracula Museum (a spooky funhouse dedicated specifically to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film) and I bought a broach made of Whitby jet. I had never seen so many goths in one place: whole goth Addams’s families, moms and dads with their Baby Bats in tow. As a subculture, goth has tremendous consistency, its affiliates maintaining a spirit of macabre glamor, regardless of age. Once a goth always a goth. From Edward Gorey to Edward Scissorhands, the particulars may morph but the foundation is the same: an anachronistic romanticism, theatrical melancholia, nocturnality, campy morbidity, and the color black.

  While the word “gothic” has been applied to literature, art, and architecture since the eighteenth century, “goth” emerged in the late 1970s as the aggression of punk turned inward into the more introspective and cerebral post-punk. The Doors, Alice Cooper, and the Velvet Underground have been described as being “gothic,” but goth music and its eponymous subculture truly originated in 1978 with the release of Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. Ian Curtis’ voice felt unusually deep for someone so young and their music had the dissonant quality of a catchy pop tune with self-deprecating lyrics about personal pain. Peter Saville’s brilliant cover, which has become iconic to the point of parody, even feels like a different kind of gothic, a modern gothic, minimalist and scientific. Joy Division is a cooled kind of romanticism, one that is less focused on the haunted and ghostly, but on the everyday of the here and now. It’s not the gothic born from a dark and stormy night in a villa in Switzerland, but from an employment service office in Macclesfield.

  Whitby Abbey / Joy Division plaque near Ian Curtis’ house, photos by L. Taylor
r />   With the debut of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in 1979, Bauhaus became the quintessential goth band. Then Siouxsie came along and sang about the ashes of Pompeii, childhood nightmares, and mad arsonists. Her fetishy punk clothes and Cleopatra eyeliner crystallized a dark sensuality, which has sustained to this day. Robert Smith of the Cure broke against gendered codes of masculinity with his untamed spiky mane of hair, red lipstick and sad love songs about boys not crying, and an aesthetic to this dark whimsy was solidified — a synthesis of glam, punk, fetish, Victorianism, Medievalism and assorted macabre accoutrement. The subculture that was born from this music began to materialize into a recognizable style, introducing a visual vocabulary to its maudlin language. In describing goth to others, I like to say, “Imagine a peacock. Now imagine a peacock that’s all black.” The uninitiated see black and assume anger or sorrow, but they miss the camp. The goth that I know is more dandies and vamps than doom and gloom.

  Goth in popular culture evokes images of alienated suburban youths with an aura of self-indulgent angst. In 1988, Winona Ryder brought us the strange and unusual Lydia Deetz in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. In 1997 on Saturday Night Live, Chris Kattan introduced the character Azrael Abyss and the “resplendent darkness” of his parent’s house in Tampa, Florida. When he isn’t hosting his cable access show, “Goth Talk,” the Prince of Sorrow works at a Cinnabon at the mall. And perhaps the nail in the coffin, the opening of the one-stop goth shop Hot Topic.

  Once the caricature was cemented, goth became ripe for parody, and this seems to mark the start of a fractionating of the subculture into further sub-subcultures. Goth stopped being a consolidated fringe group and became a marketing tool, a sellable product and a label that could be placed on anything that looked the part. Instead of goth being something that you were, goth was now something you could buy. In 2000, Angelina Jolie wore a Morticia Addams-style tight long, black dress with long, straight black hair and cat-eye eyeliner to the Oscars and the media immediately labeled her a Goth Queen. Granted she also wore a vial of her then-boyfriend Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck, so I should probably give her more cred, but soon all it took was a lacy black gown and a smoky eye to be considered goth. As goth became more commodified and embraced by popular culture, the more it adapted to maintain its otherness. It is precisely the specificity of the display of goth that makes it easy to mimic and easy to mock. In order for goth to remain other, it had to become more complicated.