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Thomas Jefferson inherited his first thirty slaves from his father (he’d own 607 over his lifetime) — the same year Walpole published The Castle of Otranto.7 In that year, 1764, the rumblings of the Revolution were just beginning, but America and England were still about forty years away from ending the slave trade (it lingered longer in Brazil and Cuba). In 1818, Mary Shelly released her modern Prometheus to the world, John Polidori was about to introduce us to our first gentleman vampire, and Frederick Douglas was born into slavery. The narratives that inform our language of terror were beginning to take shape while the seeds of a home-grown American gothic were starting to take root.
In the discourse about the slave trade there are few words that encapsulate the origins of America better than “horror.” According to Ann Radcliffe, the defining attribute of horror is the “unambiguous display of atrocity.” She was making a critique of the literary works of her gothic contemporaries, but I can’t think of a better way to express the Middle Passage.
Blackness in America is still in the middle, residing in the place between opposites: living in the present while carrying the past, being human but perceived as other, considered both a person and a product, both American and foreign, neither here nor there. Most gothic tales start with a journey: Frankenstein is an epistolary tale that begins with a journey at sea, there is something almost bureaucratic about Dracula as Harker details the minutia of his business trip abroad, and portions of The Mysteries of Udolpho read like a travel blog as the heroine describes the scenic view from her carriage of the hills of Italy. Whether it is crossing the threshold into a haunted house or crossing the Atlantic, all horror stories start with a lacuna, the nothingness of the space between places.
Saidiya Hartman writes that “the most universal definition of the slave is a stranger,” and being a stranger in a strange land is a classic way to create a sense of vulnerability, and the fear of the foreign is part of the vocabulary of horror. Early gothic writers often placed their protagonists in Catholic countries where archaic superstitions still thrived, distancing them from their enlightened Anglican England: The Monk is set in Spain and The Mysteries of Udolpho is in Italy, Dracula goes back and forth between Britain and Eastern Europe. It seems like every year there is a new movie about naïve city tourists lost in the woods or the entitled ugly American in a foreign country (Deliverance, Hostel, The Blair Witch Project). In these stories characters are taken out of the comfort and control of their environment (usually voluntarily) and inserted into an alien atmosphere with unfamiliar customs, locations and languages. It’s a powerlessness that parallels the forced displacement of captive Africans caught in the psychic Bermuda triangle between Africa, the Caribbean, and America. For those who survived, it must have felt like a living purgatory, something in between life and death, here and there, the known and the unknown. Limbo is supposed to be a space of waiting, something in between heaven and hell. But limbo also represents a state of oblivion and nothingness. It’s both a transition and a place of imprisonment, a home for the disappeared.
Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on, J. M. W. Turner, 1840
From the Book of Drexciya, Volume 1, Haqq & Estevam
The Middle Passage was a “non-place,” a space of dread, not only in between land and languages, but between perceptions of the world and states of being. It was a dislocation from one’s history, culture, identity and autonomy, a horrifying liminality between the familiar old and the terrifying new. The journey through the trade route from Europe to Africa to the Americas and West Indies could last anywhere from one to three months, during which hundreds of Africans were packed into the hulls of ships, chained next to people whose language they didn’t speak, sitting in their own waste in sweltering heat and stifling air. Some succumbed to dysentery, dehydration, malnutrition, some refused to eat in despair, some threw themselves overboard, risking the chance of a punishing afterlife for the possibility of returning home to their ancestors passed.
At the United Nations headquarters in New York City, a memorial was installed marking the (less than elegantly named) International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Ark of Return was designed by Rodney Leon, an American architect of Haitian descent. Part of the memorial, features a figure of a man lying on his back carved from black Zimbabwean granite, wrapped in a shroud of white marble. He’s not reclining comfortably, his left arm is stretched out, his neck straining to keep his head raised, a position suggesting that of a slave pressed on to the floor of a ship, barely able to move but still reaching upward. Unlike the still flat figure of the memorialized dead carved into funeral tombs, this figure is either refusing to succumb or is attempting to rise. The intent of the sculpture is “to psychologically and spiritually transport visitors to a place where acknowledgement, education, reflection and healing can take place,” but there is something tragic about this figure. He lies in a tomb-like angular structure evocative of a ship, he is reaching up just slightly and his head is lifted, but is frozen solid to the marble. The posture suggests a state of paralysis, trying to wake from a dream but unable to rise. He is not yet dead but trapped in memoriam.
Part of the horror of these deaths along the Middle Passage is the lack of memorialization — these are the unknown, the unnamed, lives that have disappeared under duress and deaths destined for haunting. Theirs are stories we will never hear, people we will never know, lost in the Tomb of the Unknown that is the Atlantic Ocean. When we think of haunted spaces, we think of structures or defined areas with clear borders. Can the sea be haunted? How does a ghost inhabit that which has no borders, something formless that ebbs and flows?
In the four-album compilation Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller, the Detroit electronic band, Drexciya, imagined a mythology of an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who were thrown off of slave ships. The babies adapted to breathe underwater in their mothers’ wombs and a society is formed of sea-dwelling Black people fathoms below the plantations and the prisons. It is an idealistic notion, a cross between Atlantis and Wakanda and one that takes the retrospective romanticism of the gothic with the addition of a speculative “what if.” The offspring of the dead have created a world of their own, and I can imagine the black figure in the Ark breaking out of his marble tomb and floating up over the East River, over Queens, dodging airplanes over JFK airport, out across the sea, back home.
Southern Gothic
The gothic is a location as much as it is an atmosphere. The foggy streets of England, the mountains of Romania, the haunted forests of Japan and Germany… every country has its ghosts. When we think of the American Gothic, two things typically come to mind: either the Grant Wood painting of the stoic farmer and his wife or the Southern Gothic.
I’m not Southern. I am a Mid-Westerner raised in the North East and my people are from Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio. I’m used to fields of wheat not cotton. I don’t carry hot sauce in my bag and when the temperature creeps above seventy-five degrees I start getting cranky. The first time I saw a Confederate Flag waving was out of someone’s dorm room window at Yale. Then in 2016, Beyoncé’s video “Formation” came out and for one fleeting moment I wished I had grown up in the South and gone to an HBCU (Historically Black College or University). I’m pretty indifferent to her music, but the images of black women with fantastic hair, lounging in a dimly lit parlor in Daughters of the Dust white Victorian dresses, lazily fanning themselves in the unairconditioned heat, made me envious. I was never a member of this sorority of Southern Black Sisterhood and I felt left out.
She stands front and center on a plantation porch twirling a waist-long braid flanked by dandyish men in long, black coats and bow ties. There are vines creeping up the worn, white columns, a candelabra hangs from the ceiling above her head, and a welcoming pitcher of water sits on a tea trolley. She wears a long, black, shoulder-less lacy dress and thick layers of silver necklaces piled
up high like a Ndebele choker. On her head is an oversized, wide-brimmed, witchy black hat that completely obscures her eyes, suggesting that she can see us while we can’t see her, wielding power like a popstar conjure woman. The aging house with wild vegetation, the all-black clothes with dramatic old-world formality, the big black hat — it’s a familiar gothic aesthetic, but through the filter of Black Lives Matter. Visually it is lush with Southern Gothic sensibility, but it comes with a particularly Black perspective on dread and death. The mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner hold up photos of their sons killed by the police and the video ends with a little Black boy in a hoodie, that suspect garment of shady juvenile delinquency. He’s dancing in front of a phalanx of white law enforcement officers in riot gear and they hold their hands up in surrender. It cuts to a wall spray painted with the phrase, “STOP SHOOTING US.”
Beyoncé’s Blackness is different from my Blackness, and I don’t subscribe to the romantic notion that the closer one is in geography to the Mason-Dixon Line the more authentic their Blackness, but the history of African Americans seems closer to the surface there. The Deep South is the heart of America’s Darkness and is the source for the art and music that is uniquely American. Dr. Regina N. Bradley puts it better:
The first thing I immediately thought when I saw Beyoncé’s “Formation” was that some folks ruts – “roots” – would show. You know, ruts: biases, fears of lineage, missing genealogies, shit like that. And folks don’t like their ruts or their slip showing. Beyoncé showed er’body’s slip, parasol, skeeta bite scars, and conjuring grandmamma essence in this video. And it was scary. Downright gothic. That is, of course, unless you’re southern – by affiliation or blood and maybe hot sauce preference – and your ruts are ALWAYS showing because there was no reason to hide them in the first place.
The traditional gothic atmosphere is foggy darkness and English damp, but the Southern Gothic climate is a sweltering humidity and oppressively blinding sun.8 Instead of tiptoeing through the dark passageways of a decrepit castle on a remote mountain, the Southern Gothic sits in a rocking chair on a wrap-around porch with a paper fan in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other. Instead of ghosts, vampires, or resurrected corpses, the phantoms that haunt gothic narratives are the ramifications of racism, repressed guilt, social pariahs, and marginalized freaks.
I have a clear picture in my head when I hear the phrase Southern Gothic, and it’s of Tennessee Williams’ Maggie the Cat in a white slip pining as her gay husband struggles with a crutch in one hand a glass of whiskey in the other. It’s the middle-aged, cotton gin-owning Archer Lee, married to a nineteen-year-old virgin who sucks her thumb and sleeps in a crib. Southern Gothic evokes images of old women telling stories of dark underbellies and old family secrets, of Faulkner’s “failed dynasties of the old ascendancy… all unwitting builders of haunted houses.” The Southern Gothic is a specific kind of American ghost story that evokes the miasma of dusty rural towns and abandoned plantations, troubled misfits and miscreants, haunted by any number of sins and secrets. It is a genre of fiction born out of the emancipated South where the grotesqueries of the human condition are the monsters, and the narrators and storytellers are usually white.
The dread of post-slavery economic decline threatened to shatter the image of the idyllic Dixieland and cast a cloud of disgrace over old traditions and a certain “way of life” that Northerners just wouldn’t understand. If the source of the gothic in England is a romanticizing of the past, the Southern Gothic is a deglamorization of the antebellum Dixie. The technicolor sunset over Tara blanches and loses its rhapsodic glow, revealing a darker kind of melodrama.
Closets and Walls
The Danes have hygge and the Japanese have wabi-sabi: words that express a unique characteristic of that country which cannot easily be translated. Similarly, in America, we have our own particularly American characteristic — a sense of unease, a lingering creepy aura from the darkness of the country’s foundation, but as yet it remains unnamed.
There’s a reason why American horror movies still use the old tired trope of haunted houses built on “ancient Indian burial grounds.” America is built over the bones of brown people who were here first, and built by Black people brought here against their will, and the fear of retaliation is real. But more than that, there is the persistent self-delusion that our gains are not ill-gotten, that slavery wasn’t that bad, that it was so long ago and we should be over it by now.
The gothic is a retrograde form of romanticism, but America is a forward-looking country — a Manifest Destiny projection to some idealized point in the horizon, and we do not like to be reminded of the sordid path we’ve taken on the way there. I wish there was a word or phrase that named this particularly American anxiety — the unsettled unease of knowing that at any moment the jig may be up. We need a phrase of our own for the muffled heartbeat under the floorboards, the fetid goo oozing from the walls, the screams coming from behind the wall, the festering guilt that comes with getting away with murder. The uncanny occurs when what was supposed to be “secret and hidden but has come to light.”9 What is the word then for the fear of exposure, a phrase that represents a fear of accountability? The colloquialism “skeleton in the closet” is the closest I have come, and it has a telling origin, going back to 1816 in a British journal on hereditary diseases: “… men seem afraid of enquiring after truth; cautions on cautions are multiplied, to conceal the skeleton in the closet or to prevent its escape.”
We use it to describe a secret, a hidden fact which if exposed could have damaging repercussions — the dirty truth that stains something perceived as clean and good. It has an element of horror: a corpse stashed away and left to rot until there’s nothing left but bones. Another version of “skeleton in the closet” used in the late nineteenth century was, “a nigger in the woodpile.” It was originally meant as a reference to the underground railroad and the practice of hiding fugitive slaves under piles of firewood. The source of America’s festering corruption was the slave, the original skeleton.
Horror has always been used to illuminate cultural anxieties and gives a voice to our collective fears. So, what to make of the gothic in America, a place which by the very nature of its founding is predisposed to a culture of anxiety? The dread of knowing the enemy at the gate is understandable, but in America the enemy has already passed through it, and has been brought inside. The call is coming from inside the house.
Through tales of horror and hauntings, by digging into graves and walking into the deep darkness, the gothic metabolizes historic trauma into art. Like historical ectoplasm, the past oozes from orifices in literature, music, film, and art. The gothic aestheticizes the atrocity, giving us a method to process the pain and confront the fear, on our own terms, in our own way. So, what does Black trauma look like? What does it sound like? If, as the t-shirt suggests, “goth-ness” is quantifiable by “Blackness,” is the American gothic ontologically Black?10
Mural dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe on the Spring Garden Apartments public housing complex in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, photo by Barb Hauck-Mah, via Flickr
The taxi driver stopped at the entrance to the Spring Garden Apartments and I looked back and forth between my phone and the street. I was far away from The Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and all the other standard historic spots in Philadelphia and thought to myself, “I know Poe didn’t live in the Projects.” I looked at the rows of uniform houses to my left and a large brick house completely covered in scaffolding before realizing that I had the right place. Behind the dense grid of steel frames and blue industrial tarp was indeed the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, Poe’s home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1837 to 1844.
When I was in the ninth grade my English teacher gave me an old copy of the works of Poe. It was lost long ago, but I remember accepting the book, with its worn red binding and the yellowed pages, with a little bit of awe. While by no means valuable, its age felt special, s
omething that was passed down, or found, not just bought in a Barnes & Noble. “The Raven” was the first (and only) poem I ever memorized.
If there was a patron saint of the American gothic, it would be Edgar Allan Poe. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and of course “The Raven,” are standards of the American literary canon as much as Mark Twain or Walt Whitman. His floppy black hair, broad forehead, and sunken eyes have graced t-shirts, posters, tote bags, coffee mugs, and greeting cards, and I myself have a Poe action figure on my desk. In the episode “Dawn of the Posers” on South Park, the goth kids create an unlikely alliance with the Vampire kids against the growing proliferation of emos. In an ultimate act of desperation, they summon the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe for help. Poe’s apparition floats above the goths, emos and Vampires, takes a drag from a cigarette and declares all of them “posers.”