Darkly
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Poe was a white man born in in 1809, so like most figures and “heroes” from American history, he is problematic. He was both northern and southern — born in Boston, raised in Virginia — he lived, worked, and died in New York, Philadelphia, and Maryland. But one’s affiliation with either the north or the south doesn’t automatically exonerate one or condemn the other. We know his family owned at least one slave, because he sold one on their behalf.
In his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Black and Native American characters are described as ferocious bloodthirsty savages. His stories like, “The Black Cat” and “Gold Bug,” have been read as metaphors for the fear of slave insurgencies and he consistently extols the color white to imply purity and black as monstrous. Then there’s that cocky, big black bird. He doesn’t have H.P. Lovecraft’s blatant xenophobia, but a more liquid unease wrought with guilt which seems more appropriate for American horror. Poe’s anxiety is a particularly American one, wary of this sleeping giant and its ramifications. Toni Morrison writes that romance (or the gothic) expresses:
Americans’ fear of being outcast, of failings of powerlessness; their fear of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; their fear of the absence of so-called civilization; their fear of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom-the thing they coveted most of all. [Romance] offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror-and terror’s most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all the connotative value it awakened.
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” all have a similar theme: the attempt to get away with murder and the effort to deny it. Guilt haunts these protagonists, drives them mad, and that madness leads to their downfall. The black cat that was brought into the home and domesticated becomes the focus of wrath:
I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree, — hung it with the tears of remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense; — hung it because I knew that in doing I was committing a sin.
Walls were Poe’s go-to place for hiding corpses. He keeps the bodies close, he keeps them in the structure of the home, in the place where we think we are the most safe and secure, but where the evidence is right on the other side of the plaster, just inches away from the head of the bed. His protagonists live with their victims, stash them away, and try to go about their daily lives in an attempt to forget what they have done. He “soundly and tranquilly slept; aye slept even with the burden upon my soul.” In both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” the killers are confident with the police, allowing them into their home with the self-assured presumption of camaraderie with the authorities, that only the privileged can afford. But they are tormented by their guilt, by “the beating of the hideous heart” and the “wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph.” In Poe’s America, they don’t get away with it.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
The proper subject for American Gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged, that ours is a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.
— Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
This is a true story. Late one night when I was ten or eleven, I lay in bed, not yet asleep, and saw a large black dog walk across my room and out of my bedroom door. We didn’t own a dog. I immediately got up and walked through the bathroom to my parents’ bedroom and glanced down to find what looked like a white German Shepherd curled up in the bathtub. I shook my dad awake whispering, “Dad, there are dogs in the house!” He drowsily got up to search, but there were no signs of any canine invaders. He assured me that I was only dreaming, but I went back to bed knowing that I saw what I saw. A few days later my mom would confide in me that one night she had woken up from a deep sleep and saw a group of little lap dogs — Chihuahuas, Yorkshire terriers and Pomeranians — hovering in a circle above her head. I knew that there had been a fire in the house long before we moved in, and I was convinced that it had previously been an animal shelter or a vet and now we were haunted by the ghosts of dogs who had succumbed in the flames.
Mine was a Disney-free childhood — my parents didn’t want me indoctrinated with any of that Prince Charming / Sleeping Beauty crap, and at the time there were no Black princesses. The first thing I remember learning about Walt Disney was that “he was a fascist.” But that kind of fantasy never interested me anyway. I was far more fascinated in the doubtful fantasy, the near-real: life-after-death, ghosts, hauntings, astral projection, psychic powers, anything that was in the Time-Life: Mysteries of the Unknown book series.
I never believed in Santa Claus, I was told that he was a spirit of goodness and giving and fun and all of those things, but a bearded fat man in a red suit was not going to come down my chimney. It didn’t matter if I knew the truth, I still put cookies and milk out and I still went to bed in delirious anticipation, listening for distant sleigh-bells. Knowing the truth never ruined Christmas for me, because I allowed myself to believe. I decided for myself that for that night (and that night only), Santa was real.
Horror is the one fictional genre that routinely asks its readers to believe them. The archetypal haunted house story, The Castle of Otranto, was published anonymously in 1764 with a preface claiming that the book was discovered in 1592 but was believed to have been written between 1095 and 1243. The specifics of the dates and the admission of uncertain origin give an air of plausibility. The possibility that this was a real account with documentary proof added to the allure, but it wasn’t until the novel became a bestseller that the writer — Gothic revivalist, parliamentarian, and son of England’s first prime minister, Horace Walpole1 — took credit for making it all up. In the second edition, Walpole added a subtitle, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, and a horror formula was born.
Similarly, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic begins with this preface:
The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths […] The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
We know now that this is a ploy to drum up buzz and amp up the fear (it was implemented to perfection in The Blair Witch Project), but it always begs the question that something of it must be real. The very real Ed Gein, who used human skulls as bedposts and made belts out of women’s nipples, was the inspiration for the chainsaw-brandishing Leather Face, not to mention Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter. The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror were gleaned from sort-of real-ish events. Don’t all legends start with a grain of truth? We delight in the tiny thrill that comes from that small suspension of disbelief, that inkling that maybe, just maybe, ghosts and monsters do exist, that there is something in the world beyond our power and understanding and that we aren’t as safe as we thought we were.
Most people can agree that zombies and vampires don’t exist, but when asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” how many of us say that we do? There are dozens of “reality” ghost-hunting television shows where a troop of intrepid paranormal investigators walk the halls of famous haunted buildings with night vision glasses and EVP recorders jumping at every odd noise and floating orb. The search for proof of life after death goes back centuries; we’ve tried to measure the weight of souls, captured faint images of loved ones in photographs, and talked to the dead on telephones. Ghosts and haunted houses are the one fictive horror subject that is given the benefit of the doubt. A ghost, after all, used to be a person. It’s not an unfathomable creature from another planet, but evidence of the immortal soul, and in this way they are al
so hopeful. The malevolent ghost, unable to cross over because of some trauma or horrible deed, suggests that what we do while we’re alive affects what happens to us when we die, and that we can’t escape our history. But if the point of the sublime is to evoke a “twinge of terror” tampered by the security of safety, what then happens when that safety is in doubt, when security is gone?
Beloved
There were times when reading Beloved that I dreaded turning the page. Toni Morrison’s novel is a cross between a slave narrative and a classic haunted house story, and out of all the ghost stories I’ve read, it is by far the saddest and the most disturbing. Its supernatural phenomena feel too plausible, inevitable even, and it’s heartbreaking to think that the ghosts of slaves could be still tethered to the spot of their pain and demise.
Beloved is the story of Sethe, a runaway slave living in Ohio with her daughter Denver. Their house is haunted by the vengeful spirit of a baby, buried with a headstone marked with the single word, “Beloved,” since her mother couldn’t afford the extra letters to finish the sentiment “Dearly Beloved.” The house emanates an eerie aura, and, although “It’s not evil, just sad,” the baby ghost is also an angry poltergeist:
Full of a baby’s venom. […] merely looking in a mirror shattered it […] two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake […] another kettleful of chickpeas in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill.
Sethe had escaped a life of unfathomable violence at the plantation, ironically named Sweet Home. But after only a month of freedom in Ohio, she was found by slave hunters. Rather than be forced back into captivity and her child sold into slavery, in a state of hopeless panic she slit the throat of her baby daughter. Sethe says, “If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.”
Then one day, eighteen years later, a woman walks out of the river and finds her way to the house at 124 Bluestone Road. The ghost of the baby Beloved has risen from her grave as an young woman with a scar on her throat, singing her mother’s lullaby. Sethe devotes herself to taking care of the child, now a woman, she killed. But Beloved sucks the life out of her mother with all the greedy needs of an infant, an infant with a grudge. Despite her mother’s attempt to explain to Beloved that she had intended to kill herself and all of her children that day, that they were all supposed to go together, Beloved is unforgiving of her mother for leaving her in her grave all alone:
Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light.
The zombie Beloved demands to be seen, acknowledged, fed, and tended to. With the whiplash speed of a child, she goes from wide-eyed singular adoration of her mother, to violent tantrums, and her need for her mother’s love and attention is relentless and terrifying. Isolated from the community, abandoned by her lover, and fired from her job, Sethe spends all of her money on fancy food, ribbons and buttons for her daughters, and shrinks into starvation and madness.
Beloved is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, who in January 1856 escaped with her family from a plantation in Kentucky to Cincinnati, Ohio. She was found by slave catchers, and under the Fugitive Slave Act, faced the prospect of being taken back to Kentucky and enslaved once again. Before they could take her away, she slit the throat of her two-year-old daughter and attempted to kill her other children to spare them all from a life in bondage. The following occurred when they took her into custody:
Margaret Garner sat as though stupefied, but she roused herself when a compliment was paid her on her fine looking little boy. She replied sadly, “You should have seen my little girl that died, that was the bird.” She had a scar on the left side of her forehead running down to her cheekbone. When she was asked how she had come by this mark, she replied only, “White man struck me.”2
Regarding the film adaptation of Beloved, Mark Fisher wrote, “Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassified as Horror… well, so should American history.” As horrifying as it is, Margaret and Sethe’s desperate act is understandable. Her daughter would have spent her life in bondage, worked relentlessly, raped, beaten and dehumanized. Her life would never be her own; her body would never be her own. After the horror that Margaret had been through, when her hard-fought freedom seemed for nothing, death must have seemed like mercy and murder the only recourse.
Candyman
There is no established literary genre of north-east or Midwest Gothic, but there could be. Every county has its own macabre genius loci, every city its seedy underbelly. When I lived in Ohio, conspiracy theorists believed that the logo for the consumer goods company, Proctor & Gamble (one of Cincinnati’s largest employers), contained Satanic symbology in its design and there were rumors that one neighborhood had a disproportionately large number of people in the witness protection program. Every place has the potential for horror.
The movie that most closely resembled the place where I grew up, Detroit, was Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992), the story of a graduate student researching the urban legend of a murderous boogey-man in the Cabrini–Green housing projects in Chicago. Unlike the suburban sprawl in Poltergeist or the quaint town of Amityville, the Candyman lurked in the graffiti-covered, dank hallways of high-rise public housing. Instead of the winding, dark secret tunnels in medieval dungeons or the creaking floorboards of a decrepit Victorian house, the architecture of dread in Candyman is that of urban neglect: the lights burnt out in a dismal hallway, the incessant drip, drip, drip of a leaky pipe, or a broken elevator with no way down from the twentieth floor but an isolated stairway.
The legend goes that Daniel Robitaille, born the son of a slave, grew up to be an artist. His talent allowed him into polite society, where he fell in love with a white woman and got her pregnant. But when her father found out he set a lynch mob out to get him. They cut off his hand with a rusty saw, and smeared his body in honey, after which he was stung to death by a swarm of bees. A century later, the Cabrini-Green project would be built on the site where they burned his body, and if you say “Candyman” five times in the mirror, he will crawl out of your bathroom cabinet and gut you with his hook.
Candyman is influenced by true events. In the 1980s, the Grace Abbott Homes were one of the most violent projects in Chicago, with one to three murders occurring a week. On April 22, 1987, fifty-two-year-old Ruth Mae McCoy made a call to 911:
McCoy: Yeah, they throwed the cabinet down.
Dispatcher: From where?
McCoy: I’m in the projects, I’m on the other side. You can reach — can reach my bathroom, they want to come through the bathroom.
Dispatcher: All right ma’am, at what address?
McCoy: 1440 W. 13th St.—apartment 1109. The elevator’s working.3
Due to an anomaly in the design of the building, some of the apartments in Grace Abbott Homes were connected to each other through a pipe chase, a space in the wall that provided easy access to plumbing fixtures for maintenance. It also provided easy access for thieves. Since the bathroom cabinets were accessible from the other side, all someone had to do was take the cabinet out and crawl through. The police arrived, but when no one answered the door and attempts to get the key from the superintendent failed, they gave up and left. A concerned friend called the next day and the police came again, but wary of a lawsuit, the building’s security guards would not let them break down the door. The day after her friend insisted that the building drill McCoy’s lock, and when they finally entered, three days after her call to the police, she was found dead from four gunshot wounds.
There are multiple layers of horror within this story, only one of which is the terrifying prospect of an intruder crawling through your bathroom cabinet. There is the reluctance of the employees to act out of fear of reprisal from the management, and the lazy indifference of the police officers
amounting to a despicable devaluing of the life of this poor, Black woman. The least amount of effort possible was made to help her, and if it was not for the persistence of her friend it might have been weeks before she was found. But what disturbs me the most is the 911 call in which she felt the need to specify that the elevator was working. She must have known that perhaps saving her life might not be worth the effort if it involved climbing eleven flights of stairs. The moral of her story is, if the Candyman won’t get you, poverty, systemic racism, indifferent law enforcement, and underfunded public services will.
Tzvetan Todorov says that the fantastic “occupies the duration of uncertainty,” between experiencing something we can’t explain and the explanation. Ghost stories and horror movies balance on the edge of the possible the impossible. The houses are familiar, the landscapes are recognizable, the families are typical. One of the most terrifying aspects of films like Poltergeist or The Exorcist is how normal everything is. We need that connection with ourselves for the fear to take hold. We need, if only for a moment, to believe what is happening to them could happen to us. If we take away the supernatural, strip away the embellishment of urban legends and baby ghosts, the stories of Ruth Mae McCoy and Margaret Garner are certain and explainable. And it could happen to any of us.
Grace Abbott Homes have since been demolished, and I wonder if Ruth Mae McCoy haunts the hallways of whatever is there now. I think I believe in ghosts, or perhaps I want to believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in god, I don’t think that there is a predesigned order to our lives, and I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I’ve always hated the term agnostic, but it’s the closest to what I know, which is that there is a lot we don’t know. I don’t trust the absolutism of either faith or atheism. Ghosts to me provide the potential for something… else — that what we see isn’t the only thing here.