The wind is blowing, the tree limbs are bare, and the moon is casting pale, silvery shadows across the back yard. Wolves howl down the street, vampires flap around the deck, and ghosts haunt the dark recesses of my darkened house. I’m feeling in a Halloween mood, and that means it’s my time to look at scary stories. The problem, though, is that recently the traditional tales of horror and fear that I relied on for my thrills- think Edgar Allan Poe’s frantic, spastic heart, H.P. Lovecraft’s winged Cthulhu, and recently Stephen King’s dagger toothed Pennywise (again)- have been overshadowed (pun intended) by something far more insidious. What could push the ghouls and morbid spirits of classic horror into the corner? Whatever it is, it must be pretty scary to crowd out the phantasmagoria of traditional horror stories.
Where do these strange new wonders appear, you may ask? Do they appear nightly on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC? Maybe. Just a little. Liberal or conservative, our collective national nightmare is certainly terror inducing. But what we see on tv is only, hopefully, a fleeting aberration on the culture and country. The optimist in me shouts that the current circus that has taken over the executive branch will go the way of all freak shows and fade into obscurity when our collective national consciousness wakes up and realizes that its “noble” experiment with charlatans and con men has gone off the rails. No, the current political landscape is scary, and sometimes keeps me up at night, but the stories that truly scare me now are older ones, ones that lurk in the shadows of our national identity, just out of reach under the surface, but always just a scratch away from bubbling up into our narratives.
Stephen King talks about three types of terror: “The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…” And who am I to argue with the modern master of the genre? Those three work for me. But I think I need to add a fourth type of terror, the type that only can come when we stare into the mirror. It is this reflective horror, the horror we find when we plumb the depths of our consciences and see the demonic specter of race leering back at us, that far exceeds any man-made ghoul. For no matter how enlightened we think we are, it is hard to deny the tug of racism that exists on the periphery of all of our minds. Unbidden, it sweeps out of the shadows of our subconscious and makes itself known at all of the most inopportune times. When we enter a room, cross the street, engage in conversation, tell that joke…
Pervasive. Ubiquitous. Insidious. Undying. Like some zombie slogging out of a primordial past that we believed we had put to rest, the spirits of the past remain as warnings, bleak signals of a past we should rightly be ashamed of.[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#ffd216″ class=”” size=”32″]The real horror isn’t in fangs or claws, but hoods and ropes.[/perfectpullquote]And these wraiths, where do they live? As an English teacher, I keep them close at hand in the texts that I teach and the books that I read at night before going to sleep. Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Song Yet Sung, The Known World, and, most recently, The Underground Railroad and Twelve Mile Straight. You don’t have to look very far to find an unsettling book that looks at slavery and its aftermath, or the racism that we only superficially try to hide. The real horror isn’t in fangs or claws, but hoods and ropes.
Listen to the opening of Eleanor Henderson’s Twelve Mile Straight and tell me that, despite being fiction, it doesn’t scare the hell out of you, primarily because it has happened innumerable times in the (near) past (and still happens today, only in slightly altered forms):
“Freddie looped another rope over one of the crossbeams and the noose around Genus’s neck. Genus didn’t struggle, and Mamie didn’t have to wait for Juke’s tap. Spooked by the dark, or the crowd, she dashed out as soon as she was free of their hands. Genus dropped, his neck snapping like a chicken’s, his body falling limp. The martins shot out of the gourds, black as bats, and for a moment formed a single shadow above them.”
The stain of lynching seen in Henderson’s novel, riffing on the darkness of Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” is way more horrifying than Dracula or Frankenstein’s reanimated corpse ever was. For the latter are constructs, exaggerated metaphors of the fears we have of our darkest sides, while the former are thinly veiled fictions of actions we actually have taken. These are true horror stories, made more horrible because they are the stories we want to muffle, suppress, and deny. These are the haunting echoes of a time not too long ago when fear rode the land carrying torches.
Maybe the horror comes out of our culture’s attempt at marginalizing all who are black, as expressed by Ralph Ellison in the prologue to Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Maybe that’s why it’s so scary now, because it seems that we haven’t quite dealt with all of the detritus of the last three hundred fifty years. Blacks, and Native Americans, have stories to tell of racism, bigotry, and violence, and when they tell them the majority stares at its proverbial shoes and wants to look the other way. We attempt to not see the ugly, horrible truths that are there, or, confronting them, try to hide behind the fact that they are fictions, and that our current reality is far different, better, even, then what is presented on the page. Or, sadly, we just accept them as the way it is, and sometimes, in a fit of cultural fear, even celebrate the images of that horrid past as a way of rallying the majority to swallow that we need to “make our country great again.” This, regrettably, is the world we live in now, which is sad, too, and sobering.
So while we anxiously sit transfixed at Robert Mueller’s investigation of this president, and the downfall of the rich, white, powerful aristocracy that surely will come, I’m trying to figure out how to teach American Literature correctly, fairly, to all involved. Every choice of Poe, or Hawthorne, or Cooper, leaves out a Solomon Northup or a Sojourner Truth, every Fitzgerald, or Twain, or Hemingway skunks a Chief Joseph or Dee Brown, every James McPherson trumps a Ta-Nahesi Coates. And there’s still that horror just there, right below the surface, unattended, feral and simmering, gazing up at us, waiting for its time to once again rise, and it’s terrifying.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”#ffd216″ class=”” size=”32″]By quietly taking part, by blindly believing that we individually are post-race, or that because our ancestors (to the best of our knowledge) did not hold slaves that we are somehow absolved of the responsibility to, say, confront torch bearing neo-Nazis on our college campuses, we enter into a shared responsibility, are all still complicit.[/perfectpullquote]
I feel sort of like one of Shirley Jackson’s townspeople in “The Lottery,” watching the macabre events of the June lottery happen but not really doing anything to stop it. As Joan Wickersham says of that story, “It’s a story about complicity. There’s a docile and implacable willingness to participate in a time-honored process, even though the end result is an atrocity. Nobody says, “This is crazy, murderous, we can’t do this.” Nobody says, “Why?” Nobody says, “Stop.” Everyone unthinkingly takes part, so no one is responsible.” (Boston Globe, October 26, 2017). By quietly taking part, by blindly believing that we individually are post-race, or that because our ancestors (to the best of our knowledge) did not hold slaves that we are somehow absolved of the responsibility to, say, confront torch bearing neo-Nazis on our college campuses, we enter into a shared responsibility, are all still complicit. Instead of escaping responsibility, as Wickersham believes Jackson’s lottery participants do, we, instead, enter deeper into the quagmire of mute acceptance. And we all do this to some degree, hence the horror of silent mirror gazing and hushed complicity. And shouldn’t we be further along by now, anyway?
I don’t know the answer, only that the issue still is out there, lurking around the corner, or swirling in the storm drains. As Neil Gaiman states in “Ghosts in the Machine,” “Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses. You ride the ghost train into the darkness, knowing that eventually the doors will open and you will step out into the daylight once again.”
But this is a narrative without daylight. Well, maybe a sliver of daylight, but only a sliver that barely slices through the grayness. And the gloom is scary.
Happy Halloween.
May all of your haunts be happy, and seeking candy.
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