Julian Lucas

The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer, 1899. Image courtesy of metmuseum.org

Hesiod’s Theogony starts off by telling where the story itself comes from: the muses teach Hesiod a song while he shepherds his lambs. His poems are created by the divine. They’re passed on by the voice of a goddess as it takes over his lungs.

Somewhere downriver in the nation’s conscience, magnolias are in bloom. Slavery is having a moment in American culture. It has made its presence felt across the arts, from plays such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' *An Octoroon* or Suzan-Lori Parks’s *Father Comes Home From the Wars*, to art installations like Kara Walker’s *Marvelous Sugar Baby*, an homage to the “unpaid and overworked Artisans” of plantations past. James McBride’s *The Good Lord Bird*, a picaresque retelling of the abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, won last year’s National Book Award for Fiction—the same year that *12 Years a Slave* won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and just two years after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s *Django Unchained*. Louis C.K. has done slavery stand up, while in one recent sketch, Key and Peele went so far as to put themselves on the auction block. Slavery has even insinuated itself into video games, with the recent release of two new versions of *Assassin’s Creed* that make it a central subject. A century and a half after abolition, slavery has become—of all things—popular.



Or, more accurately, the unpopularity of slavery has become popular, its uncomfortable infamy universally interesting. America is passing through a period of antebellum fauxstalgia, a perennial revival of interest in slavery which is equal parts a memorial and an exorcism. We have passed through this mo- ment before. Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath carried slavery forcefully into the national consciousness, interrupting decades of anxious silence, compulsory ignorance, and revisionist nostalgia. Scholars like Eugene Genovese educated the country on *The World Slaves Made*, while artists like Malcolm Bailey used the Middle Passage to highlight continuity between the past of slavery and the present of legal segregation. (Bailey’s “Separate but Equal” is a modern blueprint of a slave ship, with white and black figures chained on opposite ends of the hold.) The popular peak of this resurgence was the television mini-series *Roots*, starring LeVar Burton as the enslaved Gambian Kunta Kinte. *Roots*’s searing melodrama, now forty years old, remains the dominant image of American slavery. Its continued popularity, evident in Kendrick Lamar’s recent track “King Kunta,” suggests that our own era of recalcitrant racial injustice has an affinity with this earlier time. As in the seventies, we seem to have run up against the hard limits of American racial progress. Moments of rude awakening like these seem to demand a ritual return to slavery as the origin point of American racial injustice.



And yet, our own obsession with the antebellum period is, by comparison, strangely depoliticized. Today, slavery is a subject that allows audiences to feel morally engaged with violent racial injustice while remaining safely distant from its contemporary ravages. It is a cultural placebo politics, enabling a liberal public that craves the chance to engage with questions of race to do so without the discomfort of proximity. Audiences have confused the antebellum world’s problems with those of our own, so much so that *The New York Times* is able to call Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ *An Octoroon*—the revival of a melodrama more than a century old—“the most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.” This is itself an eloquent statement about race in America today. It speaks volumes about the liberal public’s desire to think about contemporary racial injustice *through* slavery—and through slavery alone. Pick almost any black writer, and if they’ve written a book about slavery, it’s become the most celebrated of their works. Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, James McBride, and Ishmael Reed have published many excellent books, but *Kindred*, *Beloved*, *The Good Lord Bird*, and *Flight to Canada* are the ones people read.



On the side of black artists themselves, the subject of slavery can, ironically, enable a certain freedom. It satisfies the liberal public’s craving for black artists who “express themselves” on the issue of racial injustice, while avoiding the contemporary specificity that might make that same public feel implicated. Its historical remove also allows these artists to avoid having their work reduced to political statement or personal grievance. Creating art about racial injustice *today* risks making you look like a propagandist. Creating art about slavery, or that deals with contemporary racial injustice *through* slavery, allows you to remain a serious artist.



This is not to deny that the art of antebellum fauxstalgia has often been both beautiful and politically provocative. It is only to point out that the antebellum world has become in many ways a segregated district of the national imagination, a closed arena where the country can exorcise its racial demons without touching too closely on the here and now. It is the only context where representing racist violence—and violent black resistance to racism—is reliably acceptable. Audiences are ready to applaud the vengeful Jamie Foxx of Tarantino’s *Django*, to bleed with Lupita Nyong’o in *12 Years a Slave*, and even to backstab overseers as the escaped Ade?wale? in the game *Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry*. They are less hungry for stories of resistance set in more recognizable worlds. It’s hard to imagine a blockbuster about Black Panthers facing police in the 1970s, or about the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, when members of the local black community defended themselves against thousands of rioting neighbors armed with guns, bombs, and planes. These conflicts, which took place between free people in an America recognizably our own, are more dangerous than slavery—which, for most Americans, is less a historical period than a mythic locale. Staging our national anxieties around race within the safety of this myth is a popular alternative to telling and listening to the riskier stories of other periods, especially our own. It is because we wish to avoid ourselves that we build so many imagined plantations—effigies for our General Shermans of the screen, stage, and page to burn down.

*Learned Men give it as a most certain sign of Possession, when the afflicted Party can see and hear that which no one else can discern any thing of, and when they can discover secret things, past or future. *



–Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World







*All that, we call “to have loa.” *



–Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen 







Copp’s Hill Burying Ground is all that’s left of Copp’s Hill. When the rest was cut and carted off, the yard was left standing: a tall extrusion of coffins and soil held together by a stone wall. It is Boston’s second oldest cemetery, a place where the headstones lean at wild angles as though into centuries of accumulated wind. The time to visit is winter, when snow and sky blur in white darkness and erase the horizon. Begin at North Station, follow traffic down Causeway, then, one block before the ocean, turn up steep, narrow, crooked Hull Road. Climb the hill into what was called New Guinea, where the Africans of colonial Boston, slave and free, once lived and listened for spirits from home. The Puritans feared them—feared their medicine, which understood inoculation, feared their worship, which cloaked much older faiths, and feared their long, loud funerals, which wound for hours through the city streets. These funerals so unsettled Boston’s selectmen that, in order to contain them, they outlawed their winding processions and “heathenish” ringing of bells. Thinking of these people, walking in the wake of their wakes, hug the left sidewalk. Continue, until you reach the corner of the cemetery wall. The entrance is farther along, but stop here, halfway up the incline. Press your ear against the frosted stone; you are level with the tombs.



 



Some distance behind this wall, the bones of the Reverend Doctor Cotton Mather lie buried. The shrill mouthpiece of an absolute god, Mather was Harvard’s first public intellectual. I like to imagine I can still hear him, chatty like the corpses in Dostoevsky’s “Bobok.” Still preaching—reading, perhaps from his pamphlet The Negro Christianized, to Phillis Wheatley, America’s first black woman poet and Mather’s eternal neighbor. Or perhaps he is reading from the Wonders of the Invisible World, his defense of “spectral evidence” in the prosecution of Salem witchcraft. Like his god, Mather lived in jealous, violent fear of those who listened to voices other than his own. Yet they surrounded him in life, just as he now lies buried among them: people whose untranslatable gods and worlds, now forgotten, murmured under his eaves. They were Indians, Africans, and those among his own people possessed by their dances and spells. Cotton Mather was afraid of them. He flinched from their shadows—fearing, as he wrote, cruel “Buffetings from Evil Sprits.” He was convinced his neighbors did “The Work of Darkness”; that their daughters perverted “the Plastic Spirit of the World”; that his African slaves had “magical conversations with Devils.” Conversations from which he, Cotton Mather, was excluded. Voices, that he, Cotton Mather, could not hear.



 



This issue of The Harvard Advocate was inspired by these voices and those who heard them—by the possessor, the possessed, and the relationship that binds them. It was inspired by the idea that artistic creation is always a form of ventriloquism, a vast dialogue with other voices. These voices, which Bakhtin called polyphony and the Haitian *vodouisant* calls the *loa*, are the true wonders of the invisible world. *Possession* celebrates them, and invites your ear. We hope that with every turn of the page, the good Reverend will do a corresponding roll in his grave.