[This review originally published on my web log in September 2017.]
All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire.
Robert E. Howard's suicide note [1]
This thirteen-thousand-word story was originally printed in Weird Tales, in the issue dated June 1936, the month that Howard killed himself. The timing is very interesting, and I'll come back to this at the end. The version I read was reprinted in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, edited by Glenn Lord, published by Zebra Books in 1976.
Black Canaan is unlike anything else I have ever read. On one hand, it is outrageous if you believe that fiction should only show today's enlightened attitudes, but on the other it is very powerful. If I had to summarise it in one line, I could only say: this is the most racist short story I have ever read, but also one of the most effective horror stories. I don’t know if I can truly get across what it is like in just a few words. I fear it is a case of the map needing to be as big as the territory, and the only way to understand Black Canaan is to read the whole thing for yourself. It's available online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Black_Canaan. It's a strange and fascinating read.
The story is set some time after the American Civil War and the Emancipation. Kirby Buckner, a young white man, gets a mysterious message about trouble back home in Canaan, an isolated region in the Deep South. Heading home, he is attacked by a mysterious and seductive black woman and a group of black men. He kills or disables the men, but the woman escapes. He finds himself sexually attracted to her and when he meets other white people, he can’t bring himself to tell anyone about her - a hint of the hold she has over him. This obviously represents the fear of racial mixing, miscegenation, and that old chestnut, the 'lure' of the seductive black woman on a white man – his fear of his own weakness in wanting that 'forbidden fruit'.
But to get back to the story, Buckner's white compatriots tell him that a mysterious black ‘conjer man’ (magician) called Saul Stark has moved into the area and is stirring up discord amongst the everyday black folk. There are rumours of an uprising and so Buckner goes to warn the white folk living in the backwaters. He travels through the unsettling woods and swamps, finally arriving at Saul Stark’s empty hut, where that mysterious seductive woman, the Bride of Damballah, accosts him again. She tells him that she has cast a spell on him and that he will be compelled to attend the magical ceremony that she and Saul Stark are going to conduct that night – and she also says that worse is in store.
At dawn Grimesville shall go up in flames, and the heads of the white men will be tossed in the blood-running streets. But tonight is the Night of Damballah, and a white sacrifice shall be given to the black gods. Hidden among the trees you shall watch the Dance of the Skull - and then I shall call you forth - to die!
Buckner is compelled, just as she said, and makes his way to the ceremony, followed by his friend Jim Braxton. They travel through the swamps, and are attacked by black men who have been converted into amphibious monsters by Stark. Braxton is killed. The ceremony begins, and the Bride of Damballah starts her Dance but, of course, things do not go the way she expects. The spell is broken, not through any action of Buckner but by the dying action of his friend. The ceremony is disrupted, the black people flee and Saul Stark the conjer man is killed. The status quo is returned, but Kirby Buckner is left with secret knowledge of what happened, a secret that he can only share with the black people and not his white friends.
The story is very creepy and very effective. Throughout, there is a great feeling of menace, not just from Buckner's opponents the Bride of Damballah and the mostly unseen Saul Stark, but from the environment itself. Howard used the pathetic fallacy very well, as the environment reflects and embodies completely the menace of the situation.
There are hints throughout that Saul Stark does something strange to the black people by putting them in the swamp. This fear is realised and displayed towards the end of the story when Buckner and Braxton are approaching the rite and are attacked by the creatures that Stark has created from his followers, but these creatures are as much extrusions from the environment as they are creations of Stark. The swamp is as much a character as the humans and monsters that move about inside it. There's something of The Creature of the Black Lagoon to this aspect of the story, and also Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing. It's an archetype that has lasted: the lush, beautiful but simultaneously threatening swamp and its creatures - including the Bride of Damballah - that threaten to pull you down under the surface and into its fatal embrace.[2] The imagery and the environment certainly go well with the undertow of sex and miscegenation to the story.
Racism and dehumanisation
I don't know what REH's ideas were on race. I've only read a small sample of his work and I've deliberately tried to keep away from details of his biography other than what's on Wikipedia and Infogalactic, and I'm especially trying to keep away from other critics for the moment. I want to get a feel for the man, his agenda, his interests, based on what's in his stories as much as possible. I don't want to rely on other people's opinions – the 'he said, she said' of criticism.
From what I do know of REH and how he grew up in early 20th century America, I have to trust that he knew how white people of the story's era would speak, and that he knew the attitudes of the white people of that time – better than us in the 21st century, that's for sure. Also, writers use whatever tools they need to tell the stories they want to tell, and if that means digging into unpleasant American history, that's what a good writer would do. Now, an alternative is that REH misrepresented the world of post-Civil War USA, or that he was projecting his own beliefs onto the world through his stories - which I have a half-feeling he did do - but that's a question I can't answer without looking at more of his works, to see if there is a pattern, which I will do over the coming months.
And so we come to the big issue with this story: racism. Racism is too weak a word to describe the attitude of the narrator and the people in his society. The narrator doesn't just lust after the Bride of Damballah and hate himself for doing so, he views the black populace as mostly stupid, lazy, weak. He and the supporting white cast go so far beyond racism, and view the black people around them so negatively, that we might as well call it speciesism.
We are not talking a few cosmetic cultural differences here. The black people, recently freed from slavery, are presented for the most part like sub-humans, not members of the same species as the white characters. They are written as a hidden, devolved race from the ancient prehistory of humanity in one of those other weird tales of the time. The fact that the story is mostly set in a swamp only emphasises this.
The characters constantly use racist terms throughout, terms that I daren’t use here in case my site is banned by its host. There is also a lot of racist imagery. The narrator constantly uses the word ‘black’ to describe things, especially those which are threatening. There is black water - which is usually menacing - the black muzzle of a gun, a Black River, black abyss, and on and on. When Buckner is under the spell of the Bride of Damballah he says the ‘black rivers of Africa were surging and foaming in my consciousness’.
What this story shows very strongly is a fear by the white characters that an articulate black man will come along and stir up a rebellion of the ex-slaves - that man being Saul Stark. This fear is part of what gives the story its power. The fear drips from every paragraph.
However, the fear is not just within the white characters, but the black characters as well, because Stark is the enemy of the black people too. He terrorises them, he turns them into amphibious monsters, he holds them under his literal spell, and when they get the chance at the end of the story, they flee from him.
So, it’s not just the whites who dehumanise the black people, but Saul Stark does so too – and he's as black as them. He's no nice-as-pie redeemer come to save them. Characters refer to Stark as a king-like figure from Africa or Atlantis, so it’s possible that he is meant to represent the leaders in Africa who sold their own people into slavery, which is historically well documented. In this way, the everyday black people in the story represent the ordinary Africans who were preyed on by both their own leaders (in the figure of Saul Stark) and foreign slave traders (represented by the white people of Grimesville).
However, the communities are not completely alienated from each other, because at the end of the story, Buckner shares something with the black populace that he cannot share with the whites - an awareness of terrors beyond the mundane world. Buckner has been initiated into part of the local black culture in a way that no other white man has. He knows about the creatures that ‘the black water of Tularoosa hides. That is a secret I share with the cowed and terror-haunted black people of Goshen and of it neither they nor I have ever spoken’.
So he is bound to them, but through a shared experience of the horrific, not the joyful.
Art as Magic
Why does the story work so well despite being so alien to twenty first century sensibilities? Maybe because it is so alien. Maybe because REH was plumbing the depths of the human psyche and our own ability to dehumanise other people. He went into the unconscious mind and unearthed primal fears of magic and miscegenation, and archetypes of sub-humans and seductive sorceresses, and used them to craft his story.
His poem, The Song of a Mad Minstrel, also printed in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, gives some insight into this journey. It lists all the characteristics of the Mad Minstrel (Robert E. Howard himself) and what he has done in pursuit of his art:
I have plumbed the northern ice for a spell like Frozen lead;
In lost grey fields of rice, I have learned from Mongol dead.
Where a bleak black mountain stands I have looted grisly caves;
I have digged in the desert sands to plunder terrible graves.
It ends
Oh, the heart in my breast turned to stone, and the brain froze in my skull -
But I won through, I alone, and I poured my chalice full
Of horrors and dooms and spells, black buds and bitter roots -
From the hell beneath the hells, I bring you my deathly fruits.
Now, if this is a description of what Howard himself went through to write his works, the horrors and dooms and spells he endured to produce his work, the psychological and spiritual journey he underwent, it’s no surprise that he produced such a dark, disturbing but artistically powerful work as Black Canaan - and no surprise that he ended up killing himself, either. He brought us his deathly fruits, but consumed too many of them himself.
Some people would turn from such a journey, would try to limit the areas that they as artists can explore, indeed they would try to stop anyone else from making this journey, but this would prevent anyone using the darker side of the human psyche in their art. Anyone who chooses to limit the psychic exploration to safer topics isn’t likely to produce art which is as unnerving, stomach churning, but as effective as Black Canaan.
I have one final observation to make.
The title Black Canaan is interesting, as it obviously refers to the land of Canaan in the Bible. Just as Moses was denied entry to the Promised Land of Canaan, dying within sight of it, so too was Saul Stark denied entry to his own Black Canaan, a land free of white men, dying just before he could create it. So, too, did Howard die before reaching his own full potential, never quite reaching his own promised land of financial and emotional security.
I've already mentioned that Black Canaan was published in June 1936, the month that Howard killed himself. In looking over The Song of a Mad Minstrel, it’s clear that the Mad Minstrel is Robert E. Howard himself, but he also sounds like Saul Stark, the conjer man. Both Howard and Stark were weavers of spells over their audiences, both died before fulfilling their potential, both brought back deathly fruits from the hells beneath the hells, and both ended up dead at the hands of a southern white man.
Despite being found with a ‘death poem’ in his pocket - seen at the top of this article – was Black Canaan Robert E. Howard’s real suicide note?
1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_suicide_note
Link to Robert E. Howard's suicide note
2. I'm reminded of the infamous hallucination-cum-sex-scene between Swamp Thing and Abigail Arcane in the comic by Alan Moore, except Moore went full on, not just for miscegenation but for inter-species sex.
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PAUL LUCAS, WRITER AND COGITATOR
paul.lucas0001@gmail.com