The second episode of Lovecraft Country surfaces themes of family history, the traumatic legacies of enslavement, and secret societies. The protagonists face an all-white secret society and the familial connections created through the rape of enslaved women. In the episode’s climax, Atticus Freeman and the villain’s ancestral magics contend with each other and Atticus is saved by his ancestor, Hanna.
Magic and Masons in Black and White America
The Special Collections Library’s occult collection includes books and manuscripts related to occultism and magic from many different cultures. The Library also has materials related to secret societies, including a collection of miscellaneous Aleister Crowley papers, which include signed oaths of the probationers of the Argentum Astrum and preliminary pledge forms. Interested in additional access scans from this collection? Contact Research Services.
During the banquet scene, George Freeman raises the issue of segregated secret societies and introduces viewers to the Prince Hall Freemasons, an order created in 1784 by a free Black man denied entrance to his local Masonic lodge. Our Special Collections includes a 1958 program published by the Prince Hall Grand Commandery of Illinois for the Fifteenth Biennial Conclave, Grand Encampment : 15th Biennial International Conference, Haly Royal Arch Masons of the United States of America and Dominion of Canada : Masonic Knights Templar of the United States of America and Dominion of Canada : International Conference of Grand Guilds, Heroines Templars Crusade of the United States of America and the Bahama Islands.
Although not often part of the representation of Colonial-era New England, enslaved Black and Indigenous women were present from its early years. Tituba, the first woman tried as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, was either a Black or Indigenous woman, possibly of Northeast South American or Caribbean descent. Hanna might have also been tried as a witch if she’d been found with the Book of Names, a magical tome which plays a role throughout the show. Tituba : Black witch of Salem, is a fictionalized account of her life by Guadalupian author, Maryse Condé, which reimagines her life just as the show Lovecraft Country reimagines concepts from the Lovecraftian canon. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Penn State users can check out a digital copy on HathiTrust.
In her introduction, scholar and activist Dr. Angela Davis describes how as Condé
…offers to Tituba the possibility filling the silence and voids with voice and presence, we who are Tituba’s cultural kin experience the possibilities of our own history. […] Tituba looked for her story in the history of the Salem witch trials and could not find it. I have looked for my history in the story of the colonization of this continent and I have found silences, omissions, distortions, and fleeting, enigmatic insinuations.
Gil Scott-Heron
The episode’s title comes from the spoken-word poem “Whitey’s On the Moon,” which plays during the ritual. The poem, written by Gil Scott-Heron, contrasts the living conditions of many Black Americans with the expense of putting a (white) man on the moon and the pride that resulted. Although his family could not afford safe living conditions or healthcare, the American government spent $25 billion to send three men to the moon. Nor was he the only one to make such a critique. Ralph Abernathy led 150 members of the Poor People’s Campaign and 2 mules to demonstrate at the Apollo 11 launch. You may also know Scott-Heron from his composition “The Revolution Will Not Be Televized.” Scott-Heron grew up in Chicago and moved to New York at age 12. Although he moved several years before the events of “Whitey’s On the Moon,” he’s the second boy seen playing with the ouija board in Lovecraft Country’s third episode.
Weird Fiction
Weird Fiction “represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane” – Ann and Jeff VanderMeer “The Weird: An Introduction“
“The focus is on awe, and its undermining of the quotidian. This obsession with numinosity under the everyday is at the heart of Weird Fiction.” – China Miéville The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 1st ed.
William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, used in this episode as a classic Weird fiction story, parallels this episode in several ways:
- a strange and magical house
- a door to another dimension
- and monstrous creatures
Just like the secret society’s house in the episode, the house on the borderland is destroyed at the end. The Special Collections Library has the 1946 Arkham House edition with a fantastically weird cover, used as the featured image for this post.
Continue reading about Episode 3 : Holy Ghost