Lovecraft Country Episode One: “Sundown”
HBO’s new series Lovecraft Country, based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, takes the tropes of H.P. Lovecraft and uses them to create a new world of horror. Lovecraft Country centers around a group of unsuspecting characters living their already stressful “normal” lives and has them encounter a new, mind-shattering reality: magic, monsters, and ghosts all exist side-by-side with the “regular” horrors of the world. Usually, the main characters of Lovecraft’s works battled to keep their sanity after making these discoveries. His characters had one “advantage” though: they were white, and so they always had the option of getting aid from majority of the population of Lovecraft’s white-dominated world. But what happens if the main characters who encounter these eldritch horrors are already marginalized and victimized by society? How does racism, marginalization, and victimization compound the terror of “normal” reality not being what you thought it was?
The horror is both supernatural and mundane for the main characters of the series: Atticus Turner, George and Hippolyta Berry, and Letitia Lewis. As the showrunners stated on the HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, the series presents the multiple different realities that everyone encounters throughout their daily lives.[1] The show is set in the United States in the 1950s and begins with Atticus and his family and friends experiencing the real-life horror of being African American and trying to simply function in a segregated society. The showrunners, producers, and cast do an excellent job of showing the difficulties endured by entire segment of American citizens.
The opening scene of the show is a dream involving Atticus as he is fighting for his life in a war, which is a combination of a flashback of his own experiences in the Korean War, interwoven with contemporary heroes and science fiction elements. The horror of real war is suddenly eclipsed as Atticus looks up from the trenches and sees UFOs, Martian war machines, and even a Cthulhu-type monster attacking the humans. Just about when the Cthulhu creature is about to destroy Atticus and his Martian queen Jackie Robinson smashes the creature with a bat, saving our protagonist. Atticus awakes with a start and the viewer sees that he is on a bus leaving the Jim Crow South. This dream sequence is an excellent blending of the horrible realities that Atticus finds himself in both the real and imagined world.
Atticus discusses the book he is reading, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, with his only companion at the back of the bus, a Black woman. The story itself revolves around a former Confederate officer who is transported to Mars and becomes a hero. The woman points out that the main character of the book fought for slavery and nothing he has done on Mars can erase the cause for which he fought against his fellow countrymen. Atticus responds that no one is perfect and that we must work with what we have. This statement sums up a general situation of not only Atticus, but every other African American who lived through Jim Crow: do your best in a country that is prejudiced against you (a general mindset which still exists in too many places and people today).
The realities of Jim Crow America are reinforced when the bus breaks down, leaving Atticus and his fellow African-American passenger to walk to the next town, while the white passengers get a ride. While this concept may seem shocking to some, the segregated society was legally enforced in the United States from 1890-1967. White Supremacy, in both the Southern and Northern United States, was virulent before and after the American Civil War (1860-1865). This belief in the inferiority of African Americans was shared in all regions of the United States. Even with the liberation of slaves and end of slavery in United States, white Americans were not wholly willing to accept African Americans as full and equal citizens. When Atticus ends his journey in Chicago, the viewer sees that even large northern cities are segregated.
African Americans were faced with increasing persecution in the period after Reconstruction (1865-1877). The Reconstruction Era was a period during which the defeated Confederate states were required to abolish slavery and to extend and guarantee the same legal and Constitutional protections to the newly freed slaves. This was required each of the rebelling states before they could return to the status they’d had prior to the Civil War. Three separate Constitutional Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments) had to created and adopted nationally in order to guarantee that newly freed people would be protected. Although these three Amendments would be grudgingly accepted, the Southern States, and even Northern ones, quickly found “legal” loopholes that allowed for racial discrimination to quickly reestablish itself.
“Separate but Equal” quickly became the byword for segregating African Americans from participating and integrating into their new status as American citizens. [2] Separate schools were established to ensure that black and white students and teachers did not intermix. This practice was established in the South but was emulated and adopted in the North as well. Not only did elementary, middle, and high schools fall into this category, higher education did as well, and separate African American colleges were founded. Education was only one area of separation: restaurants, department stores, churches, employment almost anywhere, and anything else you can think of, was segregated. Even routine medical appointments with a doctor and treatment in hospitals was segregated to ensure that the no element of the two races would inadvertently mix.[3]
Public transportation was a major source of racial discrimination and tension inside America. No city, town, or transportation company wanted to purchase separate buses or trains, pay for their maintenance, and hire people to staff them, so a “compromise” was reached: the back of the bus practice. African Americans were forced to ride at the back of buses, or separate train cars, even if the front of the vehicles in question was empty. They also generally were not allowed to stay in the same waiting areas as white passengers. If the “whites only” section of the bus was filled, white passengers could force African Americans to either give up their seat and stand or have them get off the bus entirely.
This practice would eventually be overturned starting with the arrest of, and subsequent legal actions and protests around, Rosa McCauley Parks when she refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955. “The Montgomery City Code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers had the ‘powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions’ of the code.”[4] In other words, Parks broke the law by not surrendering her seat to a white passenger after the bus driver ordered her to do so.
What followed Parks’ arrest was a striking example of the African American community, not only in Alabama, organizing a series of strikes and protests around the practice of “Separate but Equal” accommodations. Beginning on December 5, 1955 and continuing for 381 days, the African Americans throughout Montgomery refused to ride on any public transportation. The bus companies of the city were financially crippled. The surrounding issue of “Separate but Equal” facilities came to national attention and scrutiny, as well as retaliation.[5]
Civil Rights advocates saw the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka as legal precedent they could use to strike against racial discrimination and segregation.[6] In June 1956, Parks’ lawyer Fred Gray filed suit , eventually resulting in a Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation unconstitutional.
Resuming the story, Atticus has returned home to Chicago because his father, Montrose, has gone missing. Atticus’ uncle, George, invites Atticus to accompany him on a trip he is taking to work on The Green Book, a travel guide for Blacks in America.[7] They believe Atticus’ father is in the city of Ardham, Massachusetts. They set out cross-country with a friend of the family, Letitia Lewis, in hopes of finding Montrose.
Atticus, George, and Letitia stop in one small town that is most definitely a Sundown Town. When driving toward Ardham, they stop at a diner which was mentioned to George as a safe place and which he wanted to add to the Book. Unfortunately, the diner George was looking for was gone, and a new diner had been built over the burnt-out structure of the old building. Our protagonists must flee when the locals begin attacking them.
After a close escape, Atticus, George, and Letitia run into the local sheriff and deputies, and learn they’ve entered a Sundown County. [8] A Sundown Town or County is a small town where it is subtly, and usually implicitly, understood that racial minorities can travel through area during the day but must leave before the sun goes down. In failing to abide by these “rules,” a minority is breaking the “law” of the region and sp can be attacked, and possibly killed. While some people in the area may not share this viewpoint, they do not usually fight hard to change the policy either.
In many of these Sundown Towns police officers and fire fighters actively participated in the enforcement of these discriminatory practices. It could be that they inform an African American, or other minority, that the people in the region do not take kindly to strangers. The best-case scenario for those who violated Sundown laws was a fine, the worst-case was a public lynching.
The sheriff who stops George, Atticus, and Letitia is so well-known as an active white supremacist that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) has a thick file on him. The supernatural elements they encounter alongside these men are an additional horror added to what they were already experiencing. All of these elements that are depicted in the first episode of Lovecraft Country have a much deeper meaning to those people who have lived through and survived this era.
For further reading:
Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.
James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.
[1] https://www.hbo.com/lovecraft-country/podcast
[2] “Separate but Equal” was a doctrine that was in United States Constitutional law which worked around the Fourteenth Amendment. The phrase first showed up in Louisiana in 1890 in order to “legally” abide by the Fourteenth Amendment and at the same time undermine the protections the Amendment was supposed to guarantee. This legal doctrine declared that racial discrimination was not unconstitutional if all races were provided “separate but equal” facilities whether those be for transportation, public accommodations, medical treatment, education, and employment. This was first legally enforced in the Supreme Court verdict regarding the Plessy vs Ferguson case in 1896. By declaring that racial discrimination was legal if both races were provided with separate, but vast unequal, facilities and protections, the Supreme Court set the precedent for Jim Crow era discrimination, terror, and societal disenfranchisement to become an element of post-Reconstruction society to languish for decades.
[3] This segregation also led African Americans to become unwilling, and unwitting, victims of medical exploitation and experimentation. The Tuskegee Experiment and the illegal and immoral experimentation done on Henrietta Lacks will be discussed in a subsequent essay.
[4] https://www.biography.com/activist/rosa-parks, cited on 2 September 2020.
[5] White supremacists conducted a series of both subtle and blatant attacks were carried out against the African American community: churches and schools were burned down, Martin Luther King’s and E.D. Nixon’s houses were destroyed by bombs, arrests of African Americans for breaking antiquated laws increased, and lynchings took place.
[6] The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision by the US Supreme Court justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. This laid the groundwork for the Civil Right Movement to dismantle Jim Crow Era laws.
[7] The Green Book was a very important resource for Blacks as they traveled throughout the country, telling where places were safe to stop and what places to avoid. The Dissident Peasant podcast gives a great explanation of it here: https://dissidentpeasant.com/2019/02/dont-forget-your-green-book.
[8] An excellent study of Sundown Towns is James Loewen’s monograph Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.