Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (11 page)

The terror of the trade influenced the growth of stories that moved through villages up and down the Gambia River. One such story had it that the pasty-looking beings who bought Africans from the slave catchers were actually cannibals, capturing Africans with plans to consume them whole. Equiono described the terror felt by the newly enslaved at seeing the fires burning on the decks of slave ships, fires that slavers believed kept away disease but that the unfortunate victims of the trade interpreted as “cooking fires” in which they would be prepared and eaten “
by these ugly men.” Some slaves in Louisiana believed that they had found confirmation of their fears when seeing their new masters drink red wine. Unfamiliar with the beverage, they assumed that their masters drank the blood of African victims like vampires.
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Historian of the African-Atlantic experience John Thornton has further shown that West Africans entrapped in the slave trade viewed these “cannibal” slavers in the context of witchcraft. West African belief understood the witch as a creature addicted to kidnapping and consumption, so much so that the work of witches could be described as “eating the spirit.” Thornton notes a Jesuit priest who described seventeenth-century slaves as believing, almost universally, that their transport across the Atlantic represented “a type of witchcraft” that would end in their bodies being “turned into oil and eaten.”
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Africans saw the trade as deeply monstrous. Whites, in turn, used the imagery of the monstrous to legitimize the institution the slave trade had created. Slaveholders viewed the slave as a new kind of monster, both useful and dangerous. In nineteenth-century America, such views received the patina of pseudo-scientific legitimacy. Josiah Nott, a respected nineteenth-century physician who became known for his contributions in the treatment of yellow fever, also created a monstrous ethnology in which Africans displayed “immutable characteristics” that distinguished them clearly from other human beings. Nott put forward his ideas in a series of publications between the 1840s and 1870s, constructing a proslavery apologetic based on the alleged genetic savagery of Africans. The African was a monster in the most basic sense, outside the limits of the rest of humanity.
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Paradoxically, many slaveholders sought to deny the truth of slavery, seeing it as a domestic institution held together by paternal bonds. Planters such as James Henry Hammond of South Carolina used familial metaphors to describe the plantation, viewing himself as the caring patriarch of a large and happy family. Planters hid from themselves and from the world the violent nature of the institution, leaving whippings to overseers and writing proslavery apologetics that insisted that the slave endured no greater hardships than the industrial workers of the North and England.
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Many of these same slaveholders feared that they held a monster in chains, one that could break loose at any moment. Slave rebellions, such as the New York Rebellion of 1712 and the South Carolina Stono Rebellion of 1739, greatly increased these fears. Southern newspapers reported, often in lurid detail, revolts in other parts of the slaveholding world, always with the subtext that such horrors could occur on the
American landscape. Frequently, these accounts emphasized the supernatural terror of African religious traditions in an attempt to portray the African rebel as a kind of witch and very likely in league with the devil. A Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper account of a revolt in Antigua described its genesis in a ritual involving the drinking of a potion of grave dirt (“goofer dust”) and chicken’s blood while participants swore an oath to kill every white man, woman, and child on the island.
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Slaves became, in the white Southern mind, both monsters and faithful servants. This schizophrenic concept allowed white planters to express their fears while sublimating them. Slaves in revolt were the perfect monsters, their origins in fearful religious rites. Slaves in the household were imagined as cheerful domestics, caring for the planter’s family as if it were their own or working in his fields out of gratitude for the roof over their heads. The bewildering logic of white supremacy allowed Southern whites to maintain their sanity and, sometimes, to sleep at night.
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By the 1830s white fears of monstrosity of the African increasingly began to draw on the powerful metaphor recently created by English writer Mary Shelley. Shelley’s 1818
Frankenstein
, the story of an inhuman creature that turns on its master, provided slaveholders with a ready metaphor for the possibility of slave rebellion. Elizabeth Young, in her brilliant book
Black Frankenstein
, shows how closely descriptions of the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt in Virginia mirrored Shelly’s descriptions of the monster (and theatrical iterations of the story American audiences would have been familiar with beginning in the 1820s). In November of 1831 the
Richmond Enquirer
described Turner as “the monster of iniquity” and “a spectacle from which the mind must shrink in terror.” Turner became Frankenstein on a rampage through the countryside. Images from Shelley’s nightmare would continue to haunt American racial fantasies for two centuries.
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The creation of American slavery turned early America into a slaveholder’s republic. Slavery constrained the American definition of liberty and democracy, producing some of the fundamental tensions that led to the American Civil War. This war would not destroy the monsters of the American mind and race would remain central to the American doctrine of monsters into the twenty-first century. The ghosts of the trade continue to rattle their very real chains throughout American history.

The People Under the Plantation

Oral tradition in nineteenth-century Florida told of a fearsome, alligator-like creature known as a snoligoster. Despite its comic sounding name,
tales of the snoligoster centered on its size, fearsome appearance, and violence. Folklore frequently associated it with the death of trespassers in the swamps around Lake Okeechobee. One such story has local man Inman F. Eldredge “hunting for an outlaw negro in the swamp” when he comes upon the unlucky man impaled on what Eldredge first believes to be a cypress stump. Eldredge takes a closer look and discovers the stump is actually the razor-edged horn that protrudes out of the back of the snoligoster. He considers shooting the monster but decides that “it was doing a good work and was entitled to live on.” Eldredge went on to explain that the “very report of such a creature inhabiting the swamps” would have a good effect on the African American community.
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The story of the snoligoster shows how monsters became a part of white supremacy’s mythology of power. Runaways in the southeast United States had long taken to the swamps for refuge from the slave patrols. Tales of a monster haunting those swamps inspired fear that reinforced social and political hierarchies. The word snoligoster, or snollygoster, became a synonym for “carpetbagger” in the years following the Civil War, suggesting that the creature had a clear connection to racial politics in the American South. Legends of monsters had become assertions of racial power.

Similar stories are common in the antebellum South. One South Carolina planter, concerned that his slaves spent too much time at revival meetings, dressed himself in an elaborate devil costume, complete with a mask that contained a mechanical contrivance that made it appear to move. He used this cartoonish getup to terrify both his slaves and the whites that attended revival meetings with them. Stories such as the snoligoster and this incident raise the possibility that many of the tales of terror of creatures and spirits in Southern woods and swamp may have had their source in the plantation house. Such stories added a supernatural dimension to an atmosphere already fetid with fear and rich with the promise of violence.
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This climate of terror proved useful to the emerging American ruling class. In the early years of the nineteenth century, American elites, whether Southern planters or Northern merchants, had a vested interest in maintaining racial and economic hierarchies. Historians of the years following the American Revolution tend to emphasize that the conflict opened up the possibility of social democracy in early American life. At the same time, many of these same historians argue that the years following the revolution witnessed a revanchist move toward the consolidation of power by elites. Confiscation of Loyalist lands in the 1780s led to an increase in independent farmers, though it also helped build the
estates of the planter class in the American South. Meanwhile, though some elite Tory merchant families in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston fled to British imperial protection and left their wealth and holdings behind, these holdings were often claimed by up-and-coming elites. The final years of the eighteenth century represented a changing of the guard rather than a transformation of the basic social structure.
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The adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 created the degree of consolidation that Federalist elites hoped for, ensuring the protection of commerce. The Constitution also brought an end to the international slave trade following a twenty-year reprieve. The Atlantic traffic in human beings, alluded to in obscure language and never called by its true name in the Constitution, came to an end in 1808.

Slavery in the United States, however, continued and flourished, becoming central to the economic prosperity of the nation, enriching both Southern cotton planters and Northern textile and shoe manufacturers. By the time of the American Civil War, four million African Americans lived under the control of the plantation system in the United States. The institution thrived from enormous profits made from the internal slave trade and the possibility that slavery would move westward.

In Frederick Douglass’ speech “Slavery and the Irrepressible Conflict,” the great abolitionist and former slave refers to the institution of slavery as “America’s pet monster.” Douglass chose this frightening metaphor well. He knew from his own experience that slavery played a role in the intimate lives of millions of white Americans and yet was the institution that dared not speak its name in the founding documents. Slavery drove all aspects of American life, from its commercial revolution to its expansion across the opening frontier. America’s pet monster was obscured by the American language of rights and personal liberty, an ideology of democracy for a nation founded, in the most basic economic sense, on slavery. Douglass described how “all our political parties and most of our churches” kneel at this shrine of this thing, a “huge and many-headed abomination.”
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Monsters in the early republic functioned in a variety of ways. They represented the terrors of the past, the desire by white Americans to obscure the origins of the colonial experience. They could also suddenly leap out from the closet when those same Americans needed a reason to explain why slavery thrived in the land of democracy and why brutality coexisted alongside the high moral ideals of American Christianity. Sometimes they provided the most cynical of masters a way to frighten their chattel, to convince them that the monsters of the plantation house were nothing in comparison to those that lurked beyond the bounds of freedom.

Monsters also invaded the dreams of the oppressed. The belief that supernatural horrors drove the slave trade represented a rational response to the indescribable evil and the terrors of the unknown Atlantic passage. The slave trade, after all, did represent a kind of witchcraft and a kind of cannibalism, a dark blood-magic that transmogrified human beings into a species of property for the consumption of the voracious plantation system, Douglass’ “many-headed abomination.”

White America also dreamed of monsters, seeing them in slave rebellion and the destruction of the fragile racial hierarchy the world of the plantation had created. Deeply embedded beliefs about African American inferiority, beliefs that included age-old notions of black monstrosity, terrified whites about the fate of the country if the slaves ever gained their freedom. In antebellum America, even many white antislavery reformers believed that the expatriation of Africans, in Haiti or even back in Africa, offered the best solution for the problem of slavery. A multiracial society, in their minds, would be a monstrous society.

Antebellum America was monster-ridden. During the nineteenth century, the shadows only grew longer. The earliest American gothic fictions investigated this underside of the American historical experience as the country itself descended into a truly monstrous conflict.

One Dark Day in the Middle of the Night

Two Dead Boys Came out to Fight

Back to back they Faced Each Other

Pulled their knives

And each shot the other.

T
he stylish 1992 film
Candyman
, based on a Clive Barker short story, succeeds by combining a gothic sensibility with genuine terrors from the American past. A graduate student named Helen (played by Virginia Madsen), researching urban legends in contemporary Chicago, begins collecting stories of the mythical “Candyman.” The story of Candyman contains motifs not dissimilar from other well-known urban legends, including endangered babysitters, unquiet spirits that appear in mirrors when fatally summoned, and maniac killers with a hook for a hand.