Elizabeth Morris / HBO
My grandfather was almost murdered in a town in sundown.
I never met him, but I clearly remember my grandmother telling stories of how her husband, my grandfather, would sometimes take cross-country trips. And on many of these trips, because he was unfamiliar with the city he was in, he would have to find shelter before the sun went down, because this could be a sundown town.
Sundown cities, like the city I now live in, were cities where Black people were relatively free to walk in daylight, but once the sun went down, they were arrested and sometimes killed – simply because of their color. fel. Sometimes the founders and leaders of these cities would rationalize their treatment of people by talking about the threat of crime that black followers followed, but actually it was just a way to keep people who seemed like me in their place.
Story has it that my grandfather found one night in one of these cities. He had to wait for hours until he found a place to spend the night. He never ran into a policeman, fortunately, because if he had, he could, at best, have been arrested and, at the very least, murdered. That’s the kind of danger Black people have historically found themselves in the country – and that’s what HBO’s new show is about. Lovecraft Country, capture perfectly.
I was amazed by how good Lovecraft Country depicts the horror that black life can be in America. Yes, the show was meant to show the joy of blackness by centering the music, dancing and softness between George Freeman (Courtney B. Vance) and Hippolyta Freeman (Aunjanue Ellis) in the pilot’s first act, but once George, his cousin Atticus (Jonathan Majors), and Atticus’ childhood friend Letitia (the scene-stealer Jurnee Smollett) leave the borders of home, we are soon made aware that being black in this country seems beautiful and full of danger is like every horror movie.
For me, this is brought home when our main characters have a fateful encounter with police after the end of the episode. They are informed that they are in a county with a sundown policy (hence the title of the episode, “Sundown”), and they make their way as fast as they can to the county line in an attempt not to to violate the law.
Misha Green, who previously co-created WGNs Underground, is the showrunner and wrote the pilot episode, but I can feel the influence of Jordan Peele, an executive producer, on this element of the show. As well as Get out, this series shows that the experience of blacks in this country is far more horrible than any creature the creators could have imagined. And using horror and fantasy as the medium through which they explore this reality is what elevates a good show to something that has the potential to be awesome.
By the time the shoggoths appeared – those multi-eyed monsters proposed by HP Lovecraft, the infamous racist horror author – we’re fascinated by their existence, but what remains in the forefront of our minds is fact that our main characters were almost not killed by the monsters that appeared, but by the monsters that actually existed. We were left to puzzle over the creatures that appeared, but the true horror of the show was central to a very real phenomenon. The thing that almost killed my grandfather.
Sundown cities were not limited to the southern parts of the United States. Contrary to what many Northerners believe, these cities were hostile to the presence of Black people all over the country. In the first half of the 20thth Centuries ago, cities from Arkansas to Michigan proudly announced that they were free of Black people. During the same period, acts in Chevy Chase, Maryland, included “restrictive alliances” that sold or leased the land to “any person of Negro blood” (in addition to “any person of the Semetic [sic] race ”), and this was not unusual either. Tubman African American Museum in Georgia has found a sign in Connecticut that “Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark.” And these signs were not empty threats: A story in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1940 reports that a group of Black people on a church tour of South Carolina were fired by a group of white men who told them, “We do not leave here after sunset does not allow d – nn – rs. ‘According to the article, five people were injured.
In Sunday night’s premiere, the city our main characters encounter is in Massachusetts. I have to believe this was meant on the part of the writers and showrunner. They illustrate the average of this evil, and how inevitable the fate of Black people in America was.
I have not lost sight of the villains of Lovecraft CountryThe first episode is the police. It’s the kind of thing you might ask to call this the “show of the moment,” or “the show we need right now,” but is this just a moment? Do we need it now only? The police have at all times in history (including at the moment) always been antagonists in the story of America’s relationship with Black people. Misha Green did not respond to George Floyd when she wrote this episode – she did respond to the history of police violence attempted on people whose skin has been tutored by the sun. The only thing that is new are the mythical creatures that save them.
