"The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle (novella; 2016), discussed with help from "Lovecraft Country" by Matt Ruff (2016) and others

 **A retelling of one of Lovecraft's stories, honoring Lovecraft while also showing how much better he could have been**

This post is going to be about the fantastic novella "The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle, but I actually want to start out with a passage taken from Matt Ruff's also excellent novel, "Lovecraft Country".  Specifically, this is actually from the Author's Afterword, where Ruff addresses H. P. Lovecraft's complicated legacy:

The story that best sums up Lovecraft for me is “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” It’s about a New England coastal town whose inhabitants have made an unholy alliance with aliens who live in the sea. A tourist comes to Innsmouth for the day, sees too much, and ends up running for his life. 

All of Lovecraft’s worst traits are on display in the story: Besides the standard racist worldview, “Shadow” offers a thinly veiled allegory about the evils of miscegenation (the aliens are mating with the townspeople). But as a tale of steadily mounting dread, it works, and it’s one of the most effective portrayals of attempted lynching I’ve ever read. Lovecraft’s protagonist is white, but with just a few changes this could easily be the story of a black traveler caught in the wrong place after dark. 

So for all his faults, Lovecraft was tapping into these universal themes of horror that resonate even if you’re not a white supremacist. I wish he’d been a better person, or blessed with better mentors. But as a storyteller, I can still learn from him.

Let's make sure we're all on the same page here:  H. P. Lovecraft was a white supremacist (specifically, an Anglophile).  If you're not prepared to take this as foundational to discussion of his work, you can maybe skip this post.  Lovecraft advocated for hardline segregation, a division of races even stronger than what was already in place at the time.  And while later in his life he did soften his stance to more of a "separate but equal" notion of culture, that each culture should be allowed to flourish independently, ("make the Germans more German, the French more French, the Spaniards more Spanish, & so on.") . . . in his earlier essays and correspondence, from the same era in which he was writing much of his well-known fiction, he made it very clear that the reason for this was because Aryan society needed to be isolated and protected from the "primitive half-ape savagery" of the darker races

And before anyone says "well, he was a product of his times," . . . nah.  He advocated for segregation far beyond what was government policy at the time.  And there are countless examples of his peers, not just other authors but his friends and even his own wife, calling him out in essays and letters that survive to be studied today.  Not to mention that we have plenty of his contemporaries to compare him to.  I mean, Steinbeck was a contemporary of his, yet was able to at least write black characters without referring to them as "mongrels" (also he could write an entire story without using the word "cyclopean", so that's two things that Steinbeck could do that Lovecraft couldn't).  Hell, Zora Neal Hurston was a contemporary of Lovecraft.  So yeah, the "a product of his times" argument holds no water

(Lovecraft was also supremely classist, to the point that he regularly spoke out against the notion of democracy.  He believed an elite aristocratic class was necessary to guide the unintelligent masses.  Like Ruff said above, I wish he'd been a better person, or blessed with better mentors.  But the fact remains that H. P. Lovecraft was not a great person)

It's also important to note that Lovecraft wasn't simply an artist who was a bad person on the side.  I can listen to music written by a man who cheated on his spouse, because it's not like all of his songs are written on the theme of why it's ok to cheat.  On the other hand, Lovecraft's work is very much about all the things that made him a bad person:  Classism, and xenophobia, and elitism, and fear, and hatred, and hatred born of fear.  Fear of that which is different is not just a theme in his work, it's straight up the entire point.  And that can be hard to read

And yet

Lovecraft was an incredibly talented writer.  Fantastically talented, and incredibly influential.  He literally created a genre, one that is still vibrant and strong today.  My favorite quote about Lovecraft comes from Cassanda Khaw's "Food of the Gods", in which one character asks, "“Exactly how much Lovecraft have you read?”.  The other replies, “About two animes, six movies, and several graphic novels.”

Lovecraft created an idea and a framework so powerful, so wonderfully realized, that we can consider his greater body of work to span countless stories and works of art across every conceivable media.  We refer to a story as a Lovecraft story even if he wasn't the one who wrote it.  That's incredible!  The list of people who have had that level of influence on speculative fiction is a short one, with names like Shelly and Verne and Heinlein (although Heinlein also . . . augh, focus, don't get sidetracked, that's a topic for another post).  Lovecraft was absolutely a titan of the genre

And yet

He was not a good person, and his works cannot be extricated or separated from all of the qualities that made him not a good person.  So where do we go from here?  Victor LaValle had one idea

LaValle decided to take a look at one of Lovecraft's most problematic works, "The Horror at Red Hook".  That quote I used up above, Lovecraft talking about white society needs protection from "primitive half-ape savagery"?  Yeah, that's a quote from "Red Hook".  In many of Lovecraft's stories, eldritch horrors are used as a stand-in, a thinly veiled metaphor for other races of people.  In "Red Hook", he dispenses with the veil:

[. . .] these unauthorised newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers and harbour police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed necessary to compute their numbers, ascertain their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities.

He's not talking about horrors or demons or goblins.  He's just talking about immigrants.  This whole story is about an honest, hard-working good ol' Irish cop (he was hoping to sell this story to detective magazines, although he failed and it ended up published in Weird Tales like the rest of his work) tracking down a dark sorcerer that has set himself up as a cult leader amidst the immigrants of Red Hook.  Dark rituals, madness, you know the drill

LaValle subverts this story, telling it instead from the perspective of Tommy Tester, the titular character, a young Harlem man drawn into the dance between Detective Malone and the Sorcerer Robert Suydam of the original story.  Malone has the power of his badge and his gun, Suydam has the power of dark eldritch rites, and Tommy has no power at all, just a battered guitar and a belly full of righteous anger at the injustice of it.  Oh, and a straight razor, given to him by his father, who doesn't want him going alone to a rich white man's house without something to protect himself.  Because yes, this is a book about anger, and fury--and like any good Lovecraft-inspired story, it ends in blood and horror

I loved this book because of how layered a response it is to the original story.  "The Ballad of Black Tom" is, unquestionably, a rebuttal to "Red Hook".  Malone and Suydam both are portrayed as arrogant men caught up in their own notions of superiority, arrogance that leads to their downfall (that's not a spoiler, their downfalls occur in the original story too).  Both of them underestimate Tom, and LaValle is directly criticizing Lovecraft who would also have underestimated this young black man from Harlem.  But it's also, to be clear, a really good horror story.  LaValle is unashamed in his debt to Lovecraft for that.  The tools LaValle uses to slowly mount dread, to have the dark shadows slowly seep in from the corner of the room, to have the reader turning to the next page with bated breath . . . he makes it very clear that these tools were forged by H. P. Lovecraft a century ago, and he honors that fact.  LaValle, like Matt Ruff in the quote above, has learned from Lovecraft as a storyteller

That said, while the book portrays these eldritch horrors, it also invites us to ask if anything can be as bad as the horrors mundane man visits upon each other, especially upon those he considers his "lessers".  LaValle has a lot to say on the subject.  Black Tom certainly has his thoughts.  The reader is invited to come to his or her own conclusions

We'll go back to "Lovecraft Country" for one final quote, as our main character is talking with his uncle and discussing the pulp novels they both love so much:

“But you love these stories!” Atticus said. “You love them as much as I do!”

“I do love them,” George agreed. “But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”

“But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does.”

“No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes.” He looked at the shelves. “Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”

In many ways, "The Ballad of Black Tom", LaValle's views, and Lovecraft's place in history can in fact be summed up rather succinctly by the book's own dedication:

"For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings"

I loved this book

* * *

So!  Here we are, wrapping up this series of posts for Black History Month, during which I read (read this year, and read every year) a ton of speculative fiction written by black authors

I spent this month trying to put myself into the shoes of black and African readers, black and African fans of the genre I love so much.  And of course, at best this genre often simply forgets black people exists (N. K. Jemisin's famous line from the intro to the fantastic short story collection "How Long 'til Black Future Month?" in which she muses upon the lack of black characters in her favorite science fiction novels:  "How terrifying it’s been to realize no one thinks my people have a future").  More commonly, the genre outright excludes or even actively disparages, particularly in its early days and "Golden Age"

And yet

We can love these books.  And there will be incredibly talented authors like Victor LaValle and P. Djèlí Clark who are willing to take these flawed building blocks and put them together in new, better ways

(but hey, next month is Women's History Month, and if we want to talk about people reading a genre that so often ignores or even outright disparage them . . . I think female fans and authors will have a lot to say about that as well)