I can't imagine being Black, to be Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, making people laugh at the horror of being alive, making the invisible risible, knowing that, as tough as my life has been, full of outrageous fortune, that when I look in the mirror and pull my skin, I see that it's white and know that I'll be able to blend in just fine, fade to white.
In the recent (and renewed) HBO horror series, Lovecraft Country, there's a scene in "Jig-a-Bobo," a late episode that sees Black blues singer, Hyppolyta, confront Christina, a white wraith-like witch who has been donning a Nordic-looking white male body to hump Hippolyta, consensually (it's complicated), about how she feels after the recent funeral of Emmett Till:
Hippolyta: A 14-year-old boy was beat and shot to death, then tied with barbed wire by the neck to a cotton gin fan and cast into the Tallahatchie River.
Christina: [matter of factly] I know.
Hippolyta: But do you care? At all?
Christina: You want me to say Yes.
Hippolyta: I don't want you to say anything. I want you to feel what I feel right now. Heartbroken. Scared. Furious. Tired. So f*cking tired of feeling this way over and over. And I want you to feel alone and shameful, 'cause I'm here, feeling this, and you will never understand it. I want you to feel guilty 'cause...For feeling safe next to you and your privilege".
Christina: No.
Hippolyta: What?
Christina: I don't care about Emmett Till....
Hyppolyta might be interrogating all whites about their souls and substance. Most of us would answer Yes, we care - each and every time there is another Black Man Down. Christina answers honestly, but does gets to work thinking more about it.
Lovecraft Country is based upon the same-named movie treatment-turned-novel (2016) by Mark Ruff. He's written a few novels of some modest acclaim, but this is probably Ruff's diamond, certainly it's his ka-ching. The story begins when Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) returns home from Daegu, South Korea, where, aside from battling commies, he was married to a witch (Ji-ah, played by Jamie Chung) who is able to see his future when they f*ck and he has an orgasm, as if a portal in his psyche opens up before her. The two share a cultural legacy of racial vilification that binds them - him by slaver capitalists, her by the Japanese occupiers ultimately responsible for the division of her country, North and South.
When he returns home, Atticus immediately hooks up with childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) and his uncle Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams) for a road trip adventure in search of his missing father. Narratively, we're told they are driving from the Chicago area to a place called Ardham in Western Massachusetts, but they could be driving through the South, given the crackers and fascist cops they come across, an adventure that includes a near-execution experience in Mass. when cops lead them into the woods only to see them saved by multi-eyed monsters straight out of Revelations, the scariest book of the Bible, who chew into and demolish the cops.
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