[N.B.: I wrote this post in September 2020. In the following episodes, I grew more and more disenchanted with the series as a whole; but I still love this particular episode.]

Lovecraft Country… whew. Let’s talk about that third episode. (Spoiler alert. PLEASE do not read this until you have watched the episode if at all possible. It’s worth the free trial on HBO, along with I May Destroy You, Watchmen, and Chernobyl.)

In the third episode of Lovecraft Country, the series based on the pulp science fiction novel by Matt Huff, the leading woman character, Letitia “Leti” Lewis, realizes that her house is haunted. Leti believes these are the ghosts of 8 Black people who were killed and found dismembered in the basement of the house. Leti, who in the previous episode got shot in the gut, died, and was brought back to life by a white wizard, hears the ghosts’ cries and screams. Leti discovers through her search in library archives that the spirit of the former white home owner (a disgraced UChicago scientist who “was fired for unethical experimental practices”) is also still in the house. Leti surmises that the scientist, named Hiram Epstein, had experimented on the Black victims whose bodies were found in her house and that eight Black “restless souls trapped in my house with their killer. They want out. I know it.” Leti has launched healing by remembrance–an intentional unforgetting–of the Black ghosts’ names and a recognition of their power, despite their victimization at the hands of a brutal white scientist and a heartless white police captain.

There are other plot elements and character developments in the episode that are important to the series, but the central action in this one is around Leti and her home. When Leti bought her house, she was unaware of the hauntings, though, given its state of disrepair, it looked like a caricature of a haunted house. Beyond this movie- and entertainment-based idea of haunting, Lovecraft Country operates at multiple, varied, and simultaneous forms of haunting  across time. There are many examples of family inheritance, family knowledge, and hidden inheritances and knowledges–both lost over time and intentionally silenced. Like in many families, especially families that have experienced multi-generational silences, each episode of the story reveals stories and information that are referred to, but not fully explained; people learn about their ancestors by piecing stories, books, and archives together to visualize what isn’t spoken, what is present but not a physical being. These are “absent presences” (Gordon) or “disjunctures” (Derrida) that are inhabited impatiently by specters.

At the climax of the episode, the Hiram’s ghost has inhabited Leti’s friend’s body and is using him (his name is Tic–he’s actually the “main character” of the show, I suppose) to inflict harm on her and the house. Leti calls the Black ghosts by name: “Betsey! Lucy! Jasper! Anarcha! Rufus! Grover! Olivia! Please!” She reminds the ghosts of their empowerment, crying, “Help me! Help me cast him out!” She pleads, “Pleeeease! You are not dead yet! You can still fight!” As the ghosts emerge, Tic (inhabited by Hiram) is screaming, “Get the f— out of my house!” repeatedly. The background music swells with the refrain of a slow Black spiritual: “O Satan, we’re gonna tear your kingdom down.”

Leti and the 8 Black ghosts grab each other’s hands and chant a Creole spell (juxtaposed with the Christian spiritual) that will expel Hiram’s malevolent ghost. As the ghosts circle up with Leti to hold hands and chant the spell, the camera looks at each of them in turn, putting us in the position of Leti’s acknowledging each of them. The white ghost (and Tic) stand in the center of the circle, their fury drowned out by the Creole chanting and the spiritual.

The Black ghosts’ bloody wounds fade away; dismembered bodies that have been jumbled amongst them (a baby’s head on a grown man’s body, for instance) are re-pieced together; starved corpse-like figures regain muscle and glowing skin. Their individual personalities are expressed on their renewed faces. Their clothes, symbols of their roles in the Black community on the South side, are whole again, and clean.

Tic collapses, and Hiram’s ghost floats alone. He remains torn and cracked; he is not remade. The spiritual’s lyrics transition to the bridge: “The mothers gonna pray your kingdom down. You know what, you know what, you’ve been building your kingdom all in the house of God. But you know what, Satan, your kingdom is gonna come down. Not only that, but listen, listen, listen, listen, Satan, we’re gonna tear your kingdom down.” The white ghost roars. He no longer articulates words.

The Black ghosts don’t let go of each other or of Leti until they expel the cursing white ghost. So healed and themselves again, even in ghostly form, they, too, leave. Leti is left standing alone, her breath heaving, jaws clenched, drenched with water and sweat and looking skeletally thin. She stands like a boxer, with her hands at her sides.

I wondered if healing and expelling the ghosts–holding hands with the monstrous, with whom Leti has something in common (since she was also literally killed and brought back to life)–had depleted her. Perhaps it was expelling the white ghost that had left her so thin, leading me to wonder about the cost of resistance and reclamation. But Leti is also triumphant. She stood up to protect her home and family, she stood up for her home’s ghosts, and she succeeded in freeing the ghosts who wanted out. Maybe it is all of these–ghosts can be healed, other ghosts expelled; doing both can exhaust your body and breath, even while you succeed at spiritual and material reclamation. Maybe coming back to life was torment for her–but now Leti has learned to live with both the living and the dead. Her liminality and contradictions are essential to the writing and acting of Leti’s hauntedness and humanity.

[Note: In the next several episodes, Lovecraft Country engages with settler colonialism and the implications of disenfranchised Black communities in this reclamation, spiritual and physical. I’ll probably be writing about those as well, since they’re no less haunted and no less about leadership and love. Gaaaah I love Misha Green (who wrote the teleplay of Lovecraft Country and also wrote Underground, which also starred Jurnee Smollett). Jurnee Smollett in a Misha Green show? Yes, please.]

Anyway, we transition to the next scene, presumably a few days later. Leti is dressed up in a powder blue dress with a fitted bodice, flared skirt, and shiny curls and makeup. She is giving a newspaper journalist an interview and tour of the house, quietly humble in her speech, expert at posing for photos. The sunshine is golden on the warm wood floors, and the children of tenants run laughing through the hallway. But then the house’s elevator drops down, exposing the secret levels that still lie in the bones of the house; glowing runes for spells on the walls of the elevator shaft; and, at the bottom level, more dead bodies in a tunnel. 

No transformation is ever complete, I guess.  

Honestly, the gruesome visual effects in this episode did frighten me (especially because I believe in spirits and ghosts of all kinds); I am easily shaken by horror films. But I cherish the developing storyline and heroism of Leti. Though the show’s plot centers around her friend, Tic (the one who is inhabited by the white ghost in this episode), and his complicated inheritance of both white slaveholder/colonizer magic and Black legacies of freedom and enslavement; Leti is my hero in the series, and I suspect she is the favorite of many in the writers’ room. She is an activist and artist, a wanderer, and fights back when dismissed by her older siblings as stupid, shallow, flighty, or selfish (characterizations that are as true as they are incomplete). She saves the lives of the Black men repeatedly in each episode. She literally runs into the unknown in each episode. She is killed and brought back to life. And even in her friendship with Tic, a Black man, she is grounded enough to shake off his suggestion that she is mad, hallucinating, losing a grip on reality. (Honestly, Tic should know by now, in this version of 1950s Chicago, that reality is the fantastic and phantasmic.) Liminality–always being both/and of dualities–gives Leti strength and adaptability.

Drilling down, there are several reasons for loving Leti in this particular episode, and they relate to her modeling how to live with and speak with ghosts who have suffered state-sanctioned and societal violence–simultaneously with being victimized by state-sanctioned and community violence in the present. I am inspired by her open heart and mind to the supernatural, her engagement with the ghosts of Black victims as persons with names and loved ones. She searches for the identities of the ghosts and keeps these foremost in her interactions rather than falling back on a fear of the abject. The ghosts embody the histories that she cannot bear to look in the face–but she does anyway. And Leti has the clarity to recognize that she needs supernatural help from a Creole voodoo witch, too. In Leti I recognize a kind of Black women’s leadership that is distributed, spiritual and spirited, refusing to be flattened, and stretched thin by multiple parties’ desires, including her own. 

I also am moved by Leti’s hybrid spirituality. While the presence of magic and spiritual battles are not binary in the good/bad sense–just as ghosts are not good/bad–Leti wields Black magic and Christianity against white magic. Black Creole voodoo spells are the key to organizing ghosts who hold hands with Leti. She says. their. names. In this I sense a message of what it means to open up hospitable memory, and that such opening is not something that will be one-sided in spirit. There is a spiritual battle going on, but it’s not necessarily, or only, a Christian one. This poly-doctrine is historical, real, and often how we BIPOC communities live, dream, and draw meaning across timescales.

As Leti holds hands with the monstrous-who-are-not-monsters-but-maybe-they-are-a-little, the voodoo creates space for “hospitable memory” in which Leti presumes the subjectivity of the Black ghosts (a phrase I’ve read from Derrida, though I don’t know if he borrowed it from someone else). The colonizing white magicians (members of a patriarchal cult that seems like a Klan/Knights of Columbus/Masons kind of crowd) are expelled and blocked from entering the house in the future. This expulsion is incomplete, raising the question of what kind of justice ghosts can or and should expect, and what counts as transformation if the original house, with all its spells, still stands. (I am reminded here of Audre Lorde’s famous argument that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Can the tools of the colonized and enslaved reclaim the master’s house?)

There are so many layers in each episode of Lovecraft Country. I have enjoyed listening to the official HBO podcast hosted by writer/scholar Ashley C. Ford and Lovecraft Country writer Shannon Houston. I’ve found that they notice and interpret things that are different from my own thoughts, of course, and Shannon gives some context that helps me understand that many “messed up” parts of the show (primarily those related to sexuality and coloniality) were hotly debated in the writers’ room, were intentionally left to be complicated. Whew. What a project to be part of!