West Indies sugar plantations were particularly brutal places, where it was cheaper to work black people to death and then buy new slaves than it was to maintain slaves’ lives even in the meager and appalling way done in other contexts.
Rhode Island rum was made from the sweat and lifeblood of black men, women, and children, all being deliberately murdered, faster or slower, but no less certainly. Distillation can effect marvelous transformations indeed.
I am Providence, Lovecraft wrote.
What is Providence, then, but the gothic house, built on the bones of the Wampanoag, the Narragansett, and the Niantic people killed by European disease and European settlers?
So. Consider this fable, then. We can call it “The Horror Beneath Providence.”
This house — its occupants liked to speak and act as if it was as old as the bones of the Earth on which it rested, but this was only a charade. True, every surface had been lovingly distressed, genealogies carefully traced, distinctions painstakingly made between old money and new, old families and outsiders. But it was all only a show; nothing was truly old. Even the dust had been lovingly placed, particle by particle, to create the illusion of undisturbed stillness, stultifying tradition, utter respectability. In reality, nothing, not the dust, not the money, not the families, and certainly not the house, could claim a tenure of longer than a couple hundred years.
And no matter how much dust was laid down, how many rooms were constructed, how much furniture distressed, this house could never be older than that.
Into this house was born a child who loved it so much that for most of his life he rarely left it. And he believed even more completely and fervently than most of his generation in the illusion of age that his forebears had worked so steadily to cultivate. He felt himself older than his years would grant him and spent his happiest days rummaging in the very “oldest” cellars and basement, caressing the supposed antiquities he found there, studying the manuscript histories of this home, and working back through the plans and blueprints.
It was when he found the recipe used for dyeing the mortar holding the house’s bricks in place that the child, now a youth, quirked an eyebrow. For, from what he could read in the self-consciously antique script, the mortar in its natural state was the deep red of spilled blood.
He spent yet further afternoons in the cellars, spelunking in tunnels behind barred doors and chained gates. And during these expeditions, he began to hear sounds, faintly at first, the aural equivalent of a breeze so gentle that it cannot stir even a leaf. Just whispers. Not screams. Not yet.
As he wound his way deeper into the cellars, the sounds got louder. Nasty sounds. Cruel Sounds.
The youth stuffed his ears with cotton and pressed on.
But the cotton served only to keep the sounds inside his head, where they echoed and reverberated, and soon, all that was left in his head were the sounds, suffusing every squamous cell of this brain. And the sounds inhabited every thought he had, even the tears in his eyes, so he saw the world through their haze.
And that world became narrower and narrower, even while the youth believed in the expansiveness of his vision, thought he saw himself as an infinitesimal speck in a cold and infinite cosmos, even while he proclaimed himself lord of all he surveyed, and cast a contemptuous eye over all other models of humanity as weaker, lesser, cruder, worse.
They found him, eventually, the search parties. They were not looking for him in particular, but they found him nonetheless. Their peregrinations were the purposeful journeys of detectives re-examining cold cases, recognizing as murders deaths long dismissed as in the inevitable course of nature.
And they found the youth, now ossified into middle age. He was sitting on a throne built of human bone, his feet propped upon the dying. Blood ran down his face, out of his mouth, and onto his hands as he raved and gibbered, proclaiming himself the pinnacle of humanity and evolution, the society from which he sprang the acme of civilization.
Around him the flies buzzed and maggots crawled.
3. The New York Horror
“As for New York — there is no question but that its overwhelming Semitism has totally removed it from the American stream. Regarding its influence on literary and dramatic expression — it is not so much that the country is flooded with Jewish authors, as that Jewish publishers determine just which of our Aryan writers shall achieve print and position . . . Taste is insidiously moulded along non-Aryan lines — so that, no matter how intrinsically good the resulting body of literature may be, it is a special, rootless literature which does not represent us.”
I write and publish about Jews. Most of my protagonists, unless otherwise specified, are Ashkenazi Jews. Well, why should the goyim have all the fantastic, the speculative, the future imperfect? My editors have mostly been Jewish, too.
Are my sensibilities out of touch with those of true Americans?
I suppose so. Certainly John Rocker of the Cleveland Indians thought so when he told Sports Illustrated: “Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some twenty-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing . . . The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”
I used to live on the 7 line; I used to have purple hair. I don’t have AIDS, but I’ve known plenty of queers who do. And when I used to live in Philly I’d go entire days without hearing anybody speaking anything but English, and I found it depressing.
Whenever a politician starts rabbiting on about “real Americans,” I know that whatever they’re about to say is going to be completely antithetical to the values I was raised to hold dear.
I love New York City more than I can say, but more and more I wonder if the city I know and love, the city in which I grew up, the city I am a part of, even exists anymore. Inflation and gentrification — maybe that’s the real America.
“The population [of New York City]is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight.”
“Although he once said he loved New York and that henceforth it would be his ‘adopted state,’ I soon learned that he hated it and all its ‘alien hordes.’ When I protested that I too was one of them, he’d tell me that I ‘no longer belonged to those mongrels.’ ‘You are now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft!’”
Yes, yes, Lovecraft married a Jewish woman. I’m not surprised. I’m sure she wasn’t like all those other Jews. Even so, they had a very traditional Ashkenazi marriage, with Lovecraft, hopeless at earning a living, playing the gentleman scholar-writer, while Sonia did the dirty work of trade to keep them both solvent and fed.
So the brilliant princeling shouldn’t have to dirty his hands with anything but ink.