Finding Black Girlhood in Misha Green's Lovecraft Country
This post is from a recent conference presentation on finding liberation in Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country. After presenting this paper, I learned through Amber J. Philips, “Queer Femme Auntie from the Midwest,” IG that the show darkened a light-skinned actress’ skin for a extra “role” on the show. In this role, she depicted a younger version of a character in a wedding photo. A representative from HBO merely responded, “This should not have happened, and we are taking steps to ensure this doesn’t occur again in the future.” But it did happen. Please take the time to listen to Philips’ discussion surrounding colorism, “Stop Playing in Our Face About Colorism” Parts I & II. Because as Philips states, “Even a show about the horrors of racism in America didn’t stop them from being horrific.”
Please note this post includes spoilers.
I never read the book, so this series was nothing I could ever imagined. Lovecraft Country is a peculiar show, one with monsters, white wizard cults, and time-travel. It is a place where when you run from monsters, you actually run not tripping, not hollering, but running.The very first episode begins with the show’s protagonist, Atticus, arriving home to Chicago bidding good-riddance to the Jim Crow South. Here, we meet one of the youngest characters in the show, a Black girl named Diana Freeman, or Dee as most folks call her.
I will first add that Dee is my favorite character. Perhaps her innocence and youth protected her from my shouts at the tv screen, but she was one of the few characters with two OUNCES of sense. She is your typical Black girl—disgusted overhearing her parents doing the do in the bedroom, rolling her eyes and laughing at their corny jokes, and hanging out with friends. We encounter her first through her art. Dee is a creator. As her father operates Lovecraft’s version of the Green Book, a guidebook that assist Black travelers telling them the safest places to journey without worry, Dee creates a travel comic that he eagerly awaits. In this first episode, she debuts her new series The Intergalactic Adventures of Orithyia Blue, an Afro-futurist character who is created in the likeness of her mother, Hippolyta.
But things shift for this Black girl soon into the show. Her father is now dead, murdered, Hippolyta is told by a sheriff during his last guide trip. Dee grieves in her own way, but still finds joy and laughter, but more tragedies come. After her friend Bobo travels south to Mississippi, he is murder in a horrific way, an unimaginable way. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, holds an open-casket funeral at a church in South Side Chicago proclaiming, “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” Bobo was his nickname; but we know him as Emmett Till. While Dee mourns the murder of her friend, her mother has yet to return from a recent trip, trying to get answers about her husband’s death. Despite being surrounded by other family members and friends, they are too concerned with their own problems to notice Dee’s absence.
As she wanders around the city, two officers confront Dee about her mother’s whereabouts. They ask her about her art, about what she knows about magic. In this confrontation, they place a hex, or a curse on Dee. And the curse placed upon her manifests itself into two versions of the character—Topsy—from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—two distorted, inaccurate representations of Black girls from the white gaze and they are aiming to get her.
From this episode I reflect on how do we see Black girls? What does it mean to forget Black girls? And what does it mean for Black girlhood to be interrupted by well the list goes on: the hypersexualization of Black girls, premature death, encountering racism at a young age, abuse, arrest, etc. I think about the young Black girl on the news a few months ago. She was nine years old, placed in handcuffs, crying for her father, and pepper sprayed by the police. The officer says in recorded footage, “You’re acting like a child.” To which she responds, “I am a child.” Going back in time, I think about daughters of civil rights leader who were murdered and how they either witnessed their parent’s death or had to grapple with it. How does this shift their girlhoods? I think about the four little girls—Addie Mae, Carole, Carol Denise, and Cynthia—who girlhoods ended at the 16th Street Baptist Church on a Sunday morning and all the boy and girls who lived, but who childhoods were never the same. You think about the Black girls who were enslaved, children of sharecroppers, Black girls in Tulsa, Wilmington, and in other places marked by Black massacres. You think about the Black girls who had to learn to survive and live with tragedy and death.
I think about moments where we forget Black girls. The girls who go missing with no Amber alerts, the girls who are in harm’s way, the girls who do not see themselves anywhere and in the case of Dee, the girl who finds nothing to laugh about anymore. For Dee, it is a world where she can neither name the evil nor show it to another person. She is the only one who sees it. It is a world where when she asks for help her needs are dismissed. She becomes forgotten, learning of the magic and dangers of the world without someone to protect, shield, and defend her.
But Dee fights for herself. She confronts the officer who cursed her, she corrects them informing the officers of her mother’s rightful name origins, “It’s Greek asshole” and return his curse by spitting right back on him. And she leads the evil twins back to her house, securing all entries, leaving only one open, knowing that a battle has to take place. Because of the hex, she can’t name the evil, so she draws it. And as the evil enters, she grabs a pipe and fights. I told y’all she was the only one with sense. But you wished that she didn’t have to. You want to protect her and other Black girls, go back into the past and protect yourself. You wished that everyone else around her didn’t failed her, and you wished and wished. But that isn’t her or ours’ reality.
Ultimately, she loses, not because she didn’t fight, but because an adult intervenes, not knowing, and holding her down. Her white dress, which I saw symbolized her innocence, becomes stained red with blood and she loses her arm. I was reminded of Octavia Butler’s opening line in Kindred, “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” I was struck that Dee also loses her left arm. What does it mean for a black girl who draws to lose her arm? Despite all the spoilers, I will not spoil what happens to Dee in the end of season. But I do think about what it means for me to watch a Black girl fight for herself and to reclaim her narrative despite a curse being placed on her life, a curse that should have left her dead. I saw a Black girl doing what she had to do—and that is to confront the curse, fight the evil, and try to survive.
Christina