Black Canaan was rendered in Howard’s best length, novelette, and was published in Weird Tales in the month of his death. It is, in this reader’s view, the most savage tale he ever told, and takes us back to both his Scotch-Irish frontiersman roots and his Aunt Mary, who surely told him a similar story when he was but a boy. In Canaan, nobody gave orders to a white man—nobody. This was not the genteel South.
Black Canaan is quite obviously the American horror version of the Conan fantasy adventure Beyond the Black River, which will be reviewed in this survey, with demonic themes and sullen geography nearly identical. Black Canaan also comes off as Howard’s most racist tale, with the word niցցer used extensively, but always as spoken, never by the narrator. However, when one reads a story about former black slaves gathering in a swamp, around a voodoo conjurer near a body of backwoods water named Niցցer Head Creek, one cannot expect something that would be welcome in Oprah’s book club.
The hero is Kerby Buckner, who is down in New Orleans when an old black woman brings him cryptic news that there is “trouble on Tularoosa Creek” in the Black River swamp region, beyond Niցցer Head Creek, which is his homeland of Canaan, a mixed race backwoods area with the white town of Grimesville and a black village of Goshen.
The pace of this story is perfectly hectic, with Kirby never given a breath of physical or emotional rest between hearing the old woman’s warning and finally coming face-to-face with a horror worse than he could imagine.
Kirby Bucker strikes out to discover the mystery on the Tularoosa and is faced with one of the most convincing vixen enchantresses in fiction, whose father is a black separatist named Saul Stark, who came out from the Carolinas and has set up camp on an island in the swamp [which were precisely the types of haunt favored by fugitive slaves in slavery days].
The tale is too taut, and too simply plotted, to give away the substance of the last few chapters. Keeping Kelly the Conjure-Man in mind, the reader can well envision Saul Stark, who seems to be a fleshed out version of Kelly. The character at the center of this entire drama, a seductress who dances with a spinning skull, represents the crux of the story, and seems to be a composite of the washer woman Arbella, Howard’s Aunt Mary as a young woman, and of the white woman who tortured her, with a dash of some “insolent” colored girl who at some point in his life must have turned his head.
Below are some passages from their interactions:
“Her perfect English was disquieting to me…”
“She indicated the black depths with a swaying motion of her supple body rather than a gesture of the hand, smiling audaciously as she did so.”
“Every gesture, every motion she made set her above the ordinary run of women; her beauty was untamed and lawless, meant to madden rather than soothe…”
“Again a rich musical laughter… ‘Why did you not go into the ju-ju cabin, Kirby Buckner?’ she mocked, lowering her arms and moving insolently out from the tree.”
The most fascinating assertion made by the black villain in this story was his observation that once whites moved into an area they could never be put upon to move! As a stay behind white man in a world of aggressive blacks and rabbit-footed house-hopping whites, this brought a sardonic bolt of laughter from me as I read. This illuminates a truth that Howard points up in many of his fantasies dealing with ancient lands and lost cities, that once a people have grown used to the ease of civilization, they are easily disposed of. In the end the evil on Tularoosa creek has brought suffering predominantly to the blacks of Goshen, rather than to the whites of Grimesville, as one of their own does harm to them in the name of hating the whites and gaining retribution for past sins, a lesson that, if one looks to the news, 70 years after Howard’s death, has yet to be learned from.
