Spotlight On: The Devil in America

CONTENT WARNING: The short story being discussed in the following post contains material that some readers may find upsetting. Themes within the story include racially based violence

“The Devil in America” by Kai Ashante Wilson is told in pieces, the story itself interspersed with segments that allude to a looming tragedy, creating an atmosphere of bleak uncertainty from the tale’s beginning, despite the comfort that readers might find in the warm characterization of the story’s protagonists.

In “The Devil in America,” we meet the Mack family, as seen through the eyes of Easter Mack, a twelve-year-old girl living in a post-Civil War era South. Before we meet the Macks, however, we encounter the present-day reflections of (presumably) Wilson’s father, who immediately makes it clear that though the story we are reading may be fiction, very real are the countless instances of racial violence and injustice that have been dealt against Black people in this country for decades. “Dad” recounts learning about the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 before going on to name other victims of tragic murders that have made headlines over the course of his life. A personal friend who had died under suspicious circumstances in Vietnam; Arthur McDuffie, who had been beaten to death by police officers in 1979; “Amadou Diallo, 1999; Sean Bell, 2006… Trayvon, [2012]. Every year it’s one we hear about and God knows how many just the family mourns,” he says.

Wilson has explained that the press coverage following Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, specifically an interview with his mother, Sybrina Fulton, was “the precipitating spark of ‘The Devil in America,’” the tragedy being only “the latest iteration of a very old pattern: someone in America, black and innocent, killed by someone else, white and manifestly guilty of unjustified murder.” Of this racially based juridical injustice, Wilson explains that he felt as though he were “perceiving some non-Euclidian distortion of the American time/space continuum, or the countrywide effects of an ancient curse.” This idea, that there exists a deep evil that permeates from the bloody past through the tumultuous present, and on into America’s uncertain future is readily apparent in “The Devil in America,” and serves as the antagonizing force which drives the story forward.

Though we as readers find ourselves easily enamored by the main protagonist, Easter, and her loving description of her family, we cannot help but fear for them, to be wary for their futures. We catch glimpses of a looming tragedy when we meet Pa, who recounts to Ma’am what happened on his most recent trip to Greenville. The town had been badly burned, and Miss Anne, a white woman, has made claims that not only did she see a black man running from the scene, but that he and a group of black men had violated her. This (often unsubstantiated) claim, that a white woman had been assaulted by a black man, has many times been the justification behind unspeakable acts of violence throughout American history.

In fact, the fictional Rosetree, where Wilson’s tale takes place, is likely modeled after the very real Rosewood, Florida, where in 1923, an estimated 27 to 150 were killed in a race riot that had been sparked by the claims of Fannie Taylor, a white woman who said she had been beaten by a black man. Fannie Taylor, like Miss Anne, lived in a predominantly white neighboring town. And while there was no concrete evidence to suggest that her assailant had fled to Rosewood from Sumner where she lived, that did little to stop the brutality of white mobbists, who proceeded to violently murder many of the citizens of predominantly black Rosewood, eventually burning the town to the ground.

Though it is clear that the violent aggressors in “The Devil in America” are the hate-fueled racists from the town over who have been set into motion by Esther’s unwitting deal with the Devil years prior, there seem to be other, subtler antagonists at play. In a column taken from an essay entitled “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction,” Nisi Shawl argues that by including portions of text from the apparently nonexistent White Devils/Black Devils, Wilson blames “the uprooting effects of the Transatlantic slave trade and the dehumanizing racism based on it,” for the tragedy, which has, in this particular case “distorted the very nature of its captives’ deity, making of the amalgamation of ambivalent West African trickster figures a wholly malevolent entity, gorging on their suffering.” We cannot, explains Shawl, blame Easter for mistakenly making a deal with the Devil, or even Hazel Mae for explaining to her daughter what little she can of the “old Africa magic.” Instead, the fault lies with those who stole precious bodies from their homelands, distancing them from any cultural understanding they might have of the magic they possess.

Next week, we will look at a few short stories written by Kate Chopin. You might be familiar with Chopin’s second novel, The Awakening, which was less than well received in her time, but has been the subject of more recent literary revival, and is now one of her more famous works. Many of Chopin’s short stories were published in reputable magazines and were quite popular due to their emphasis on social commentary and their often unforeseen endings.

The first of Chopin’s stories we will be discussing, Desiree’s Baby, is a harrowing tale about a woman, Desiree, who was found in the middle of the road as a baby in a pre-Civil War era South, and her titular child. You can read “Desiree’s Baby” in our collection within the anthology In the Shadow of Edgar Allen Poe: Classic Tales of Horror, 1816-1914

Second, we will be reading “Ma’ame Pelagie,” a story about a family that has fallen to ruin, and a matriarch who refuses to relinquish her memories of their past splendor. You can read “Ma’ame Pelagie” within American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps