In the fall of 2020, Misha Green's television adaptation of the novel Lovecraft Country aired on HBO. The show is a treat in genre storytelling, pulling together threads of horror, weird fiction, sci-fi, and the gothic into a tale about a black and white family's fight over magic. The show and novel's main character is Atticus "Tic" Freeman, a Korean War veteran and descendant of a woman who was enslaved by the white, rich, and magic-possessing Braithwhite family. However, it is the black female characters in the show who provide the most interesting and illuminating perspective on the intersection between blackness and womanhood in 1950s America.

Before delving any further into the characters, we need to talk about bell hooks and what she calls the "oppositional gaze." hooks argues that white slave-owners would punish enslaved black people for looking, an attitude and stigma that has trickled through history into her own experiences.¹ She points out the danger of black men looking at white women, at the violence carried out for just a gaze. An oppositional gaze is a result and response to this stigma. "All attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming urge to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze,"¹ hooks writes.

So, what does this have to do with Lovecraft Country? Green's show and its female characters embrace this idea of an oppositional gaze and seek to rectify the erasure of black women in media through black female representation. "When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television," a time closely related to the setting of Lovecraft Country, "they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation."¹

In horror, a genre of storytelling most historically defined by its negation and (mis)representation of black people, Lovecraft Country uses its black female characters to subvert and combat the prevalence of white supremacist mass media. hooks argues that the construction of the oppositional gaze comes from a desire to resist media that devalues, objectifies, or dehumanizes black women's place in society, and reconstructs identities in resistance.¹ One of Lovecraft Country's black female filmmakers speaks about this issue of representation and characterization:

"We, as Black female artists, don’t have any different depth than anybody. It’s that we don’t get the opportunity to explore the depth of our instrument. How often are writers just writing stories for us to explore and play and be imaginative and curious?" - Jurnee Smollet ("Leti Lewis") Hollywood Reporter

Letitia "Leti" Lewis is a family friend and love interest of Tic. But to reduce her character to just that would be inaccurate. She's adventurous, a social activist, and a photographer. She is joyful, resourceful, and deeply caring towards her sister, Tic, the Freeman family, and her community. In episode three, "Holy Ghosts," she buys a large house in an all-white neighborhood in North Chicago, renting rooms out to black folks in an area where they would otherwise be unwelcome. When the neighbors (and disfigured ghosts in the home) begin terrorizing Leti, she searches for the truth about the trauma lingering in the house.

When Tic asks about her haunted house, she says, "Hell, I thought the world was one way and I found it isn't. And that terrifies me, but I can't live in fear, I won't. I gotta face this new world head-on and stake my claim in it." This line particularly illustrates her well-developed, nuanced characterization. Leti helps exorcise the spirit of the home's previous owner, Hiram Epstein, who used to kidnap and torture black people in the house. In a charged moment, Leti takes the hands of the other spirits and banishes Epstein's spirit from the home, finally bringing peace to the others. 

Leti is just one of many black female characters in this show that resist the mischaracterization or erasure of black women in film and television, especially in the horror genre. All of the characters are nuanced, driven, and reflective of the deeply complex nature of the human experience, of the black woman's experience.

Footnotes

1. hooks, bell. (1999). The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. In S. Thornham (Ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (pp. 307–320). New York University Press.

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