Reflective Futurology: Exploring Black Time Travel and Intergenerational Healing in Lovecraft Country and Beyond

Abstract

Reflective Futurology: Exploring Black Time Travel and Intergenerational Healing in Lovecraft Country and Beyond Loren S. Cahill (bio) Ten million viewers mourned the recent loss of the HBO series Lovecraft Country, a show that covered many themes amplified through the writers’ juxtaposition of science fiction with the violence of Jim/Jane Crow America. In Episode Nine, “Rewind 1921,” four characters from the show tackle feats of Black Time Travel and intergenerational healing. Those characters are Atticus (“Tic”), the show’s protagonist; Montrose, his father; Lettie, who is pregnant with Atticus’s child; and Hippolyta, Atticus’s aunt. This collective is tasked with traveling back in time to find the Book of Names during the massacre of three hundred Black citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma, commonly known as the Tulsa Massacre. This racial cleansing event resulted in an entire thirty-five square block radius being burned off of the map. Five hotels, thirty-one restaurants, eight doctors’ offices, two movie theaters, four drug stores, twenty-four grocery stores, and over one thousand homes were reduced to ash (Matthews). Over the course of just a few hours, each character not only witnesses destruction but also learns lessons from ancestors, parents, and children that have unconsciously shaped them in the present. In this essay, I will highlight how each of these four Lovecraft Country characters vicariously witnesses this tragedy and intimately learns about collectively-held trauma. Atticus learns more context for the abuse Montrose endured at the hands of his father because of his queerness. Montrose observes as an adult how he has been unable to break his father’s cycle of abuse and alcoholism. Leti has a powerful conversation with Nana Hattie, Dora’s (Atticus’s Mother) grandmother about the tasks required of Black matriarchs. While Hippolyta stays in the present, she uses cyborg technology to open a time portal; in a moment when Hippolyta feels unable to sustain the point of entry, she thinks of her daughter, Diana, and is able to accomplish her task by transforming into Orithyia Blue, a superhero representation of Diana’s wildest dreams for her mother. Each person is uniquely making connections to those who came before and from them and are forever changed through the process. I use these examples from Lovecraft Country to scaffold a critical need for Black people to develop our own mechanisms of time travel (Phillips and Ayewa) and also our relationships with ancestors and future generations. I call this practice Reflective Futurology, a method and epistemological framework that seeks to unravel the processes by which communal memory is seeded and collective memory is spread across time and space, reaching backward and forward in time simultaneously to include everything that has happened and [End Page 59] will happen (Phillips and Matti). I conclude the article by listing practices that will allow readers to trace their family lines, learn more about their history, set intentions, and begin their own archival practice for their future ancestors. Such praxis includes intention setting, ancestry tracing, oral history, and creative nonfiction. Reflective Futurology, through both the examples of cinema and in our lives, allows us to learn about and break cycles and creates the opportunity to chart new paths. Historical Context In May 1921, Greenwood was so promising, so vibrant that it became home to what was known as America’s Black Wall Street. But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence sending hundreds of dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees, though for decades what happened in Greenwood was willfully buried in normative educational and national history. The troubles began when on May 30 a situation involving two teenagers in an elevator in the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa morphed into an accusation of sexual assault (Parrish 2). Accounts vary as to what happened between Dick Rowland, 19, a young Black shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. One common theory suggests Mr. Rowland tripped and grabbed onto the arm of Ms. Page while trying to catch his fall. She screamed, and he ran away, according to the commission report (Goble 57). The next day, Mr. Rowland was arrested and jailed in...