This is the fourth column in a series by Nicholas Whittaker on black horror. Read the first three here.
The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, believed that chimpanzees had a special predilection for black women. In his Notes on the State of Virginia—a paean to the natural and social perfection of the region—he writes that this preference is uniform: without fail, male apes will find black women more sexually desirous than they will their own species. He provides no evidence for this claim, of course. It emerges in a series of rhetorical questions, unanswerable in their obviousness, on the aesthetic and biological inferiority of the Negro.
Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-ootan [chimpanzee] for the black women over those of his own species.
The implication is clear. The “other race” is not human, not really. They—we—are stunted, brutish things, a sort of superior animal—the apple of every ape’s eye.
The ape and the Negro have long shared a lascivious relationship in the Western imagination. In Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, the scholar Claire Jean Kim demonstrates that when European colonists encountered both apes and Africans in the 1500s, they supposed them to be cousins: Africans were “apes who were tailless and walked upright.” The purported illumination brought by the Enlightenment, and the subsequent advent of modern biology and anthropology, did not change many minds. Quite the opposite: Darwinism, phrenology and other burgeoning fields worked overtime to prove what Jefferson had only hypothesized. Kim notes that 1906 saw the installation of a Congolese man in the Bronx Zoo. This man, named Ota Benga, was labeled as an “African pygmy.” The New York Times playfully asked: “Is it a man or a monkey?”
Twenty-seven years later, a man on a stage in New York City promised to show his audiences “the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew. But now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong: the eighth wonder of the world.” The curtain rises: and an ape, as tall as a building, bound in shackles, stands there, silent, eyes wide.
This, of course, is a scene from King Kong, one of the most popular and beloved horror films of all time. Kong is a giant ape worshipped as a god by dark natives on a forgotten island in the Indian Ocean. American expeditionists seek to capture him, to display him in New York as a trophy. They use a white woman as bait. He is unable to resist her.
It takes an impressive degree of obstinacy to refuse to see the racial implications of this story. Kong is simply the 1930s iteration of the fantasy of the Negro ape: a “missing link” between man and animal, indelibly linked to the mythos of Africa. That figure, it seems, will never leave us. Kong has starred in ten films, three of which were released in the past ten years. But while he is the most famous monstrous ape, he is not alone.
King Kong was a cash grab. It took advantage of a hungry market after another blockbuster film titled Ingagi was released in 1930. Ingagi employed a common horror conceit: it purported to be a documentary. The first frame of the film is a drawing of three heavy-browed Negroes, huddled over a dim fire. In the trees above them, a jaguar hunches over, seemingly about to pounce. Superimposed over the drawing is the following text: “Portraying the thrilling adventures of Sir Hubert Winstead, F.A.S., during his two years’ expedition into the hitherto unknown regions of Darkest…” These words fade, and one final name replaces them, in shimmering, daunting script: “AFRICA.” As that introduction suggests, the plot of Ingagi is as ingeniously simple as it is racist. Sir Winstead discovers that an African tribe is offering its virgin women to gorillas as mates. By the film’s conclusion, he bravely rescues one of the women and slays her would-be groom.
Ingagi lacks the Hollywood sheen of King Kong, and its documentarian conceit restricts its narrative force. Yet it exploded, leading to the greenlighting of the Great Ape. But Ingagi helped another film get made too: a more humble affair, released eight years later, in the midst of a relative drought of horror movies. It even lent its name to this film: Son of Ingagi (1940).
Son of Ingagi is not merely about blackness. It is also—unlike King Kong and Ingagi—black. Its cast is entirely black. It takes place wholly within a black American middle-class community: the bankers, lawyers, doctors, policemen, lovers and friends are all black. And it is written by Andy, of Amos ’n’ Andy fame: Spencer Williams, a brilliant, idiosyncratic black actor, writer and director.
But the film’s blackness is not merely a matter of demographics. Son of Ingagi is less a reiteration of the Negro ape narrative than an intervention in it: a clever subversion of an anti-black mythology, a discordant counter-refrain. In answer to the pivotal question “Is it—are we, am I—man or monkey?” Son of Ingagi asks, Why does it matter?
●
Son of Ingagi takes place in an unnamed black community: imagine if Tulsa’s Greenwood District had survived into the 1940s, rather than be decimated by a white-supremacist massacre in 1921. A young, loving black couple has just been married. Their friends have thrown them a party to celebrate. The town’s lawyer and policeman—both black—look on in pleasure. All is well.
Yet one figure remains outside this magic circle, this black middle-class utopia: Dr. Helen Jackson. Jackson is a brilliant doctor and chemist, yet she is despised by the broader community. She seems to hate them too. She lives alone in a large house and is rumored to have a stash of gold somewhere in the manor—gold, it is also rumored, from one of her many visits to Africa.
This fortune is not all Jackson has brought from the Dark Continent. We soon learn that Jackson is not, in fact, alone. She shares her home with N’Gina: the titular “Son of Ingagi.” N’Gina is huge and lumbering, covered in hair, incapable of speech, savagely emotional. And yet Jackson has dressed him in a tunic and pants, and calls him by name; he recognizes her, and obeys her commands, and tries to communicate with her. Dr. Jackson, we realize, is no heartless loner. She is tender with N’Gina. She bandages his wounds, and he roams the house unfettered; his bedroom is a cell in the basement that she never seems to lock. They sit together as she works on her chemical experiments; he fiddles with her tools and tries to hug her, as she laughingly smacks his hands away.
N’Gina, it seems, is more like a child than anything. (Recall the frequent comparisons made between children and animals we deem “intelligent.”) N’Gina wants companionship and care, entertainment and purpose. He thinks critically. He expresses himself. He has a friend. Indeed, he does not merely seem like a child; he appears, for all the world, like Jackson’s child.
That is why it is so heart-wrenching and unsettling when he kills her. It is not on purpose. He drinks a vial on Jackson’s table, which seems to cause him great pain. Like a wounded animal, he finds Jackson and corners her; it seems to me as though he wants her to do something, but he doesn’t know what. He does not know where this pain is coming from; maybe he even thinks she is its cause. Jackson backs away from him slowly. We cut to her eyes, widened in terror. She screams. After a brief cut away from the action, we return. N’Gina now stands alone, and Jackson lies dead.
One wishes so fervently to know what occurred in that break. Did her heart give out? Did N’Gina strangle her, or bash her head in? We never learn; the only witness doesn’t speak our language.
Jackson’s death occurs only halfway through the film. We learn—the same moment they do—that the newly married Lindsays are the beneficiaries of Jackson’s will. They have been given the house and all its contents. So they move in. And the hauntings begin. From his dark, lonely cellar, N’Gina sallies out at night. He raids the fridge. Perhaps he does not understand death, and seeks his companion too. The Lindsays suspect they are being robbed, and a policeman, played by Spencer Williams himself, stays the night. N’Gina eludes them all.
One night, Jackson’s brother arrives, hunting for his sister’s gold. He runs into N’Gina, and shoots him repeatedly. Though his blood paints the floor, the monster will not die, and he staggers upstairs. Perhaps he is looking for Jackson. Instead, he finds Eleanor. And she finds him, too; horrified by the sight of this ravaged thing, she faints into his arms. He tenderly carries her back to his lair and lays her in his bed. When she awakes, he is sitting beside her, offering her bandages. He wishes to be bandaged up, like he has been before. He wants help. Instead, she screams. Her husband and the policeman find them just as N’Gina has accidentally started a fire. They lock him in his cell—which, again, had never been locked before. They escape, and he dies, alone and hurting and confused.
●
There is no way to know for sure if Spencer Williams had seen Ingagi. His film’s title suggests that he had; but it is equally likely that the name was studio-mandated. This is common in the world of low-budget cinema, especially horror; brands, character names and iconographies are often deployed to drum up audience interest, even if the films possess no narrative connection to their predecessors. Indeed, Williams based Son of Ingagi on his own short story, which was called simply “House of Horror.” But whether or not Son of Ingagi is in fact the artistic offspring of Ingagi, it clearly taps into the same wellspring of anti-black mythology.
“Ingagi” is a made-up word, purportedly the word for “gorilla” in the tongue of the earlier film’s African tribe. While that film’s hero does save one black belle from the beasts, others are not so lucky. At one point, we even meet one gorilla’s harem, a contingent of mute, shuffling women. One of them holds a child. The film tells us that it is “a strange-looking child. seemingly more ape than human.” We barely get a glimpse of it; then it disappears from the film.
It is not difficult to imagine N’Gina as that child, now fully grown. Unlike Kong and the Ingagi, N’Gina does not look like any mere ape. He is an uncanny chimera, some unholy mix of human and Ingagi, perhaps the fruits of their union. N’Gina, like the child of Ingagi, seems like the proof Thomas Jefferson sought: evidence of the biological kinship between Negro and ape.
What makes a monster, if not aberrance? By most accounts, monsters are liminal creatures: biological, physical or psychological impossibilities that combine or warp the categories we use to make sense of the world. In blurring the lines separating those categories, the monster imperils them. The ghost and the zombie combine life and death into one profane entity, neither/both living and/or dead; the doppelgänger fuses Self and Other; the demon, the material and the abstract. And creatures like N’Gina—likewise werewolves and vampires and the Creature from the Black Lagoon—blur the line between human and animal.
Why do such alchemical wonders horrify us so? In this column, I have tried to define horror as not so much fear but the experience of genuine unknowability. In horror, our ways of experiencing the world become precarious. The figure of the monster exemplifies this. Zombies, after all, are not horrifying merely because they may devour us, but because their very existence challenges our comprehension of the difference between life and death. They throw into disarray our neat taxonomy of the world—and ourselves, as part of it—as animate or inanimate, living or dead. For if the zombie is neither/both, it raises a terrible question: What, then, are we?
Ingagi’s white audience, however, had an escape hatch from this question. (It is worth noting that the film was not originally intended as a horror film.) Ingagi’s offspring did not, in fact, implicate them. It was not a hybrid between human and animal, not really; but rather a hybrid between Negro and animal. And what is a Negro, if not a beast? The film spends considerable energy emphasizing the primitivism of the African tribe, blending them into the landscape of lions and baobabs. Such efforts likely only served to punctuate the racist mythology the audiences were ready and willing to bring to the theater, going back to America’s founding. So when the child arrived on screen, it might not have appeared monstrous at all: perhaps it was more of a biological curiosity than an aberration, like a mule or a Labradoodle.
The same is likely true for N’Gina; viewed from the right angle (one backlit by anti-blackness), he is practically the Lindsays’ in-law. But they don’t seem to see it that way. They shriek, bellow and faint at his visage; they murder him without hesitation. He horrifies them. And he horrifies me. Why?
A racist viewer would buy into the trope of the Negro Ape without so much as batting an eye. But what if one resists that way of looking? What if one refuses to accept the ideological prerequisite that paints blackness as animality?
Son of Ingagi does not take place on the African savanna. N’Gina’s “victims” are not loinclothed brutes. We watch the Lindsays’ wedding, in a church, to the sound of bells. Their friends throw them a gentle party; a local Negro lawyer calls on them in their new home to discuss the intricacies of Jackson’s will. Even Jackson is humanized. We eventually learn her misanthropy is a guise; she anonymously funds the community’s orphanage, and spends her spare time, and considerable intellect, whipping up miraculous curatives. The primary black response to monsterization has always been an insistence on our humanity.
And yet—like the insistent, never-truly-banished specter of Jefferson’s hypothesis—N’Gina haunts these would-be humans. The horror of Son of Ingagi lies in the possibility that white supremacy is right, that the border between the Negro and the nonhuman is by no means secure, that we are not what we insist we are, that we don’t deserve the dignity and recognition we have fought to achieve. N’Gina is the fantasy of a cousin from hell, dragging us screaming back into ugly and familiar depths of degradation. He is the flight of blackness from humanity, our being streaming out of our clenched fists.
●
So what, in the end, is Son of Ingagi up to? From what I have said so far, the film seems almost to mock the viewer in its determination to dehumanize the Negro, to “prove” anti-black mythology right. Why? Out of sheer cruelty?
Not quite. N’Gina is unlike his forebears in another sense. He is the unabashed victim of the film: his suffering is undeniable, and obviously evil. It is evil because it is the product of the disregard of others. He is immediately identified as a threat; he is hunted, shot and burned alive—and not because of anything he’s done, but only because of what they think he might do. It is only thanks to the film camera, capable of finding N’Gina in his moments of lonely vulnerability, that the audience can see past the image of the Devil-Ape, the Dangerous Negro, that encrusts him. His living companions are not so generous.
The ascription of animality has always been an excuse for brutal violence—from the relentless murder of livestock and garden “pests” to the stamping out of endangered species. It’s no surprise, then, that as a ruthless refusal of the animalization of blackness, we resort to defending black humanity. But such declarations so often take the following structure: “I am human; that means that I am not an animal, or a monster; and that is why you must treat me with kindness and respect.” The unspoken premise of the Negro Ape—that animality is an ethical carte blanche—is not rejected; it is what it rests on.
Confronted by the horror N’Gina evokes, we have a choice. We can flee the devastating implication he offers: the precarity of humanity, our unholy connection to the inhuman. We can insist upon our separation from what we are not. Or we can reject that separation itself. We can see N’Gina not as human, but as worthy of care, simply because he suffers and desires, even if he defies the borders used to taxonomize the living world.
Or we can choose to rest easy in our superiority, waving proofs of lineage to escape the still-wet killing floor.
This is the fourth column in a series by Nicholas Whittaker on black horror. Read the first three here.
The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, believed that chimpanzees had a special predilection for black women. In his Notes on the State of Virginia—a paean to the natural and social perfection of the region—he writes that this preference is uniform: without fail, male apes will find black women more sexually desirous than they will their own species. He provides no evidence for this claim, of course. It emerges in a series of rhetorical questions, unanswerable in their obviousness, on the aesthetic and biological inferiority of the Negro.
The implication is clear. The “other race” is not human, not really. They—we—are stunted, brutish things, a sort of superior animal—the apple of every ape’s eye.
The ape and the Negro have long shared a lascivious relationship in the Western imagination. In Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, the scholar Claire Jean Kim demonstrates that when European colonists encountered both apes and Africans in the 1500s, they supposed them to be cousins: Africans were “apes who were tailless and walked upright.” The purported illumination brought by the Enlightenment, and the subsequent advent of modern biology and anthropology, did not change many minds. Quite the opposite: Darwinism, phrenology and other burgeoning fields worked overtime to prove what Jefferson had only hypothesized. Kim notes that 1906 saw the installation of a Congolese man in the Bronx Zoo. This man, named Ota Benga, was labeled as an “African pygmy.” The New York Times playfully asked: “Is it a man or a monkey?”
Twenty-seven years later, a man on a stage in New York City promised to show his audiences “the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew. But now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong: the eighth wonder of the world.” The curtain rises: and an ape, as tall as a building, bound in shackles, stands there, silent, eyes wide.
This, of course, is a scene from King Kong, one of the most popular and beloved horror films of all time. Kong is a giant ape worshipped as a god by dark natives on a forgotten island in the Indian Ocean. American expeditionists seek to capture him, to display him in New York as a trophy. They use a white woman as bait. He is unable to resist her.
It takes an impressive degree of obstinacy to refuse to see the racial implications of this story. Kong is simply the 1930s iteration of the fantasy of the Negro ape: a “missing link” between man and animal, indelibly linked to the mythos of Africa. That figure, it seems, will never leave us. Kong has starred in ten films, three of which were released in the past ten years. But while he is the most famous monstrous ape, he is not alone.
King Kong was a cash grab. It took advantage of a hungry market after another blockbuster film titled Ingagi was released in 1930. Ingagi employed a common horror conceit: it purported to be a documentary. The first frame of the film is a drawing of three heavy-browed Negroes, huddled over a dim fire. In the trees above them, a jaguar hunches over, seemingly about to pounce. Superimposed over the drawing is the following text: “Portraying the thrilling adventures of Sir Hubert Winstead, F.A.S., during his two years’ expedition into the hitherto unknown regions of Darkest…” These words fade, and one final name replaces them, in shimmering, daunting script: “AFRICA.” As that introduction suggests, the plot of Ingagi is as ingeniously simple as it is racist. Sir Winstead discovers that an African tribe is offering its virgin women to gorillas as mates. By the film’s conclusion, he bravely rescues one of the women and slays her would-be groom.
Ingagi lacks the Hollywood sheen of King Kong, and its documentarian conceit restricts its narrative force. Yet it exploded, leading to the greenlighting of the Great Ape. But Ingagi helped another film get made too: a more humble affair, released eight years later, in the midst of a relative drought of horror movies. It even lent its name to this film: Son of Ingagi (1940).
Son of Ingagi is not merely about blackness. It is also—unlike King Kong and Ingagi—black. Its cast is entirely black. It takes place wholly within a black American middle-class community: the bankers, lawyers, doctors, policemen, lovers and friends are all black. And it is written by Andy, of Amos ’n’ Andy fame: Spencer Williams, a brilliant, idiosyncratic black actor, writer and director.
But the film’s blackness is not merely a matter of demographics. Son of Ingagi is less a reiteration of the Negro ape narrative than an intervention in it: a clever subversion of an anti-black mythology, a discordant counter-refrain. In answer to the pivotal question “Is it—are we, am I—man or monkey?” Son of Ingagi asks, Why does it matter?
●
Son of Ingagi takes place in an unnamed black community: imagine if Tulsa’s Greenwood District had survived into the 1940s, rather than be decimated by a white-supremacist massacre in 1921. A young, loving black couple has just been married. Their friends have thrown them a party to celebrate. The town’s lawyer and policeman—both black—look on in pleasure. All is well.
Yet one figure remains outside this magic circle, this black middle-class utopia: Dr. Helen Jackson. Jackson is a brilliant doctor and chemist, yet she is despised by the broader community. She seems to hate them too. She lives alone in a large house and is rumored to have a stash of gold somewhere in the manor—gold, it is also rumored, from one of her many visits to Africa.
This fortune is not all Jackson has brought from the Dark Continent. We soon learn that Jackson is not, in fact, alone. She shares her home with N’Gina: the titular “Son of Ingagi.” N’Gina is huge and lumbering, covered in hair, incapable of speech, savagely emotional. And yet Jackson has dressed him in a tunic and pants, and calls him by name; he recognizes her, and obeys her commands, and tries to communicate with her. Dr. Jackson, we realize, is no heartless loner. She is tender with N’Gina. She bandages his wounds, and he roams the house unfettered; his bedroom is a cell in the basement that she never seems to lock. They sit together as she works on her chemical experiments; he fiddles with her tools and tries to hug her, as she laughingly smacks his hands away.
N’Gina, it seems, is more like a child than anything. (Recall the frequent comparisons made between children and animals we deem “intelligent.”) N’Gina wants companionship and care, entertainment and purpose. He thinks critically. He expresses himself. He has a friend. Indeed, he does not merely seem like a child; he appears, for all the world, like Jackson’s child.
That is why it is so heart-wrenching and unsettling when he kills her. It is not on purpose. He drinks a vial on Jackson’s table, which seems to cause him great pain. Like a wounded animal, he finds Jackson and corners her; it seems to me as though he wants her to do something, but he doesn’t know what. He does not know where this pain is coming from; maybe he even thinks she is its cause. Jackson backs away from him slowly. We cut to her eyes, widened in terror. She screams. After a brief cut away from the action, we return. N’Gina now stands alone, and Jackson lies dead.
One wishes so fervently to know what occurred in that break. Did her heart give out? Did N’Gina strangle her, or bash her head in? We never learn; the only witness doesn’t speak our language.
Jackson’s death occurs only halfway through the film. We learn—the same moment they do—that the newly married Lindsays are the beneficiaries of Jackson’s will. They have been given the house and all its contents. So they move in. And the hauntings begin. From his dark, lonely cellar, N’Gina sallies out at night. He raids the fridge. Perhaps he does not understand death, and seeks his companion too. The Lindsays suspect they are being robbed, and a policeman, played by Spencer Williams himself, stays the night. N’Gina eludes them all.
One night, Jackson’s brother arrives, hunting for his sister’s gold. He runs into N’Gina, and shoots him repeatedly. Though his blood paints the floor, the monster will not die, and he staggers upstairs. Perhaps he is looking for Jackson. Instead, he finds Eleanor. And she finds him, too; horrified by the sight of this ravaged thing, she faints into his arms. He tenderly carries her back to his lair and lays her in his bed. When she awakes, he is sitting beside her, offering her bandages. He wishes to be bandaged up, like he has been before. He wants help. Instead, she screams. Her husband and the policeman find them just as N’Gina has accidentally started a fire. They lock him in his cell—which, again, had never been locked before. They escape, and he dies, alone and hurting and confused.
●
There is no way to know for sure if Spencer Williams had seen Ingagi. His film’s title suggests that he had; but it is equally likely that the name was studio-mandated. This is common in the world of low-budget cinema, especially horror; brands, character names and iconographies are often deployed to drum up audience interest, even if the films possess no narrative connection to their predecessors. Indeed, Williams based Son of Ingagi on his own short story, which was called simply “House of Horror.” But whether or not Son of Ingagi is in fact the artistic offspring of Ingagi, it clearly taps into the same wellspring of anti-black mythology.
“Ingagi” is a made-up word, purportedly the word for “gorilla” in the tongue of the earlier film’s African tribe. While that film’s hero does save one black belle from the beasts, others are not so lucky. At one point, we even meet one gorilla’s harem, a contingent of mute, shuffling women. One of them holds a child. The film tells us that it is “a strange-looking child. seemingly more ape than human.” We barely get a glimpse of it; then it disappears from the film.
It is not difficult to imagine N’Gina as that child, now fully grown. Unlike Kong and the Ingagi, N’Gina does not look like any mere ape. He is an uncanny chimera, some unholy mix of human and Ingagi, perhaps the fruits of their union. N’Gina, like the child of Ingagi, seems like the proof Thomas Jefferson sought: evidence of the biological kinship between Negro and ape.
What makes a monster, if not aberrance? By most accounts, monsters are liminal creatures: biological, physical or psychological impossibilities that combine or warp the categories we use to make sense of the world. In blurring the lines separating those categories, the monster imperils them. The ghost and the zombie combine life and death into one profane entity, neither/both living and/or dead; the doppelgänger fuses Self and Other; the demon, the material and the abstract. And creatures like N’Gina—likewise werewolves and vampires and the Creature from the Black Lagoon—blur the line between human and animal.
Why do such alchemical wonders horrify us so? In this column, I have tried to define horror as not so much fear but the experience of genuine unknowability. In horror, our ways of experiencing the world become precarious. The figure of the monster exemplifies this. Zombies, after all, are not horrifying merely because they may devour us, but because their very existence challenges our comprehension of the difference between life and death. They throw into disarray our neat taxonomy of the world—and ourselves, as part of it—as animate or inanimate, living or dead. For if the zombie is neither/both, it raises a terrible question: What, then, are we?
Ingagi’s white audience, however, had an escape hatch from this question. (It is worth noting that the film was not originally intended as a horror film.) Ingagi’s offspring did not, in fact, implicate them. It was not a hybrid between human and animal, not really; but rather a hybrid between Negro and animal. And what is a Negro, if not a beast? The film spends considerable energy emphasizing the primitivism of the African tribe, blending them into the landscape of lions and baobabs. Such efforts likely only served to punctuate the racist mythology the audiences were ready and willing to bring to the theater, going back to America’s founding. So when the child arrived on screen, it might not have appeared monstrous at all: perhaps it was more of a biological curiosity than an aberration, like a mule or a Labradoodle.
The same is likely true for N’Gina; viewed from the right angle (one backlit by anti-blackness), he is practically the Lindsays’ in-law. But they don’t seem to see it that way. They shriek, bellow and faint at his visage; they murder him without hesitation. He horrifies them. And he horrifies me. Why?
A racist viewer would buy into the trope of the Negro Ape without so much as batting an eye. But what if one resists that way of looking? What if one refuses to accept the ideological prerequisite that paints blackness as animality?
Son of Ingagi does not take place on the African savanna. N’Gina’s “victims” are not loinclothed brutes. We watch the Lindsays’ wedding, in a church, to the sound of bells. Their friends throw them a gentle party; a local Negro lawyer calls on them in their new home to discuss the intricacies of Jackson’s will. Even Jackson is humanized. We eventually learn her misanthropy is a guise; she anonymously funds the community’s orphanage, and spends her spare time, and considerable intellect, whipping up miraculous curatives. The primary black response to monsterization has always been an insistence on our humanity.
And yet—like the insistent, never-truly-banished specter of Jefferson’s hypothesis—N’Gina haunts these would-be humans. The horror of Son of Ingagi lies in the possibility that white supremacy is right, that the border between the Negro and the nonhuman is by no means secure, that we are not what we insist we are, that we don’t deserve the dignity and recognition we have fought to achieve. N’Gina is the fantasy of a cousin from hell, dragging us screaming back into ugly and familiar depths of degradation. He is the flight of blackness from humanity, our being streaming out of our clenched fists.
●
So what, in the end, is Son of Ingagi up to? From what I have said so far, the film seems almost to mock the viewer in its determination to dehumanize the Negro, to “prove” anti-black mythology right. Why? Out of sheer cruelty?
Not quite. N’Gina is unlike his forebears in another sense. He is the unabashed victim of the film: his suffering is undeniable, and obviously evil. It is evil because it is the product of the disregard of others. He is immediately identified as a threat; he is hunted, shot and burned alive—and not because of anything he’s done, but only because of what they think he might do. It is only thanks to the film camera, capable of finding N’Gina in his moments of lonely vulnerability, that the audience can see past the image of the Devil-Ape, the Dangerous Negro, that encrusts him. His living companions are not so generous.
The ascription of animality has always been an excuse for brutal violence—from the relentless murder of livestock and garden “pests” to the stamping out of endangered species. It’s no surprise, then, that as a ruthless refusal of the animalization of blackness, we resort to defending black humanity. But such declarations so often take the following structure: “I am human; that means that I am not an animal, or a monster; and that is why you must treat me with kindness and respect.” The unspoken premise of the Negro Ape—that animality is an ethical carte blanche—is not rejected; it is what it rests on.
Confronted by the horror N’Gina evokes, we have a choice. We can flee the devastating implication he offers: the precarity of humanity, our unholy connection to the inhuman. We can insist upon our separation from what we are not. Or we can reject that separation itself. We can see N’Gina not as human, but as worthy of care, simply because he suffers and desires, even if he defies the borders used to taxonomize the living world.
Or we can choose to rest easy in our superiority, waving proofs of lineage to escape the still-wet killing floor.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.