The Secret Origin of Zombies-Part Four

A Zombie Taxonomy

At the beginning of January, I wrote an article in this space called "A Retreat of the Totalitarian Monster." In it, I quoted Dr. Stephen Olbrys Gencarella of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as follows:

The zombie trope in the United States emerged with the zombie-as-slave phenomenon around the turn of the 20th century, when American capitalism and colonialism led to ethical conflicts about labor and human rights.

I dismissed what Dr. Gencarella said about "American capitalism and colonialism" as "typical leftist claptrap." I confess that I haven't read his original paper, "Thunder without Rain: Fascist Masculinity in AMC's The Walking Dead" in Horror Studies from 2016 (7 [1], pp. 125-146). I would like to. But unless I see some evidence that "[t]he zombie trope" came into American popular culture around 1900, moreover that there is actual evidence in the texts of that time of some connection between zombies and capitalism/colonialism, I will stick by what I wrote: it's all a bunch of leftist claptrap, unsupported by evidence, based on a confirmation bias, and spoken from a position of authority.

So when did zombi(e)s come into American popular culture? I'll do some hypostulatin' here and say that it happened at least four times and possibly five (or maybe four and a half).

1. Li (or Le) Grand Zombi--Zombi(e)s probably first arrived in America as Li (or Le) Grand Zombi, the serpent spirit or serpent god of Voodoo. The place would appear to be Louisiana, in which case the time was probably the eighteenth century, when Louisiana was a French colony and as black slaves were imported from the West Indies. It's interesting that the zombi(e) in the Western hemisphere, brought here from Africa, is a creature of colonies that were largely Catholic and largely French: Haiti, Martinique, Louisiana. African slaves were of course imported into British colonies as well, but zombi(e)s seem not to have gained a foothold here. Catholicism has its aspects of mysticism and has historically tolerated and eventually assimilated pagan beliefs. The British in America were Protestants, however, some of them pretty harsh and strict. I don't think they trucked with that kind of thing, so no zombi(e)s in the Colonies. (One place to test that theory is Maryland, a colony settled by Catholics but which was also a slave colony and a slave state. My guess is that there aren't or weren't any zombi(e)s in the folklore of Maryland: the Catholic influence may have been too minor or short-lived and there probably wasn't a large enough African/Caribbean community to have given rise to them, plus Maryland was not an island or "island." To that point, I can put forth the idea that the different versions of zombi(e)s developed on different islands or "islands" of African/Caribbean culture--the slave-zombie in Haiti, the spirit-zombi in Martinique, and Li Grande Zombi in Louisiana--something like speciation in the Darwinian scheme of evolution.)
2. The Zombi as Spirit--The word zombi came into American popular culture in 1838 with the publication in American newspapers of "The Unknown Painter." The zombi in that story (who is only mentioned and never makes an appearance) is a spirit, and zombis remained spirits--evil spirits--throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Lafcadio Hearn was the most prominent author to write about zombis, but there were others, including authors of popular novels and short stories after 1900.
3. The Zombie as Slave--Zombies with an -e arrived in 1928 with William B. Seabrook's dispatches from Haiti, which were collected in book form in The Magic Island in 1929. The book was a sensation and led to a stage play, more stories and novels, and a number of zombie movies, beginning with White Zombie in 1932. There is no evidence that zombies first arrived in America around 1900, nor that they had anything to do with American capitalism, colonialism, or imperialism, except that Americans in Haiti sent back or carried back stories of zombies to their native country. It's more likely that the slave-zombie dates to the French colonial period and that, as a representation of slavery, zombie-ism is far more ancient than any capitalist institution. It's worth noting that if the first zombie-as-slave in literature was in The Magic Island, then that slave was a black man who was the slave of a black man. If we can believe Seabrook, zombie slavery was an affair for black men, and as Lamercie, a black woman in his book, says, "Z'affai' nèg pas z'affai' blanc'." (Roughly, "The affairs of blacks are not the affairs of whites.") As I have pointed out, slavery is not a capitalist institution. It predates capitalism and is in fact anathema to capitalism. Slavery and related forms of servitude are ancient and medieval institutions. Capitalism is a later development, an invention of free and prosperous people, and one that thrives on free and prosperous people and free exchanges of goods, services, labor, etc. Further still, to say that zombies came to America around 1900 and that they are related to capitalism and colonialism/imperialism may be to suggest that they are also related somehow to the Republican Party. (There were Republican presidents from 1896 to 1912, the period "around the turn of the 20th century.") We should remember that the Republican Party was founded explicitly as an anti-slavery party; that the Republican Party was the driving force behind emancipation and the passage of the anti-slavery amendments to the Constitution; that the Democratic Party was historically the party of slavery and other ancient or medieval institutions of servitude; and that the majority of Democratic presidents from Thomas Jefferson (1800-1808) to Woodrow Wilson (1912-1920) were either slaveholders or the sons of slaveholders (including, strangely enough, Martin Van Buren). In any case, zombie slaves, or at the very least, zombies as "dead bodies walking, without minds or souls," as William Seabrook described them, seem to have been the predominant version of the zombie from 1928 into the 1950s or 1960s, possibly into the 1970s or '80s. (Let's call him the Seabrook zombie.)
4. The Zombie as One of a Mass of Scientific Anthropophages, aka the Matheson-Romero Zombie--Okay, that first label is really long and cumbersome, so I'll offer an alternative, a label after the two men who gave us our current version of zombies: Richard Matheson in I Am Legend (1954) and George Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels (1978-2010). If my hypostulatin' is right, then the zombie-as-slave or soulless automaton faded away sometime during the late 1950s to the late 1970s or early 1980s and was replaced by the Matheson-Romero zombie that we have today. That zombie has two distinguishing characteristics: 1) It is one of a mass or horde; and 2) It is explained by scientific or materialistic means. The Matheson-Romero zombie is also an anthropophage, a fancy word for cannibal (except that zombies aren't people anymore, so they can't really be cannibals). And because of those three characteristics--because they are hordes of cannibals who carry a virulent disease--zombies went from being harmless slaves to being things to fear. It's as if the slaves were in revolt except that they are never released from their zombie-state. There are two other things to consider here regarding the Matheson-Romero zombie: 1) It was the version of the zombie current when popular culture became a legitimate subject of academic or scholarly inquiry, that is, during the 1960s and '70s; and 2) It is the version that has become politicized. The second development probably has a lot to do with the first, as the academics who came up at the same time as the Matheson-Romero zombie tended to be--and still tend to be--leftists, and they tend to see things through the badly cracked and very foggy lens of either: a) The old left, meaning Marxism; or b) The New Left, especially critical theory. As evidence, I'll offer these tidbits from Stephen Olbrys Gencarella's description of his interests and list of publications: "intersection," "critical folklore studies," "activist," "social injustice," "excluded," "democratic," "anti-democratic," "fascist," "commodification," and the kicker, "Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies." If you feel like rolling around in your mouth some nonsensical leftist/academic verbal stew, read the abstract of that paper here. (For those who don't know much about him [I don't], Gramsci was a Marxist theorist. In other words, he theorized about how he could take from you the things that are yours.)
5. The Missing Zombie--There's a gap in my chronology of zombies. The gap is between 1910 or so--when the zombi-as-spirit was still the predominant version--and 1928--when William Seabrook first wrote about zombies in American newspapers. What was in that gap? Well, there were some stories about Voodoo and related subjects in pulp magazines, especially in Weird Tales. Were there zombi(e)s in those stories? Yes, at least in a couple. What kind of zombi(e)s were they? Well, at least a couple of them were the old spirit zombis. But was there a new kind of zombi(e), too, a zombie out of Haiti, like the Seabrook zombie? I don't know, and that's what we ought to find out.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Challenge of the Snake" by Meigs O. Frost, a zombi story reprinted in newspapers in 1926 after having first appeared in Short Stories for February 25, 1924. Frost's story is set in Louisiana. The villain is Zombi Le Veau, a powerful Voodoo man who has named himself after Le Gran' Zombi, the snake-god. The story was published long before Short Stories, Inc., acquired Weird Tales. The artist's signature looks like Machamer; there was an artist, Jefferson Machamer (1900-1960), who worked as an illustrator and cartoonist and was active at that time. He's probably our man. In any case, the fact that this story was published in 1924 shows, I think, that the spirit zombi or serpent-god zombi was still the version known by readers of popular fiction. And that was only four years away from Seabrook's jaunt in Haiti.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley