Mantan was also a Negro (man tan, get it?). And a lot of other Negroes were in it, too. Dead ones. They all looked and behaved like my clan of alcoholic relatives in New Jersey. I suspect this was the reason why my mother wanted me to watch this movie in the first place. One of the dead Negroes in the movie was played by Song of the South's original Uncle Remus, who Zippity-Doo-Dahed his way to an Oscar..
           “Beautiful car.” he says to Mantan, his hair electrified bristles.  “I drove car like this for Master.”
           “Yeah?” Mantan replied with a dubious side glance.
           “When I was alive....”  
           The movie was called Revenge of the Zombies. Its story was set on a former slave plantation in southern Louisiana turned high school science project. John Carradine played the bad guy––Dr. Max Heinrich von Altermann––a hoodoo madman in lab whites. It was Dr. von Altermann who revived my popeyed and stumbling relatives from the dead. With this newly resurrected army of ink-stained Lazaruses, the plan was to conquer the world under the Third Reich's corporate logo. Unfortunately, as he had never been invited to an outdoor barbecue attended by my pickled kin, and didn't understand the source materials he was working with, Dr. von Altermann's plan was doomed to failure from its inception.
          The movie also posed vexing questions like: “If the story is framed during W.W. II, the plantation's original tenants have long since putrefied into some vile-smelling sedimentation, so where did Dr. von Altermann find his army of constipated Negroes? Did he bypass the family plot and cut down what the locals left hanging from the trees?” In addition to Hitler's new military division––Die Schwarztoten––there was also a wraith-like zombie drifting airily through feathery, moonlit clusters of Spanish moss. And some plantation-era coonfoolery with Mantan and my intoxicated kinfolk but I don't remember what. Cussing and chicken-thieving most likely.
          What I do remember is the piercing voice of a woman who looked and sounded like Aunt Jemima (not in her modern Pearl Bailey incarnation but the handkerchief-headed pancake chef of old) auditioning for the role of Lawrence Talbot in The Wolfman (“Ah's tire ob' dis' hot-ass kitchen!! Can't ah git off'n dis' here pancake box an' makes me de' big money scarin' white folks in the monster movies wif' Frankenstein an' Dracula?”). The character went by the trite and unimaginative name of Mammy Beulah. However, the actor’s name listed in the credits was ideal for one of Charlie Chan’s yellow-on-high-yellow love interests. Madame Sul-te-wan. Despite her seemingly outrageous name, Madame Sul-Te-Wan (which in truth was Nellie Crawford of Louisville, Kentucky), had the distinction of being a Black American trailblazer. Having worked with such leading lights of American cinema as D.W. Griffith, Lillian Gish and the rest of the monkey people in Birth of Nation and King Kong, she is noted as the first Black American actor to have a genuine movie contract signed by genuine white people with genuine ink that didn’t genuinely disappear!
          In Revenge of the Zombies, Madame Sul-Te-Wan stood at the entrance of a fog-shrouded cemetery, and just before a horde of slovenly-dressed Negroes rose from their graves, and shuffled through the gate, she would cry out in eerie blues holler, "Ahhhhhhh-OOOOOOOOO!!!"  And the recently arisen would trudge down to the chow wagon for a heaping bowl of cold grits and fly larvae (or whatever it was zombies ate before discovering the nutritional value of the human brain) before beginning another night of undead servitude in the name of the Fuhrer. Arbeit Macht Leiben!
          In retrospect, the old woman's cry had a uniquely haunting quality of its own. It was the movie’s most effective instance of magic. Its echo reverberated in my subconscious for decades thereafter. But, at age seven, I didn't understand a single emulsified frame in Revenge of the Zombies. I deferred to my mother.
          "What's wrong with them colored people? They drunk? They walk like Uncle Willie."
          "No, they're dead."
          I did an owl-eyed double-take. "What you mean dead? Walkin' don't come in that package!!"
          "They're special people."
          "What you mean special?" I didn't like the sound of that.
          "They're special because they're dead people who've been brought back to life by voodoo magic."
          Doo-doo magic? What this woman talkin' 'bout? I can take a lump of some stinky old doo-doo, rub it on some dead people and they be up and runnin' like Remco's™ Mister Machine? She gone cross-eyed crazy?!!
          "If that's true," I said, remembering the odor that clung to my clothes after I had made pee-pies with the ringworm gang in a nearby empty lot, "why didn't you let me rub some doo-doo on that lady who dropped dead watchin' King Kong? The one who used to babysit us? She be sittin' here right now, smellin' worse'n Uncle Willie."
          "I said Voodoo! Not doo-doo, silly!"
          "You talkin' 'bout bringin' dead people back to life with som' voodoo doo-doo an' you callin' me silly? I think you need to stop workin' at that crazy-house an' turn my tv set back to Popeye!"
          Despite the numerous African masks and assorted carvings of various kinds throughout our home; and the marked influence these objects had on my father's painting and sculpture, my mother didn’t understand, or chose to ignore, the significance of the masks' spiritual reality or the function this reality served in African art. She had received her training under Dr. Fredrick Wertham in the psychiatric wing of Harlem Hospital (yes, the very same Dr. Wertham reviled by comics aficionados everywhere); but, apparently, was unaware of the objects d'Africaine in Dr. Freud's Viennese study. Like many modern Blacks, not only in the U.S. but among the educated classes in Haiti and Africa as well, she associated 'voodoo' with the culturally embarrassing and infantile practices of half-naked primitives in Jungle Jim's movie adventures.