Although her mother, my grandmother, was psychically attuned to ancestral spirits, and delivered messages from the long dead who visited her in dreams; and her father, my grandfather, was schooled by his Choctaw grandfather in the medicinal properties of various roots and herbs found in the woods of South Carolina, my mother dismissed it all as nonsense; the product of superstitious bigfoot country Negroes; not the traditional wisdom that aided American blacks through the long nightmare of American slavery. She had chosen to disacknowledge the obvious presence of Voodoo's vibrant spirituality in her own life and so she certainly couldn't explain it on the basis of the film we were watching.
          However, I can.
          In Revenge of the Zombies, 'voodoo' isn't represented as religion or superstitious folk magic. It is rather a 'mad science' in the service of white 'Aryan' domination. Here, two evils intertwine––the infernal mechanisms of National Socialism and the transported rites of an imagined Africa. Nazism is transformed into a 'white voodoo'; a 'voodoo' defined by corrupt ideology and 'science'. And, anticipating Papa Doc Duvalier by eleven years, voodoo becomes an instrument of depraved political power. How?
          Neither 'Nazism' or 'Voodoo' are made explicit in the film. They are left unnamed in the narrative space (which is also an invocative ritual-space). The two words 'Nazism' and 'Voodoo' exist as blanks in a sentence. The sentence speaks only of an inane 'science' with southern-gothic trappings. The word 'voodoo' is never spoken. The black bodies shaping the narrative emptiness only suggest it. Dr. Von Altermann boasts he is manufacturing automatons for The Fatherland. Which 'Fatherland'? He doesn't say.
          The viewer is left to fill in the gaps with a stubby pencil.
          The blank and unspoken in cinema can be seen in the analogous light of the Sese funeral drum of the matrist Afro-Cuban Abakua´ society. It is a holy drum. It is not played. It is displayed. Significance is imported through silence.
          Curiously, as suggested by Article 249 of Haiti's Criminal Code, the process of 'zombification' is achieved not by bringing the dead back to life, but simulating the appearance of death through the administration of various drugs (then providing a partial antidote to rouse the victim to brain damaged semi-consciousness). At the time of Revenge of the Zombies’ release, 1943, the Nazis were, in fact, experimenting with numerous combinations of drugs for the purpose the film implies: turning humans into 'soulless automatons'. Funny, too, Dr. Von Altermann conducts his experiments on the grounds of a forced labor camp. The film is prescient in this respect.
          Now, what's important to understand, when my mother and I watched Revenge of the Zombies, the movie was broadcast in the very early years of the nineteen sixties. John Kennedy's courage was the nation's inspiration. Dr. King had yet to stage his massive March on Washington. School children sang Stephen Foster's antebellum pop tunes after reciting The Pledge of Allegiance with hand over heart. The sparkling pink behinds of Dick and Jane rubbed against the dusky booty of Little Black Sambo on the library shelf. And blacks were clubbed and firehosed in Alabama's 'Magic City' of Birmingham.
          So, as far as television went, there was no such thing as a Sanford and Son. Or that fine figure of American Negritude, Dr. Huxtable, teaching black people how to talk, and make good on the advances of the civil rights movement (because, well, the civil rights movement hadn't yet made an advance). There was no Fred 'Rerun' Berry pop-lockin' on What's Happenin'? Or Ted Lange's bargain basement James Brown on That's My Mama! No Linc with a blown-out 'fro on The Mod Squad. Or World Wrestling Federation Stanley Crouch-Imiri Baraka grudge matches!
          We didn't even have a Huggy Bear!  We was some iconically deprived Negroes!
          At best, we had Harry, Sidney and Sammy. Mostly, we were handed the television equivalent of welfare cheese. Reruns of Amos 'n Andy; the occasional appearance of Beulah; and endless episodes of those resourceful pickaninnies in The Little Rascals.
          I watched any Sepia/Colored/Negro character doled out on the tv set: hankaheads whisking pancake batter in the kitchen; the bizarre, child-like antics of slow-witted yard help; liveried chauffeurs who, at the mere mention of ghosts, sped off in cyclonic clouds of dust tailed by bolts of lightning; snowy-headed retainers who, despite senility and advanced arthritis, could out dance Shirley Temple on their worse days; and, as described earlier, legions of grunting, glassy-eyed grotesques. And do you know why I watched? I wasn't welcomed in Donna Reed's house!
          Who was Donna Reed? A Honky Bitch who didn't even have a colored milkman that's who! You know the milkman I mean. The one you'd see for a hot second. If you were lucky, he lingered long enough to set down the milk bottles and say: "Have a nice duh––" Cut his scene before he could get the ‘ma'am’ out his mouth. That milkman.
          The Donna Reed Show was 'whiteness' hermetically sealed. Nothing in her world of domesticated blandness represented my own family's black working-class reality. No drunken uncles. Or psychic grandmothers. No practical parental advice like 'If you go out an' getta job shovelin' elephant shit you can buy your own goddam circus!'
          My face was not reflected in her mirror. I could not participate. The disparity between our worlds created mental dissonance. I felt isolated from her world and alienated within my own.
          And I know I had these feeling because Timmy lived in a house just like the one I saw on The Donna Reed Show. I once went there to play. And Timmy's mother served a lunch of baloney and mayonnaise sandwiches on soft white bread with a handful of potato chips.
          `Wow! They eat potato chips off of saucers an' not out the bag! It really is like The Donna Reed Show!´
           The next day, I asked Timmy if I could come to his house and play. He said no.
          "My mother said you were a nigger and I shouldn't play with you anymore."
          But I didn't know what a 'nigger' was. A three-pronged garden-trowel immediately sprang to mind. 'Go get the nigger and dig behind the rose bush.’
          Why did Timmy's mother call me a garden tool? Was he saying my mother was a hoe? So, after I popped a couple of blood vessels in Timmy's nose, I ran home and asked my father.
          "What's a 'nigger', Dad?" It was a Beaver Cleaver moment.
          His gaze was long and thoughtful. Then he told me to look in a mirror. So I looked in the mirror screwed into the wall above the bathroom sink. Mantan Moreland looked back.
          His eyes were pitted cataracts.

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