Most enthusiasts of ghost movies relish the feeling of watching a depiction of flying apparitions or floating ghastly phenomena, either enchanting the living or terrorizing them until their comportment becomes sheer frenzy. But can you imagine taking your friend to see a Ghostbuster’s movie shot with no ghosts only to watch their expectation turn to derelict disappointment? Similarly, fans clamor to see movies about natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions. But can you imagine seeing Pierce Brosnan aimlessly climbing volcanic cliffs without the peril of ever seeing a volcano erupt, or lava flow to the mainland?
The climatic irony of life is that these nonsensical occurrences have not happened in film because no writer, director or producer would make such an adroit oversight with nature or supernature. However, early on, they would with the saviors of oppression film, Black people. In 1940, the same year that John Lewis, Richard Pryor and Roy Ayers were born, the same year that Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an academy award and Richard Wright published Native Son there was a movie called Santa Fe Trail. This was the unofficial story of John Brown the slave abolitionist.
In this movie, we see: Errol Flynn who popularized Robin Hood, Joan Fontaine’s sister, Olivia De Havilland, who would later appear in Roots, Raymond Massey who played Abraham Lincoln in another film that same year, as John Brown and the inglorious Ronald Reagan, our 40th president who enslaved generations of black people by giving us crack cocaine and Reaganomics as George Armstrong Custer. But what we don’t see in this movie are the slaves that John Brown was trying to free. Why is this? Could the logic be that they wanted to make a slave movie to glorify the messianic deliverer of the slaves because in doing so the “white messiah” trope would be vindicated? Emmeshed within this stream of though must be the notion that the story of slavery is insignificant to the story of the white slave abolitionist, therefore we don’t need to show the slaves.
Proliferating this hypothesis as true, another conclusion can also be drawn. Prior to 1940 the slaves we saw in film were exaggeratively mild and socially detached stereotypes like in Uncle Tom’s cabin in 1927, where Black people were revered for resignation instead of revolution. Earlier, in 1915 we saw white men in blackface “hooliganize” virginal white damsels in distress in Birth of a Nation. In 1930, the film Abraham Lincoln showed slaves, approximately, once and instead of depicting their suffrage it depicted their Labor like Israelite peonage in Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments. It was a wailing while you work hum drum labor.
In 1939 a film called Boy Slaves casted light on white male children being held bondage in turpentine camps, without a Black slave in sight. In stark contrast, the 1935 film The Littlest Rebel starred Shirley Temple playing a six-year-old proxy owner of a slave named Uncle Billy played by Bill Bo Jangles Robinson. The cringeworthy sight of our exploited and self-deprecated Mr. Bojangles tap dancing to the Minstrel song Polly Wolly Doodle along with Shirley Temple is a phrenologist racist’s wet dream. In the same year the film, Captain Blood, emerged about an Irish doctor sold into West Indian Slavery, Ben-Hur was released about a Jewish Prince forced into galley slavery and MGM made The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1939 featuring the good-natured slave Nigger Jim.
Undoubtably the trend before 1940 was that if there were movies about slavery made, the slaves should be ancillary figures or non-existent and the emphasis should be on the great white adventurer. In this sense we’ve found our ghosts from the figurative “ghotsless” Ghostbuster’s movie. They were the invisible personages in slave movies made prior to 1940. If they appeared the slaves were the white men who suffered to be exalted as an unflinching higher breed of human. What must it be like to be an Austrian born film maker or a Hungarian writer hanging on the symbolic ledge reading the pages of a slave novel and as you adapt it the living lava you see from the task master only burns his ego, because Black people aren’t a hot enough topic to even warrant being abused?
In Kantian Deontology, Kant’s Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals states, “act only in accordance with the maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” A maxim being a general principle underlying a particular action, is exactly what Hollywood did in 1940 when they made a John Brown movie with no slaves. To test whether any maxim should be followed we must universalize the action to see if it’s possible for everyone to live by it. Hollywood proliferated the notion that Black people not being present in a slave movie is a maxim that everyone can live by, seemingly, because people who watch films made about white ethics want to see white people as ethical and unethical, or the slave and the master. Everybody can live by the maxim because suffrage is only valuable if it’s white suffrage and vindication is valuable because its ethically white. By this rationale, up until 1940 Hollywood didn’t think it important to cast many Black people as slaves because their not being present or white people playing slaves better venerated the white ethic.
Contrary to what the love for Hollywood inclusivity would indicate, that maxim is fine by most Black people. Keep us out of your slave movies and revisit the 1940’s Hollywood maxim that gave you more glory playing slaves yourself or making Black slaves invisible in those films. White Hollywood should glorify white ethics because their approach appears to be Kantian which invariably denigrates Black people because Kant was a staunch racist. In lieu of this, most attempts at white Hollywood making a Black film would underserve or humiliate Black people. The conscientious of us prefer that you if you continue making slave movies, just do like New Edition said and “count us out.” And to think we were upset when we heard that Julia Roberts was asked to play Harriet Tubman. In light of this recent revelation, it makes all the sense in the world…