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'Bring out the chasm the spirit Claudia': Claudia's summoning

While the séance scene in "New York" ostensibly borrows its concept from the séance scene in Merrick by Anne Rice, as many others have pointed out, there is an inevitable racialised element to the scene in the show, because Claudia is a young Black girl. Others have discussed the racist language the writers put into the actor's mouths (here, here, and here are just a few examples) so that will not be the focus of this post, nor will this post compare the scene with the one in Merrick, as that has also been done by other users.

I also want to stress that while this post is analysing this scene on a meta level, I do not believe that excuses the racist language in the scene, nor do I believe the writers were necessarily intentionally engaging with scholarship of the Transatlantic slave trade. This is just how I have been pondering the scene.

I have not yet seen anyone discussing is the fact that Claudia is brought back into a mutilated form, with her tendons slashed, wearing the dress she was lynched in. While this is obviously because it was how she died, and in fiction, ghosts typically appear how they looked when they died, this actually serves a deeper symbolic purpose.

The first shot of Claudia's ghost lingers on her ankles as she shambles painfully forward. As has been discussed by many people, this was a tactic to stop enslaved people from running away from their masters:

"A female who ran away […] for a fifth offense, 'the cord of the slave's legs' would be cut above the heel, or the slave would suffer death."[1]

By having Claudia appear in the form in which she died - still mutilated in a way visually linked to slavery - the scene is making manifest how historians of the Transatlantic slave trade often encounter enslaved individuals in the archives. These men and women are often unnamed in the sources, but brutalised nonetheless. As Saidiya Hartman says:

Rather than the wasted effort of a striking a line through “meager girl” or a “refuse boy,” the ledger introduces another death through this shorthand. And it returns the dead to us “in the very form in which they were driven out of the world.”[2]

Hartman's influential essay, Venus in Two Acts (which can be read here), explores the difficulties inherent in discussing the lives and suffering of Black enslaved individuals encountered in the archives, when they are often unnamed, the sources are invariably mediated through the lens of White slave traders and masters, and the archives often describe horrific violence and degradation committed against Black enslaved individuals.

Hartman asks, how do historians discuss the lives and experiences of these individuals, and do so with dignity and empathy? Is it a historian's job to offer narrative catharsis where the archive provides none? As she says:

Yet how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features?[3]

She concludes that inventing narrative catharsis is not true to the sources. The essay revolves around questions thrown up by the enslaved Black girl (known only as Venus), who was murdered onboard the ship The Recovery in 1792 by Captain John Kimber. Hartman discusses her desire to invent a friendship and comfort between "Venus" and another enslaved Black girl who was also murdered by John Kimber aboard the ship:

Initially I thought I wanted to represent the affiliations severed and remade in the hollow of the slave ship by imagining the two girls as friends, by giving them one another. But in the end I was forced to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic.[4]

The archive does not offer evidence of even the solace of friendship between the two murdered girls. As Hartman says, "I could not have arrived at another conclusion. So it was better to leave them as I had found them. Two girls, alone."[5]

In this way, the Hell that Claudia has been banished to in the narrative of the show mirrors the archival reality suffered by many Black enslaved girls - in this case, "Venus" of Hartman's essay, and the other girl who was murdered onboard The Recovery. Trapped by the very documents which preserve the only evidence of their existences, alone, having been brutally murdered. There are even obvious parallels between Armand's title of "Maître", and White "master" slave owners.

Like the Black enslaved girls and women that historians encounter in the archives, Claudia is frozen at the place of her subjugation, her body itself a site of racialised violence, suffering alone without the ability to be afforded comfort by a narrative.

She ends the scene screaming for Madeleine before disappearing, strongly implying that there is no hope for her being reunited with her lover.

'Can't move my body': Louis' mutilation

I will not be including screenshots of Louis' headless body and decapitated head in this section. Having to see it on screen in the finale was bad enough. I am also going off my memory of the scene for the exact dialogue, because I have not rewatched it.

Besides the fact it was horrific body horror seemingly for the sake of body horror, as many people have pointed out, it was mutilation and violence committed against a Black man. Need I say more? Probably not, but this violence can be contextualised against a backdrop of torture, violence, and experimentation on Black people, so I will say more.

I could not work out what else was so disturbing about this scene, besides the horrific racism and gratuitous violence, until I read this post, in which @heliza24 pointed out that there were real medical experiments and medical torture carried out on Black people.

I think this can be taken further, especially in the context of Hartman's essay. Hartman questions the purpose of writing about violence committed against enslaved people:

Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence?[6]

As Hartman says, questioning how one tackles this issue is vital, because it impacts on how these people's lives are retold and remembered. The importance of how this is approached cannot be overstated, because these were real people who suffered unimaginable torture and pain:

If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal, then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been? To envision a free state from this order of statements? The dangers entailed in this endeavor cannot be bracketed or avoided because of the inevitability of the reproduction of such scenes of violence, which define the state of blackness and the life of the ex-slave.[7]

Simply rehashing the violence against Black enslaved individuals is not enough. The violence was done, but how it is handled and discussed and dealt with is incredibly important. It must be discussed carefully, compassionately, delicately. Violence against a Black person in media is never just violence. It is the unwitting repetition of centuries of violence and medical experimentation and torture and violation.

That is even more true when discussing Louis de Pointe du Lac, who lived in the early 20th century and was the victim of racism and racial microaggressions throughout his mortal life. As season 1 of Interview with the Vampire tried to address, turning Louis into a vampire did not protect him from racism. It gave him the power to fight back against racists, but he was still a Black man. Likewise with Claudia, trapped in the body of a young woman. She had power, but it was shaped by her youth and the fact that she was Black.

But the violence against Louis was not just torture. It was medical torture. Throughout the entire episode, wires were attached to Louis' severed head, and Fareed was monitoring his vitals, how coherent he was, how long his head had been separated from his body. Louis struggled to speak, his sentences were slurred, his eyes slid in different directions. He also struggled to write - his handwriting was reduced to a huge, childish, scrawl.

This was torture via experimentation. The question both Armand and Fareed wanted answered was, "How will Louis hold up in these conditions?" This experiment could have worked with Lestat, but of course, it was carried out on Louis. Ostensibly, because Armand wanted an apology from Louis, but by doing this - intentionally or not - the writers were also tapping into centuries of medical violations and experiments against Black people.

There was an added layer of horror. Louis' headless body and severed head themselves were made horrific and monstrous. When Louis slurred that he didn't know where he was, that he couldn't move his body, and Armand had Louis' head turned around and he was shown his own headless neck, blood still staining his skin, we, the audience, were supposed to be horrified and sickened by Louis' body itself. We were supposed to be repulsed by his body, by the sight of his head without a body, slurring and struggling to speak. Though Louis was our point of view character, and we were supposed to feel the horror with him, we were also horrified by him.

This was exacerbated by Regina's presence. She screamed and sobbed in fear when she saw Louis. The subject of Regina and her involvement with Armand is a separate meta, but suffice it to say here, Regina's body was brought in as part of the horror when Armand threatened to cut her head off and sew Louis' head onto her body. There was now a Black woman dragged into this experimentation. The history of medical torture against Black women is a subject all by itself, again too detailed to discuss in this meta.

There is more I could probably say about all of this, but that would require me rewatching the scene, which I will do, when it's available online in higher quality, and when I can stomach it. I think the point is made.

'Says you're a slave': Louis' branding

One final point that must be discussed is Louis' branding. Even after he and Armand share a moment of understanding and sympathy, even after Louis was able to apologise to Armand for how he treated him in light of Armand's history as a CSA victim and the victim of slavery, the script still had Armand brand Louis with the letter "A", for his own name.

Why the writers chose to include this is truly beyond me. Was Armand saying that Louis still belonged to him? That part of Louis would always be his, because of the horrific torture he had now inflicted on Louis? Was that point not made in season 2, when we learned that Louis still had rocks embedded into his feet from the coffin he had been buried alive in? Those physical reminders of the betrayal Armand committed against him at least had a narrative purpose - Armand pointed out that Louis could have had them removed, but like Claudia said in season 1, "We keep the damage so we don't forget the damage." That was why Louis chose to keep the rocks in his feet, as a reminder of the damage the coven inflicted on him.

This cannot be explained the way that was. This was Armand carving his initial into Louis' body, while Louis' head was still detached from it. As so many people have said already, this was a branding.

This also comes right after Claudia's infamous line in "New York": "There's a little etching on your rib cage, says you're a slave." I cannot read this branding as anything other than corroboration of that statement. Armand branded Louis because Armand was, and still is, Master in their relationship. Armand added the Stein's into Louis' photo collection; he manipulated and lied to Louis for over 70 years; he erased and edited his memories; he hired Regina to use her against him (it still isn't clear to me why he did that); he listened to Claudia's séance; he was pulling the strings offscreen this entire season.

By having Armand brand Louis, the show seems to be confirming that yes, Louis is a slave. He is Armand's slave. Louis is being defined completely by his Blackness, but also by his subjugation. There's also the constant reminders to the audience that Louis was a pimp. Meanwhile, Claudia's ghost referred to her "bleak, Black, life".

In seasons 1 and 2, the fact that Louis and Claudia were Black and Lestat was White felt like a pointed decision, and a doorway to discuss race and racism in the early 20th century and the present day, abuse in interracial couples, and vampirism and Blackness. This season, they have been punished for their race. That is painfully, upsettingly, obvious in these two scenes.

Bibliography

A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period, p. 177

Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, Small Acts, 26 (2008), p. 5. The final quote, “in the very form in which they were driven out of the world”, is Hartman quoting Michel Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, p. 284.

Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, p. 3.

Ibid., p. 9.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 5.