Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

Voodoo Tales

The Ghost Stories of

Henry S. Whitehead

with an Introduction by
David Stuart Davies

Voodoo Tales
first published by
Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2012

Published as an ePublication 2012

ISBN 978 1 84870 312 4

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Introduction

The advice often given to those who wish to turn their hand to storytelling is to write about what they know. This has always seemed to me to be rather a restricting approach to fiction. It makes no allowance for the writer’s flights of fancy or the creative elements that his unfettered imagination can bring to the narrative. Certainly those who work in the genres of science and supernatural fiction would be greatly hampered if they followed this advice. In fact they write about what they do not know!

However, ironically, Henry St. Clair Whitehead (1882–1932) was to a large extent able to combine the facilities of both a vivid imagination with factual knowledge of his subject, which he acquired during time spent in the West Indies. He developed a strong interest in black Caribbean folklore and Voodoo practices through the years of living on the island of Santa Cruz. He met with practitioners of black magic and high priests of the Voodoo cult and became familiar with their ways and ceremonies. He learned that their power was rooted in the unswerving belief of their flock. As a result of Whitehead’s experiences, he was able to infuse his narratives with a chilling verisimilitude. He seems to believe and accept the fantastic nature of the events that take place in his tales and thus his persuasive voice plays very nicely on the reader’s initial scepticism and undermines it.

In reviewing one of Whitehead’s collections, the critic of the
New York Times
observed:

With deceptive gentleness and clerical decorum, Dr Whitehead wrote of voodoo spells, fiendish manikins and other terrors to be found in the tropic nights of the Virgin Islands. So quietly did he edge up on horrors that his stories seem quite like the truthful reminiscences they purport to be, which means they are pretty good.

That paragraph effectively sums up the essence of Whitehead’s craft and why he has, over the years, built up a strong appreciative following amongst fans of supernatural fiction.

Henry S. Whitehead was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and spent most of his life in New England, except for that interesting and creatively stimulating period when he lived in the West Indies. He was possessed of two differing natures: the serious academic and the gregarious sportsman. He led an active early life, playing football at Harvard and serving as commissioner of athletics of the AAU. He resigned this post to enter the ministry and in 1912 he was ordained deacon of the Episcopal Church. After serving his ‘deacon’s year’ as curate of Trinity Church Torrington, Connecticut he went out to other pastorates, including the Virgin Islands where he gathered the content and colour which later went into his Voodoo tales. As a Christian, the Reverend Whitehead seemed to have no compunction in presenting this pagan material in the form of convincing fiction. It was as though when he was writing he was exercising another part of his brain which had nothing to do with his own religious convictions and duties. But then he was a man who was constantly surprising. His friend, the writer Robert Barlow, commented: ‘In later life he could be prevailed upon . . . to startle social gatherings by tearing a pack of cards in two and then quartering them.’ A habit which clearly shows that Whitehead took pleasure in shocking people. Barlow added: ‘His friends ranged from ship’s surgeons to safecrackers.’ One of these friends was the notable horror story writer H.
P.
Lovecraft who said of Whitehead: ‘He has nothing of the musty cleric about him, but dresses in sports clothes, swears like a he-man on occasion, & is an utter stranger to bigotry or priggishness of any sort.’ Lovecraft was also a great admirer of his friend’s dark stories. He commented on ‘the charm and erudition of the writing – a pleasing relief from the dominant crudeness and illiterateness of popular magazine stuff.’

Whitehead spent his last years in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, Florida where he was rector of the Episcopal Church. He died on 23 November 1932, of a chronic gastric ailment, just as he was hitting his stride as a writer. In the opinion of some, this was the reason he was not as well known as his pulp-era contemporaries, especially since his stories were not collected until well after his death. The first such collection was
Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales
, published by Arkham House in 1944 and this was followed by
West India Lights
in 1946, also by Arkham House.

His strange tales first began appearing in the American pulp fiction magazine
Weird Tales
and other similar publications in 1924. However his first short story was ‘Williamson’, written in 1910 but not published until 1946 in the posthumous collection
West India Lights
. This is a remarkable piece of work with a stunning climax, containing many of the elements that the author wove effectively into the canvas of all his tales: suspense, mystery, a cool delivery of events and yet told with an insidious sense of impending horror. It was in this story that he introduced the narrator who featured in most of his tales: Gerald Canevin, who E. F. Bleiler, one of the world’s greatest authorities on supernatural fiction, believed was ‘a mask for the author, whose ancestral name was Caernavon.’ Whitehead took great pleasure in pointing out that the name was made up of ‘cane’ and ‘vin’, which is cane wine, in other words rum, the typical product of the West Indies.

At first glance Whitehead’s realistic treatment of Voodoo and its spells may seem to sit oddly with a minister of the Christian church, but in many instances the fearsome spells he writes about are able to be overcome by the power of Christianity: the force of good over evil. In ‘Black Terror’, for example, where a young black man has been condemned to death by a curse, a ‘sweat ouanga’, the narrator hits upon an idea how to beat the curse.

Perhaps I could prevail upon the English Church Clergy to help. It was, when one came down the brass tacks of the situation, a question of belief. A similar ouanga ‘buried against’ me would have no effect whatever, because to me, such means of getting rid of a person was merely the height of absurdity . . .

Later in the story, an English priest, Father Richardson tells the afflicted boy:

God is intervening for you, my child, and God’s power is supreme over all things, visible
and invisible
. He holds all in the hollow of His hand. He will now put away your fear, and take this weight from your soul,
and you shall live
.

The point is that power of the Voodoo lies in the belief and imagination of the victim rather than in some dark satanic being. Whitehead implies that it is a power that can be destroyed by Christian beliefs and prayers. The author was at pains to show that supernatural forces are real, but are also susceptible to the powers of goodness.

To the modern reader, some of Whitehead’s themes may sound racist, but his treatment of the West Indian blacks and ‘coloured’ people (i.e. natives of mixed ancestry) is presented cordially and with relatively little condescension. He perceived them as God’s children after all.

It may be thought that as a representative of the Episcopal Church, Whitehead might have been hesitant in demonstrating the powers and efficacy of a primitive and alternative culture of belief, but he did not. He relayed in his stories the facts of the matter as he had learned them and it was this approach that gives his narratives their chilling effectiveness.

This collection contains all the stories from Whitehead’s three collections,
West India Lights
,
Jumbee
, and
The Black Beast
, rare volumes all, but in addition there are five other stories which have never been collected together in a popular edition before: ‘No Eye-Witnesses’, (1932), is an unusual take on the werewolf tale, set in New York; ‘Across the Gulf’ (1926) concerns a dead mother who appears in a dream to warn her son of danger; ‘The Tabernacle’ (1930) is a departure in style and content for the author, retelling in a modern setting an ancient tale concerning a mysterious hive of bees; ‘The Door’ (1924), a spookily adroit tale with a surprise ending; ‘The Moon Dial’ (1931), an elegiac and atmospheric piece set in India; and ‘The Sea Tiger’ (1932), a dreamlike tale, featuring an hallucinatory premonition and a sea battle with a barracuda, the sea-tiger of the title.