Henry S. Whitehead: "Across the Gulf," "Jumbee" and "The Projection of Armand Dubois"

Let's read some 1926 Weird Tales.  Today's author: Henry S. Whitehead.  We read three Whitehead stories recommended by anthologist Robert Weinberg back in 2024, "The Shadows," "The Fireplace," and "The Passing of a God" and more recently read Whitehead's "The Door," "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing."   And let's not forget Whitehead's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft, "The Trap."  Today we add three to this pile, "Across the Gulf," "Jumbee" and "The Projection of Armand Dubois;" click the links in this sentence to read the same magazine versions of these three stories that I am reading.  If physical media is your thing, all three of today's stories are included in the big 2012 Whitehead collection Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead.

"Across the Gulf" 

I'm not here to truck in ethnic stereotypes, but today's three stories are, and "Across the Gulf" suggests that Scottish people are superstitious.  And here I thought they were cheap.  Well, I guess they can be both.  Anyway, Carrington the successful business lawyer is in his late thirties when his "Scotch" (I don't know when you are supposed to say "Scottish" and when you are supposed to say "Scotch;" I always say "Scottish," but Whitehead says "Scotch," like when he says "the Scotch are a dour race") mother dies.  Mom often claimed to have been visited by her own dead mother in dreams, right before something bad happened, and Carrington, though not superstitious himself, kind of worries he might see Mom in his dreams.  But for like six years, Mom stays out of Carrington's dreams.

Carrington is a workaholic, and, at age 43, his doctor tells him he'd better take the summer off.  So he goes to the Adirondacks to help a cousin on his mother's side, a minister who quit the clergy to become a fiction writer and run a boy's camp; the camp's business manager has keeled over and cuz could use some help from a man of business like Carrington.

Life in the country greatly improves Carrington's mental and physical health.  Then one night he dreams about his mother.  Then a couple of days later he eats some poisonous mushrooms; fortunately, the African-American cook staff help him vomit up the poison and he is OK.  Carrington realizes that his mother is still looking after him, a heart-warming experience.

This story is not very good.  There are lots of extraneous details; about the minister's career, for example, and then Whitehead describes for many paragraphs the discovery of the mushrooms, the examination of the mushrooms, the cooking of the mushrooms, and then Carrington's illness and recovery thanks to gulping down copious amounts of mustard, which induces vomiting.  People will complain that Herman Melville describes whales and the equipment and techniques of whalers in too much detail in Moby Dick, that it is boring, but as a 20th-century slacker I have no direct experience of whales and whaling, so I found that stuff engaging, the description of an alien world.  But cooking and eating and getting food poisoning are pretty common events, and having all this quotidian kitchen activity described in detail, even competently in Whitehead's able prose, was far from thrilling.  Also, the utility of the dream seems to be nil--Mom in the dream doesn't say "Don't et any wee poison mushrooms, laddie," or anything useful like that, all she does is tuck him into bed.  Whitehead does not establish a link between the dream and the poisoning, and leaves us wondering if this story is supposed to be creepy or heart-warming.

I have to give "Across the Gulf" a thumbs down, though a mild one--it is limp and boring rather than annoyingly bad, a story that is sort of long but confused and adds up to very little.  Maybe people who have or had good relationships with their mothers, or are very interested in mushrooms and mustard, will like it more than I did. 

"Across the Gulf" has reappeared in a few Whitehead anthologies, and in one of those Barnes and Noble instant remainder anthologies edited by Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, 100 Wild Little Weird Tales. 

"Jumbee"

It being the title story of a Whitehead collection, I am hoping for great things from "Jumbee."  In particular, I am hoping it is an actual voodoo story, as I have heard that Whitehead learned all about voodoo while living and working down in the Caribbean and put this knowledge to good use in his fiction, but in my readings of Whitehead's work thus far I have seen very little evidence of this!

In old books, people are always going away for a few months for their mental and physical health.  Lee is a Virginian, a veteran of World War I, a victim of a mustard gas attack.  To help recover, he goes to St. Croix for some months.  Curious about local customs, he asks around about something occult he has heard mentioned, "jumbee."  Black laborers and shopkeepers profess to not believe in such superstition--some even claim white people made it all up to scare their black employees into staying home at night.  But Lee gets a different answer from a wealthy man who is one-eighth African, Jaffray Da Silva, whose answer comes in the form of a creepy story.

Da Silva had a friend, a big fat Dane prone to heart attacks.  Da Silva and his pal were interested in the occult and supernatural, and had a pact--the first to die would try to contact the other from the other side!  Sure enough, when the fat guy dies, Da Silva suffers a terrifying visitation, apparently the Dane's soul or spirit contacting him, wordlessly alerting Da Silva that he has passed beyond the veil to the afterlife!

An hour or so after the disturbing visit, a servant comes from the fat guy's wife to Da Silva's house to summon him and alert him of his friend's death.  On the way to his dead friend's house, Da Silva sees an apparition--three ghosts of black people, hanging in the air, turning to continue facing Da Silva as he walks by.  These are the "jumbees" of the title, the ghosts of black people who always appear in a group of three.  They don't do or say anything, just hang there, looking at you.

Da Silva sits up with his friend's wife and sister-in-law a while, and then they go to bed as two black servants prepare the deceased's body.  Da Silva heads home; there is an old black woman sitting on the steps, apparently asleep.  Da Silva looks away a moment, looks back, and the woman is gone, but a white dog is bounding towards him to attack!  The woman was a were-dog!  Da Silva hits the dog a powerful blow on the skull with his walking stick, throwing himself off balance with the effort of his swing.  When he looks up again, the dog has vanished.

And that's it.  There is no explanation what connection there might be among the three crazy supernatural incidents, Da Silva's white friend sending him a message from beyond, the vision of the three African-Caribbean ghosts, and the attack by the were-dog.

Each of the three incidents is well-written and effective, but it is a little odd that Whitehead makes no effort (that I could see) to link them.  Are the jumbees mourning the dead white man?  Warning Da Silva of the impending attack by the lycanthrope?  Why do they always come in threes?  Maybe the idea is that jumbees and were-beasts are always stalking the night, and Da Silva hadn't seen them before because he wisely stays home at night, and the death of his friend serves as the impetus for him to venture forth into the haunted night of St. Croix.

I'll mildly recommend this one.  I suppose I should also warn my 21st-century readers that the characters in "Jumbee" express contempt or pity for black people (Da Silva says "full-blooded Africans"), suggesting that blacks are like children and also have excellent hearing, like that of a dog or cat.  I have to admit, I can't recall ever hearing that Africans have particularly good hearing before--there's so much racism out there, there are racist beliefs I haven't yet heard of!

"The Projection of Armand Dubois"

This is one of the Gerald Canevin stories; we've already read two Canevin tales, "The Trap" and "The Passing of a God" (links to my blog posts above.)  This one is set in St. Croix, before Canevin, the narrator, "became a landed-proprietor, as I did later, and was still making a variable living by the production and sale of my tales."  Canevin is the narrator merely of the brief frame--the actual story is one told to him by a white woman in her seventies, a widow who serves as narrator for like seven of the story's eight pages.

The woman in question was the young wife of an Anglican minister on St. Martin in the year 1880.  By chance, she discovered that her husband was owed money by two men, one a "white gentleman planter" and the other a "prosperous" "colored man."  Hubby had decided, for years, to not pursue these debts, but wife endeavored to get back the money they were owed.  The white man pays up within six months.

The "colored" individual, one-quarter African, is the Armand Dubois of the title.  We are told that Dubois was not respectable like so many West Indian "quadroons," but instead "his leanings, as sometimes happens, were to the Black side of his heredity" and he pays up, but "with a very bad grace" and only after visiting the rectory where the minister and wife lived, accompanied by a gang of blacks, to demand a chance to speak to her.  On the advice of a devoted black servant, who thinks Dubois very scary, the minster's wife refused to speak to Dubois.  There is reason to believe Dubois was planning to splash "vitriol" on the minister's wife from a vial he carried--I guess this would be sulfuric acid.

(Like "Jumbee," "The Projection of Armand Dubois" portrays black people as childish--impulsive, emotional, selfish, imitative and unoriginal.  Whitehead includes the parallel debt of the white man to suggest that Dubois only asked for a loan because he heard that the white man had got one, was aping the white man.)  

A month after the debt was reluctantly paid through the minister's agent, the minster's wife is awakened in the night by a series of supernatural apparitions.  The first is of Dubois in her room, menacing her, pantomiming the act of splashing a liquid on her.  She is awakened a second time by the appearance in her room of a goat, and a third time by the image of Dubois again, walking around her house, then through a wall.  The next day she learned that Dubois died the night before of some fever.

"The Projection of Armand Dubois" is similar to "Jumbee," what with a guy projecting his presence after death to another person, but this story is better constructed--we know why the supernatural events occur, because Dubois hates the woman who forced him to pay what he owed.  I guess whether Dubois really died of a fever and on his way to the afterlife terrorized the woman, or, died because he was casting a spell with the intention of seeking revenge, a spell that took the hazardous course of separating soul from body, is a mystery.  I personally recommend that you keep body and soul as closely bound together as possible, just to be safe.

I can moderately recommend "The Projection of Armand Dubois;" it is perhaps a little better than "Jumbee;" as I have suggested, the story's components are more coherently linked together, and Whitehead includes little details of life in the 19th-century West Indies that are sort of interesting (a lot more interesting than kitchen tips.)  This story is closer to what I was expecting when I started reading Whitehead, a tale of white people confronted by malignant black sorcery.  "The Projection of Armand Dubois" can be found in Jumbee, which I think our British friends published as two paperbacks, the second (which contains the saga of Monsieur Dubois) titled The Black Beast.

**********

We'll be taking more trips to the creepy West Indies with Henry S. Whitehead, but that will be in 1927.  For now, expect more 1926 weirdness here at MPorcius Fiction Log.