from left: angela bassett, jessica lange, and kathy bates, in american horror story: coven/fx

Does ‘American Horror Story: Coven’ Have a Race Problem?

There is no forgetting the violent history of racism in this witch tale set in New Orleans. But I worry that it might be too forgiving

[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD] Last year, I fell in love with Ryan Murphy. Together with co-creator Brad Falchuk, he delivered a brilliant American horror story, Asylum — the second in his anthology series — set inside a 1964-era Catholic-run mental institution that struck the perfect balance of great storytelling, camp, searing social commentary, and anchored it with an exquisite ensemble cast led by Murphy’s muse, Jessica Lange, and his muse-in-waiting, Sarah Paulson. It was, among other things, an eviscerating indictment of the Catholic church and a lacerating reminder of a not-so-distant-time when homosexuality was categorized and treated as a mental disease. We gain access into this asylum when an ambitious lesbian journalist, Lana Winters (Paulson), is wrongly committed by a nun (Lange) who presides over the patients. Sister Jude is fiercely protecting this maddest of madhouses from the likes of Lana — who is eager to write about a serial killer rumored to be a patient at the hospital — when really it is Lana who ultimately needs protection. Because it’s a place where the young woman is subjected to such barbarous acts as conversion-aversion treatments by a psychiatrist revealed later to be that serial killer; and where we bear witness to unspeakable human science experiments by a Mengele-esque Nazi doctor hired by the priest who runs the hospital. These are just a few of the many horrors at the Briarcliff mental institution, and if they hit close to the bone for this lesbian Jewish viewer, I can only imagine how much closer they crushed up against the heart and soul of Murphy, a gay man who grew up Catholic. These stories drew on a hell of a lot of pain. Stress on “hell” and “pain.”

But now, with this new horror story, Coven, I’m getting worried Murphy and Falchuk have gotten in over their heads in dealing with the fraught terrain of race. We’re halfway through this season, a story inspired by our loathsome history, this one about warring witches in racially charged New Orleans. They wasted no time getting right to the gore — and not run-of-the-mill-genre gore. This is pogo-sticking-on-a-minefield storytelling, with images and characters that deliberately hew close to reality, to a past that we can barely talk about let alone train our eyes on.

The season premiere had some of the most brutal and repulsive scenes I’ve ever seen on TV, as it flashed back to the 1830s to introduce Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie — based on a real horror show of a person, a soulless town socialite who had tortured, mutilated, and murdered her slaves—played here with a little too much soul by Kathy Bates. In her desperation to preserve a youthful glow, LaLaurie tries all sorts of balms — even daubing blood on her face. Blood, we soon learn, that is human, drained from the living bodies of her slaves. (There are even more excruciating stories that are revealed in future episodes, but I just can’t ...) Which is to say: Not a detail is spared, as we behold the stomach-turning, torture-pornographic sight of LaLaurie mutilating a still-breathing slave that she suspects is flirting with one of her daughters (he’s not). She drags him up to the attic where we see other slaves in cages in various states of flay and decay. It makes me physically ill to even recount this, to summon these images again; it was traumatizing enough for this typically unflinching viewer to see it the first time.

Ordinarily, I’d have stopped watching. Except that I have come to trust Murphy because, while it is often hard to predict where he will direct his outrageous narratives, I do know that the man cannot resist avenging evil. And halfway into the season, things seem to be heading in that direction for LaLaurie. But complicating matters is the fact that this punishment — which wouldn’t be Madame’s first — is paired with a complex moral quandary gnawing at one of the witches, who has gotten ensnared into a Driving Miss Daisy–like relationship with her. More on that in a moment.

The real LaLaurie was punished by outraged local citizens, who, upon discovering what she had done to her slaves, ransacked and demolished her mansion. She fled to Paris (bitch got off easy), where she was believed to have died. In Coven, her whole family is hanged before her, and black voodoo priestess Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) curses her with eternal life and locks her up in a pine box, buries her, forcing her to listen to the world continue on without her, and to be alone in her thoughts, memories, grief, and nightmares.

The LaLaurie we see in present-day New Orleans is one who has been disinterred by Fiona Goode (Lange), the Supreme of a coven of Salem-descended witches who lives in Miss Robichaux’s School for Exceptional Young Ladies, housed in a classic Garden District manse. A self-described liberal (she voted for Obama twice, she tells a scandalized LaLaurie, and adds that there’s nothing she hates more than a racist), Fiona is, like the eternal-living monster LaLaurie, desperate to find a cure for this aging thing. Growing older, Fiona’s becoming invisible to men who were once so easy to seduce. Her barren daughter hates her and she worries she has no legacy, besides one of evil: She seized her supreme power when she was young by slitting the throat of her mentor, only to squander away her years of supremacy. Now that Fiona’s dying of cancer, she’s cleaving to her quickly vanishing power with all her might, even if it means killing off her protégés.

What Fiona wants with LaLaurie is less clear now than it was earlier in the season, when she was desperate to learn the secret of youth everlasting. But know that LaLaurie is a hot commodity for Marie Laveau, who holds the secret to eternal life,and who is eager to exact revenge once again on that diabolical slaveowner (perhaps this time she’ll try it a la LaLaurie — that’ll keep her from reemerging from six feet under). But Laveau isn’t eager to share any secrets with the white witches of Salem, who have tried for centuries to appropriate her magic and just about everything else. She’d rather see them burn to the ground. And she has plans to make that happen.

The core of this multilayered horror story is set in the present-day — 300 years after the Salem witch trials — and portrays the end of a truce of a long-fought war between the white Salem witches and Laveau (a character based on the daughter of a nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole woman of the same name, who was born free). There was a real Marie Laveau, who evolved into the New Orleans voodoo priestess legend still celebrated today. Like Bassett’s Marie Laveau, the real Laveau had a lover named Christophe (on Coven, he’s enslaved and mutilated by LaLaurie and turned into a minotaur) and worked as a hairdresser — except that nineteenth-century Laveau tended to rich white women’s hair (disbelievers in the occult thought she’d drawn her powers of divination from overhearing information and gossip from her clients).

In Coven, Laveau has her own salon, which is devoted to a black clientele, and has lived hundreds of years (her actual time of death was widely debated; people claimed to see her long after she was said to have passed), and has subsequently witnessed centuries of atrocities perpetrated against her community in the antebellum and Reconstructionist years— lynchings, burnings, flayings, rapes. And she doesn’t believe the past is past: Why would she, when you can still be tried as a victim of a homicide if you’re black, or blown to bits for being on a white man’s doorstep asking for help ? And in this role, Bassett’s Laveau serves as an enemy and foil to Lange’s Fiona, there to react with a righteous vengeance, and be a constant educator and reminder for the younger members of her community, and to the viewer, of America’s gruesome past — a moral conscience and an enforcer. She will not forget and she will not forgive. Hers is a crucial role. But rendered here, hers is not a fully dimensional one, certainly not as complex as Fiona’s, or even the horrendous Madame LaLaurie, whose attempts to become enlightened by her growing bond with her mistress (yes, mistress), Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) — the one black member of the Salem coven at Miss Robichaux’s School — opens a door to redemption, a door that should be nailed shut.

Because Fiona, who is a narcissistic, elitist, acerbic, vindictive, and petty woman — and a truly shitty mother — also has genuine moments of compassion, humanity. We watch her bring a stillborn back to life to the overwhelming relief of a grieving new mother; share her vision with a dying black woman during their chemo treatments that she’ll live to see her child’s wedding day. And we glimpse, too, her at her most vulnerable, as she grasps the fact of her mortality, see her hair falling out by the handfuls from chemotherapy, her power fading, her light dimming, feeling invisible and undesirable, desperate for one more love affair.

I am certain Laveau has these moments in her day-to-day life, too, but we simply don’t get to spend as much quality time with her. (Besides, you know Murphy will bestow upon Jessica Lange the meatiest, most richly flawed role so that she will crush your heart, make you fall in love with her, forgive her, and want her to triumph despite everything.) I worry that in casting Laveau as simply a foil, a reactor, we may reflexively root against her. Because what Laveau most wants is to take down every last one of those witches, who are guilty by association with Fiona and those before her. And since we spend most of our time with the Supreme and her coven at Miss Robichaux’s — where half the charges, led by Fiona’s daughter Cordelia (Paulson), want to kill her, we feel deeply conflicted about whether we want her head, too, no matter how much evidence we’re presented with. For Ms. Goode is anything but. She’s more responsible than anyone inside or outside the witchy world for the fact that theirs is an ever-shrinking coven — she burnt her gadfly Myrtle Snow at the stake, the first witch-burning in nearly a century. But she doesn’t harbor illusions about being good. And though her enemy is black, she does not perceive herself to be a racist, nor is she presented as one — just a good-old-fashioned Waspy diva beeyotch. Her insults toward Laveau seem more steeped in class than race, an important distinction to Fiona. It makes it easier for us to forgive her, and to want her to survive. Maybe too easy.

But it’s the weird bond that has been forged between LaLaurie and Queenie that is my deepest concern. A series of events have drawn the two closer than either would have expected, and certainly more than Queenie would like (Fiona ordered LaLaurie to fully submit to the young black woman, and become her slave). Queenie seeks out Marie Laveau, who wants to lure the black witch away from the very white coven (for one thing, she doesn’t want her going down with those Salem witches when the house burns to the ground). But she’s conflicted, because she doesn’t quite feel connected to the other girls, but she’s not sure she connects with Laveau, either. Still, Queenie capitulates to her demand to bring her LaLaurie; in turn, Laveau rewards the girl by giving her the pleasure of slicing the old bag first. But can Queenie bear it? Can we, when Bates’s LaLaurie looks so terrified? And when the young witch appears to have betrayed her trust?

A glimpse into next week’s episode shows Queenie feeling torn — maybe even remorseful, guilty? No matter how many flashbacks we’re shown to be reminded of LaLaurie’s sociopathy, we also get seduced into sympathizing with her, or at least feeling sorry for her because Queenie does. And the reason is because LaLaurie went from a person who thrived on instilling fear in others to a person who is trapped in a constant state of fear, and one who, because she is an anachronism, suddenly thrust into a world 200 years into the future and desperately trying to catch up, is cartoonishy daft. That’s the person we can relate to. So our instinct is to give in to her — to want to forgive her. (It’s also helped by the fact that Kathy Bates is a fantastic comic actress and has admitted to wanting to humanize her.) And that is a huge problem: We need to be outraged and never forget that outrage. We need to want to tighten, not loosen, that noose because there are some things that are not forgivable. LaLaurie is not to be forgiven. Not ever.

I see what Murphy is doing here, and I want it, too: to watch a dialogue between a slaveowner from 200 years ago, and a 21st century black woman. But this is not the right slaveowner to be in that conversation. I believe in redemption. Yet each story we learn about LaLaurie’s past is worse than the one before it, proving again and again that she’s not your run-of-the-mill slaveowner. She’s a sadistic psychopath, not only sadistic to her slaves, but to her daughters, too — and you don’t recover from being that kind of person. It’s who you are, even if you’ve been buried alive with your own thoughts for 200 years.

But forgiveness and redemption are recurring themes in Murphy’s work and especially in American Horror Story —he may be a recovering Catholic, but certain values are ingrained in a person. I appreciate that — it’s one of the things I most admire about him. But what I also admire about Murphy, perhaps even more so, is that he has also demonstrated that he can withhold forgiveness, as he did with Asylum, when he incinerated the Nazi doctor and essentially executed a corrupt Catholic priest who colluded with the doctor’s egregious crimes. This New Orleans horror story isn’t over, so it’s not too late: There’s still time to do what he will with Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie. But I’m extremely uneasy. I hate that I want Fiona to triumph. But way more so: I hate that I spent even a split second feeling sympathy for the very embodiment of the worst kind of evil.