American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

Afterword: Haunted Houses

211 Afterword Haunted Houses The Executioner’s Mirror Did you say that you are a poet? Where do you come from? I notice your skin is so smooth . . . Executioner, do you hear me? I granted you his head, Take it, but bring me the skin unharmed   The skin is desirable to me and precious . . . Your skin will be my carpet It will be the beauty of beauties, Did you say that you are a poet? —­Adonis1 Just outside Natchez, Mississippi, in a thicket of imposing live oaks, sits the main house of the Longwood Plantation. Described by its owner, Haller Nutt, as an “oriental remembrancer of times past,” the octagonal structure stands six stories high and is capped by a large onion dome. Longwood was never meant to be a working plantation, and the main house was a place where Nutt’s wife, Julia, planned on holding balls and social events. “It is creating much admiration,” Nutt effused in a May 19, 1861, letter to his architect, Samuel Sloan. “I think after this the octagon ِ ‫اف‬ّ‫ي‬‫الس‬ ُ‫ة‬‫رآ‬ِ‫م‬ -‫؟‬ٌ‫ر‬‫شاع‬ َ ‫ّك‬‫ن‬‫إ‬ َ ‫قلت‬ ‫هل‬ ً‫ام‬‫ناع‬ َ ‫جلدك‬ ُّ ‫س‬ِ‫ح‬ُ‫أ‬ ‫؟‬ َ ‫جئت‬ ‫أين‬ ‫من‬ . . . ‫ني؟‬ُ‫ع‬‫تسم‬ ‫اف‬َّ‫ي‬‫س‬ ‫ه‬َ‫رأس‬ َ ‫ك‬ُ‫ت‬‫وهب‬، ّ ‫س‬َ ُ‫م‬‫ي‬ ‫أن‬ ْ‫ر‬‫واحذ‬ َ‫د‬‫الجل‬ ِ ‫وهات‬ ،ُ‫ه‬‫خذ‬ ‫أغىل‬ ‫و‬ ‫يل‬ ‫أشهى‬ ُ‫د‬‫الجل‬ . . . ً‫ا‬‫بساط‬ ‫يل‬ ‫جلدك‬ ‫سيكون‬ ٍ‫مجمل‬ ‫أجمل‬ ‫سيكون‬، ‫شاعر‬ ‫إنك‬ ‫قلت‬ ‫هل‬ 212 Afterword will be the style.”2 Antebellum writers who wanted to critique the despotism , cruelty, and sexual licentiousness of slave owners often used Oriental imagery to describe the South. But Nutt, a slave owner, was only too happy to Orientalize himself and his summer home. Nutt’s enthusiasm for the Arabo-­ Islamic “style,” coupled with his musings on the Oriental house’s “remembrancer” function, evidence a belief in taste as a form of possession. Through Longwood Nutt sought to control both time and space. The wealthy Louisiana plantation owner claims that Longwood allows him to dictate the meaning of the past, to architecturally write the history of what will be remembered. The aesthetic is rarely free from the political. By transplanting the exotic into the familiar geography of the antebellum American South, Nutt co-­ opted an Arabo-­ Islamic cultural referent as a sign of his wealth, power, and influence. But the history Nutt would have remembered through the Longwood structure was ultimately out of his control. Nutt’s architect, Sloan, lived in Philadelphia, as did the work crew he brought to Natchez. By 1861, Sloan and his men had erected the exterior structure of Longwood. The interior was never completed. The Philadelphia workers dropped their spades and picked up muskets. When they returned south, it was to fire those muskets at Confederate soldiers. Longwood remains to this day a ghostly skeleton. The house is an odd Oriental ruin of antebellum America’s obsession with Arabo-­ Islamic forms, as well as a reminder of the role those forms played in conjuring transcendental and transhistorical fantasies of American identity. But Longwood is also a testament to how those Arabo-­ Islamic forms change meaning over time and why we should pay attention to the stories embedded within the American fantasies they shape. As a façade without an interior, the Longwood mansion offers a visual analogue for the message of Adonis’s “The Executioner’s Mirror.” The poem has three main players: a poet, a speaker, and an executioner who is doing the speaker’s bidding. The speaker demands that the poet’s head be discarded once he has been executed. He also demands that the poet’s smooth skin be preserved as an exquisite adornment. The speaker wants the executioner to separate the poet’s words from the poet so that he can co-­ opt them to perpetuate his own power and luxury. Adonis implicitly warns the reader to pay attention to what happens when a writer’s words are taken from a writer, taken out of context, and translated into someone else’s property. The reflected, refracted, and stolen subjectivity in Adonis ’s poem offers a working example of one way the arabesque as a literary Afterword 213 form operates: through linguistic and epistemic violence. But the Longwood mansion, itself a kind of detached skin, also offers a lesson on arabesque representation. For if Longwood is, in one regard, an antebellum form hollowed of content, in another regard its haunted postbellum history accumulates in that hollow. The story Longwood tells is not an Oriental story but rather a very American story, a story of Civil War. American Arabesque began with an anecdote about the interruptions of the American Civil War, and it ends with a return to those interruptions and the competing fantasies of American identity they engender. Prior to the Civil War...