Things Lovecraft Country Gets Right About History

Ruby first mentions staying in a boarding house in "Sundown," but in the third episode, "Holy Ghost," directed by Daniel Sackheim and written by Misha Green, the audience sees Leti try to establish one of her own. Black-owned and Black-friendly boarding houses were key elements of survival during segregation, offering not only a place to live and food but providing a space for artistic collaboration, political activity, and safety.

According to Wear Your Voice, one of the most famous Black-owned boarding houses was deemed "N***erati Manor" by writer Zora Neale Hurston (pictured above). Owned by Black New Yorker Iolanthe Sydney, the boarding house was a rent-free space that was intended to provide housing to Black artists. And Hurston wasn't the only artist to pass through the doors. Countee Cullen, Dorothy West, and Langston Hughes were also prominent features.

It was in N***erati Manor that the literary journal Fire was produced. According to Langston Hughes, "we set out to publish Fire, a Negro quarterly of the arts èpater le bourgeois, to burn up a lot of the old stereotyped Uncle Tom ideas of the past." Unfortunately, Fire's first issue was also its last.