"The Scarlet Letter's" Dark Secret: Who was the 'Black Man?'
While reading The Scarlet Letter for research, two words gave me pause: “Black Man.” The words Hawthorne chose to describe a devilish figure haunting the forest around the Puritan colony. I have an MDiv, so demonic imagery isn’t new to me. Hawthorne could have used any biblical epithets to refer to the devil, but he wrote the book in 1850. Racial tension was nearing its country-dividing precipice. So, why did he choose those specific words?
The character is mentioned sparingly in the text. When Pearl pesters her mother, Hester, about the “Black Man” in chapter sixteen, she retells a story of how the being haunts with a book of iron where people sign their names in blood and in exchange, the man puts his mark on their chest. Pearl even asks if the “A” on Hester’s chest is from the “Black Man.” [1] However, the “Black Man” isn’t the evil person who comes for them, nor is he the villain of the novel. That role goes to Roger Chillingsworth, Hester’s jealous husband, hellbent on revenge. The “Black Man” had nothing to do with the events of the novel.
So why include him? Why choose that specific term?
The racial fear and connotation of the “Black Man” wouldn’t be lost on his readers, primarily white, affluent Americans in a country that was tearing itself apart over slavery. Yet, no objections. His biggest issue with his readers stemmed from the book’s introduction, “The Custom House.” The term was reprinted in every edition, including the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, published by Ohio State University in 1962.[2] There had to be a reason why “Black Man” was needed to illustrate a devil. To understand why, I had to trace the origins of this imagery.
Black didn’t always mean “evil.” Throughout history and into the modern day, the color black has symbolized winter, water, experience, wisdom, and even life and death. For the Puritans, however, it would’ve meant only one thing – evil. Yet when I searched the Bible for references to the color itself being associated with evil, I found none. So, where did the connection come from?
In Genesis 1 and 2, the beginning of the universe was black (ḥōšek (חֹשֶׁךְ) or “darkness”). Isaiah 45:3 designates darkness as sacred, as it was the color before creation. Throughout the Old Testament and New Testament, the word “darkness” was used to describe ignorance, sin, rebellion, judgment, separation from God, and evil itself. It wasn’t an indication of skin color.
There was no social construct of ethnicity as a color; rather, it was culture. We see this in Acts 22:8, where the Romans are surprised to learn that Paul is a Roman citizen, and in Numbers 12:1, where Miriam and Aaron oppose Moses because he married a Cushite woman. Kush was located in modern-day Sudan, indicating that Kushites were dark-skinned. They weren’t a slave race. It was a kingdom respected for its elite soldiers and was a significant power player throughout African history. Miriam and Aaron might have thought that Moses was being presumptuous by marrying above his station.[3]
When the color black was used, it was either descriptive (such as in Rev. 6:5 describing the black horse) or positive. In Song of Solomon 1:5, “I am black and lovely,” the term black is rooted in the term shachor (שָׁחֹר), literally “black,” which appears six times in the Old Testament and denotes the color.[4] The word “black” was never used negatively in either the Hebrew texts or the Koine Greek texts. The scriptural evidence was clear: this connection didn’t originate in the Bible. Where did the connection start?
I moved to the apocrypha. In the fourth-century apocryphal Syrian text The Cave of Treasures, the authors attempt to establish a genealogical record of figures in Genesis. They drew the line between Ham’s line (to include his son Canaan) and the Kingdom of Kush, citing them as “servants of servants.”[5] This gave rise to the narrative that if you were black, you were a rightful slave.
This tradition continued for centuries. During the Early Medieval Era, the radical interpretation spread throughout Eastern Christianity and Islamic literature, reinforcing the racialization of colors to a scale of black is evil and white is good. By the thirteenth century, it became visual. In the Codex Gigas (“Devil’s Bible”), created by an anonymous Benedictine monk, the devil is depicted as a being with two horns, white eyes, a large nose, bright red lips, large ears, two tongues, and a black and green face.[6] This codex traveled throughout Europe before being acquired by the Swedish Library in 1649. The work illustrated a pattern that persisted for hundreds of years in medieval art: black was evil, white was good.
It was then in the sixteenth century that biblical interpretations were weaponized to justify the slavery of Africans. The enslavers claimed Christianity, and Protestant and Catholic leaders alike justified the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a fulfillment of “Canaan’s Curse.” To the white enslavers, the slaves weren’t people. They were subhuman, servants of servants, created by God to be cursed, their skin as proof. Only two hundred years later, Hawthorne would publish his work, choosing the exact words to connect “Black Man” with evil.
What does that mean for the black teenager hearing these words in English class as a part of an assigned text? Does it create a moment of pause within, or is it just another brick on the enormous wall of racial inequality that America has been building for centuries?
I can’t answer that question. But I know we’re still teaching The Scarlet Letter, ignoring the larger issue. In most classrooms, the “Black Man” might be mentioned once. The character is treated as Puritan world-building, not evidence of how deep racism in American Literature runs.
For the record, I am not advocating for this text to be banned. The Scarlet Letter remains essential reading for understanding Early Colonial America, Puritan theology, American moral anxiety, and shame culture. Teaching it without the context, however, only perpetuates the issue Hawthorne chose to continue. When we gloss over the “Black Man,” we inadvertently signal that subtle racism in literature is still justified, and we’re teaching those who are non-black students to ignore it.
Hawthorne wrote it in 1850, drawing on centuries of racialized Christian theology and imagery, as well as on oral traditions passed down through his religious community and on his research into the Puritans. Whether he understood what harm he would cause, I can’t know. The choice to include it mattered. It still matters. The metaphor didn’t stay in the Puritan colony, or even in 1850s Boston. We still use it.
The Scarlet Letter is only a sampling, but it represents a pattern in how we encode the natural biases of our culture into the artful works we consume today. We observed something similar in post-9/11 narratives, spy thrillers, and action films, in which the villains were Middle Eastern. In the 1980s, they were Russians to Americans and Americans to Russian cinema. We can do better. We can push the boundaries in art, in culture, in education, and in our daily lives without having to resort to perpetuating the casual racism encoded in our unchecked moral vocabulary.
With All My Heart,
Geoffrey
[1] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, December 1, 2015), 172.
[2] Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1.
[3] E. Randolph; O’Brien Richards, Brandon J., Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (IVP Books, 2012), 59-61.
[4] James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1988).
[5] E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Cave of Treasures: A History of the Patriarchs and the Kings Their Successors from the Creation to the Crucifixion of Christ (London, England: The Religious Tract Society, 1927), The Vineyard of Noah. https://sacred-texts.com/chr/bct/bct00.htm.
[6] Codex Gigas, (National Library of Sweden, c. 1229). https://lccn.loc.gov/2021667604.