ONE DAY in the fall of 2021, I received a voicemail message at work. The caller announced, “This is Cecil Brown from Stanford University.” I knew the name—we had met at an academic conference a decade earlier, where we spoke about his 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy, but we hadn’t kept in touch. This time, Brown was calling about something else.
He was interested in my recent book, The Black Romantic Revolution, about the poets involved in the U.S. abolition movement—in particular the chapter focused on the enslaved poet George Moses Horton. Brown told me that he had learned about Horton when he was a child in rural North Carolina and that he’d been thinking about Horton for more than seventy years. I was excited to get the call and fascinated by the connection between Horton, the antebellum poet, and Brown, the postmodern novelist and critic. We agreed to talk again soon. Sure enough, a week or so went by, and he called again; after another week or so, we talked again; and on and on. As I was writing this piece, I dug up that initial voicemail and had a sweet laugh. Now I know Cecil’s voice well, but on the recording, he sounds different, more business-like, “from Stanford University”—which of course he is, in a sense, but he’s also much more.
In the course of our conversations, Cecil let me know that he was at work on a digital project about Horton. His idea was to use virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology to restage the experience of encountering Horton in antebellum Chapel Hill, where he had improbably made a name for himself as a poet from the 1820s until the Civil War.
I had some doubts about this effort: I have seen my fair share of ed-tech scams and overhyped digital humanities projects, after all. But against my qualms, Cecil kept arguing the necessity of a fully realized digital Horton. I came to see that his approach to digital development was an outgrowth of his participation in avant-garde aesthetic experiments across media since the 1960s and his decades of experience teaching in the Bay Area, which has made him fluent in the language of education and technology. The project is partly intended to help students find connections between the long history of Black oral culture and hip-hop. Cecil also hopes that it will make for an exemplary instance of “Black tech” and inspire more Black young people to develop technology. But there is more to it: a grander vision, one might say. Reviving Horton is an example of what Cecil’s old friend Ishmael Reed once called “Neo-Hoodoo,” an African diasporic ritual intervention on contemporary American life.