"Black Canaan" is a short story by American writer Robert E. Howard, originally published in the June 1936 issue of Weird Tales.

The related stories include "The Shadow of the Beast", "Black Hound of Death", "Moon of Zimbabwe", and "Pigeons from Hell".

While in New Orleans, Kirby Buckner is confronted by an elderly Creole woman who whispers a bizarre warning: "Trouble on Tularoosa Creek!

As the sun sets, Buckner feels himself drawn towards the black settlement of Goshen, unable to resist or even speak of the witch's spell to Braxton.

Buckner, totally helpless in the grip of a voodoo spell, finds himself watching the rites of Damballah from a grove of trees.

The black people flee in panic, their uprising haulted, as Buckner stalks out of the swamp and kills Stark.

The burden of this terrible knowledge is a secret Buckner does not share with his fellow whites, creating an unspoken bond between himself and the black people of Canaan.

He mentions the Scotch-Irish settlement of Holly Springs, Arkansas, where his grandfather, William Benjamin Howard, settled in 1858.

After recounting some of the local history, Howard goes on to write: Probably the most picturesque figure in the Holly Springs country was Kelly the 'conjer man', who held sway among the black population of the `70s.

He lifted 'conjers' and healed disease by incantation and nameless things made of herbs and ground snake bones... Later he began to branch into darker practices... [T]he black population came to fear him as they did not fear the Devil, and Kelly assumed more and more a brooding, satanic aspect of dark majesty and sinister power; when he began casting his brooding eyes on white folks as if their souls, too, were his to dandle in the hollow of his hand, he sealed his doom...They began to fear the conjure man and one night he vanished...In Howard's following letter to Lovecraft, he responds to the latter's suggestion that he make use of Kelly in his fiction; "Kelly the conjure-man was quite a character, but I fear I could not do justice to such a theme as you describe.

The article begins with: About seventy-five miles north-east of the great Smackover oil field of Arkansas lies a densely wooded country of pinelands and rivers, rich in folklore and tradition.

Here, in the early 1850s came a sturdy race of Scotch-Irish pioneers pushing back the frontier and hewing homes in the tangled wilderness.

In his obituary of Howard, H. P. Lovecraft singled it out for praise; "Other powerful fantasies lay outside the connected series -- these including...a few distinctive tales with a modern setting, such as the recent 'Black Canaan' with its genuine regional background and its clutchingly compelling picture of the horror that stalks through the moss-hung, shadow-cursed, serpent-ridden swamps of the American far South.

(The narrator Kirby Buckner describes the use of the term by others, and uses it himself when conversing with peers, but uses "black" or "negro" when addressing the reader directly.)