Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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and Jeff’s dice click with each roll as he mechanically repeats his puppet-like action, oblivious to the approach of the now hatless Jones in his torn uniform. Jones asks, “Is you—is you—a ha’nt?,” spends a second lead bullet to make Jeff disappear, and then “plunges wildly into the underbrush.”63 (See p. 79.)
Station to station, little goes according to Jones’ plan. Scene four discovers a wide road in the forest. Jones enters panting and worn down, his uniform disheveled. He discards his useless spurs and asks his Baptist God to shield him from more “ha’nts.” A chain gang of black prisoners enters and creates a mechanical mime show of swinging picks and shoveling. The white guard carries a rifle and a whip and motions to Jones to join in the gang’s work, which he does. The guard approaches, lashes Jones with his whip, and turns away. Jones attacks the guard with his shovel but quickly finds his hands empty. So he spends his third lead bullet, only to find himself lost again as the forest moves in around him.
Social reality and personal history dissolve at this point. He now races backward into cultural and racial memory. Scene five opens on a large clearing with a dead tree trunk in the center that resembles an auction block. Jones enters with his shoes and clothes in shreds. He asks the Lord for forgiveness for killing Jeff and the guard and, again, to keep the haunts away. As he jettisons his destroyed shoes, he notices a crowd of Southern planters, an auctioneer, and spectators, as well as a group of enslaved Africans to be sold. In the “dumb show” that ensues, the auctioneer appraises Jones’ physical qualities, reducing him to an enslaved body, inferior and less than human, capable strictly of manual labor and mindless force. The silent bidding begins. Caught in the nightmare of being sold on the block, Jones shoots twice, which leaves only the silver bullet in the chamber of his revolver.
Scene six, the next step backward toward Africa, is the shortest of the play. The forest has stripped Jones down to torn pants that look like a “breech cloth” and encloses him in a space “like the dark, noisome hold of some ancient vessel.”64 (See p. 86.) Two rows of swaying, shackled bodies become visible. They moan in unison and sway with the roll of the ship at sea. Jones tries to shut out the vision but ultimately takes his place as part of the rocking, wailing chorus. As the light and the voices fade, he struggles to move deeper into the forest, and the drumbeat becomes louder and more persistent.
The historical and literary treatments of the Middle Passage (from the early sixteenth through the first half of the nineteenth century) create an archive as devastating as the twentieth century’s Holocaust: capture, sale, slave-holding fortresses, diseases, sexual exploitation, torture, purposefully overcrowded transport vessels, the deaths of hundreds of thousands at sea, all leading to arrival in the Americas and the repetition of the same conditions of holding pens, auctions, and death sentences as enslaved laborers on New World plantations. Thus scene six presents a condensed version of more contemporary works, such as Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (staged 1967) while, even in its brevity, providing a glimpse of the impact that Derek Walcott records in the poem “Laventille” (about a Port of Spain favela, published 1965): “Something inside is laid wide like a wound, / some open passage that has cleft the brain, / some deep, amnesiac blow. We left / somewhere a life we never found, / customs and gods that are not born again, / some crib, some grille of light / clanged shut on us in bondage…”65 If a Kurtzian sense of “the horror, the horror” exists, the hold of the slave ship would be its most appropriate location.
In scene seven, the still wailing and trance-like Jones arrives at the riverbank (presumably the Congo). Instead of the joy of homecoming, fear overcomes him and he again asks the Lord to protect him. The Congo witchdoctor (described earlier) begins his performance and “croon” to the intensifying drumbeats. The mime drama he acts out signifies Jones’ role as the sacrificial victim who must pay for his sins. Terrified, Jones asks for “mercy on dis po’ sinner” as the witchdoctor summons a huge crocodile from the river. Now nearly possessed, Jones “squirms” on the ground toward the beast. The drums reach their most hypnotic intensity, and the witchdoctor shrieks in “furious exultation.” Suddenly Jones again prays to “Lawd Jesus,” awakens from the trance, and fires the silver bullet into the eyes of the crocodile. He is left prostrate on the riverbank with only the sound of the tom-tom.
The Formless Fears, Jeff, the chain gang, the auction block, the slaver’s hold, and finally, the sacrifice: all are products of Jones’ imagination, his panicked nightmare of slipping from the privilege of American civilization and power which, in spite of his position on the lowest rung of the social ladder, has been ingrained in him. Instead of embracing his racial past, he fears sliding back to the heathen savagery of the Congo origins he has been taught to fear as a personal “heart of darkness.”
Scene eight returns the action to a more concrete social reality. It begins with Smithers’ assurances that no one can catch the wily Jones, and Old Lem’s certainty that he will be caught. Lem guarantees that assertion by revealing that he and his followers spent the night molding silver bullets to end Jones’ charmed life. Smithers admits reluctantly that Jones may have lost his way and circled back rather than crossing through the forest. Shots are fired, and the divested body of the ex-Emperor Jones, now no different than those he called “black trash,” is carried onto the stage. Smithers asks, “Where’s yer ‘igh an’ mighty airs now, yer bloomin’ Majesty?,” and the play ends with his last comment, “Silver bullets! Gawd blimey, but yer died in the ‘eighth o’ style, any ‘ow!”66 (See p. 93.)
Although still compelling, The Emperor Jones can make for awkward contemporary reading: “Lem is a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type, dressed only in a loin cloth”;67 (See p. 90.) Jones “is a tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded negro of middle age. His features are typically negroid, yet there is something decidedly distinctive about his face—an underlying strength of will, a hardy, self-reliant confidence in himself that inspires respect”;68 (See p. 57.) whereas O’Neill describes Smithers as “a tall, stoop-shouldered man about forty. His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam’s apple, looks like an egg” with yellowish skin, “small sharp features,” and a pointed nose turned red by too much rum.69 (See p. 55.)
O’Neill established his descriptive ethnographic style even earlier. In Bound East for Cardiff, Cocky describes his undesirable New Guinean sexual partner as a “bloomin’ nigger. Greased all over with coconut oil, she was… Bloody old cow, I says.”70 (See p. 260.) Cocky returns to describing New Guinean “cannibals” in The Moon of the Caribbees while the crew of the Glencairn anchored off an unspecified West Indian island await the arrival of the rum woman—Bella—and three other “West Indian Negresses.”71 (See p. 228.) Instead of the beat of the drum, a “melancholy negro chant, faint and far-off, drifts, crooning over the water.”72 (See p. 229.) Cocky finds Bella “bloomin’ ugly…like a bloody organ-grinder’s monkey,” and when challenged by Paddy, Cocky calls him “A ‘airy ape.”73 (See p. 237.) Two of the women who come onboard for the officers are described by Driscoll as “two swate little slips av things, near as white as you an’ me are.” When the four other women enter, the scene note indicates, “All four are distinct negro types. They wear light-colored, loose-fitting clothes and have bright bandana handkerchiefs on their heads.”74 (See p. 241.) The Dreamy Kid demonstrates similar racialized character descriptions—“negresses” with a wizened (Mammy) or round (Ceely) face or a “young good-looking negress, highly rouged” (Irene), or Dreamy, who is a “well-built, good-looking young negro, light in color.”75 Brutus Jones uses “nigger” both self-referentially and as a pejorative to describe African-Americans such as Jeff or the island “natives” he has duped into making him emperor. Although a slightly up-scaled version, Smithers shares much of the same vocabulary and attitudes about race as Cocky in the sea.
Even though it sounds better when spoken than when read, the dialectal nature of the language makes the play more difficult to perform in a contemporary context. For that reason, perhaps, Charles Gilpin, the African-American actor who first acted the role in 1920, began to alter some of the lines, over O’Neill’s strong objections. O’Neill may have attempted to transcribe the speech of Adam Scott or other black acquaintances, but Jones’ speech probably also records standard stage language for black-faced white actors on the professional stage and even contains traces of minstrelsy. Scene seven begins: “What–what