Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill

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      Part of the play’s inspiration may spring from Adam Scott, a black bartender at Holt’s Grocery in New London, Connecticut. He seems to be a model for many of Brutus Jones’ religious and social attitudes and beliefs,52 although probably not for his speech. Black friends in Greenwich Village, Jamaican sailors O’Neill knew, and “his readings on Toussaint L’Ouverture and Henri Christophe”53 were important as well, just as they no doubt were in the creation of the urban setting of the young gangster Dreamy in The Dreamy Kid. But most accounts credit the key source of the play as a story O’Neill heard sometime after July 1915, told by circus man and friend Jack Croak about the Haitian military strong man and short-termed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam (25 February–27 July 1915). Sam apparently claimed that only silver bullets could kill him and he carried a revolver loaded with them in order to, should the need arise, kill himself. He publicly executed his predecessor and over 160 followers, but only six months later, angry protesters pulled him from the French Embassy where he had fled for asylum, killed him, and left his body in the street to be torn apart by an angry mob. On Sam’s death, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the US Marine Corps to invade and occupy Haiti, where they stayed until 1934. The play’s setting on an island “as yet not self-determined by White Marines” signals O’Neill awareness of the US occupation.

      O’Neill also almost certainly used the flamboyant King Henri Christophe—named president in 1807 but, more importantly, ruler of Northern Haiti from 1811 to 1820—for other aspects of Jones’ character. Not Haitian by birth but from the Caribbean island of Grenada (in some accounts, St. Kitts), Christophe was apparently apprenticed or sold into sea service and later arrived in Haiti as a young man. Rumors place him fighting with French units in the American Revolutionary War, and he was a restaurateur and hotelier at the time of the Haitian Revolution. Dictatorial, arrogant in his creation of monuments and the trappings of European-styled nobility, but also innovative in education and economics, Christophe was partially paralyzed in 1820 and shot himself—numerous accounts claim that, in fact, he fired a silver bullet—to avoid capture and public humiliation. Apocryphal or not, these stories bind Henri Christophe, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, and Brutus Jones to the need to create the pretense of invincibility.

      Also like Henri Christophe and, nearly one-hundred years later, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, Brutus Jones dresses impressively: “He wears a light blue uniform coat, sprayed with brass buttons, heavy gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold braid on the collar, cuffs, etc. His pants are bright red with a light blue stripe down the side. Patent leather laced boots with brass spurs, and a belt with a long-barreled, pearl-handled revolver in a holster complete his make up.”54 (See p. 58.)O’Neill continues by saying that the costume is not “altogether ridiculous,” and that Jones carries it off with style.

      Ceremonial and lodge dress were still common early in the twentieth century. In addition to seeing his actor-father onstage in outlandish costumes, O’Neill perhaps also saw him dressed in lodge regalia for ceremonial events. The scene notes for All God’s Chillun Got Wings that place an African mask to the left of the rear wall, place to the right of the wall “the portrait of an elderly Negro dressed in outlandish lodge regalia…adorned with medals, sashes, a cocked hat with frills…as absurd to contemplate as one of Napoleon’s Marshals in full uniform.”55 Henri Christophe himself dressed as a Napoleonic figure, but this portrait represents a successful African-American businessman, the deceased father of Jim and Hattie Harris (to Ella, “his Old Man—all dolled up like a circus horse”56), although it could reasonably be the ceremonial dress of Marcus Garvey, whose presence in the United States after 1915, and his movement back and forth between Jamaica and New York that was related to his political and business ventures, attracted the attention of large segments of the African-American community, as well as US law enforcement agencies. Hattie Harris speaks much like a Garvey initiate—“We don’t deserve happiness till we’ve fought the fight of our race and won it!”57—and issues of race and racial inequality play foundational roles in The Dreamy Kid and The Emperor Jones, as much as in All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

      In the mid- to late-nineteen-twenties, New York saw the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, but in 1919-1920, when O’Neill worked on The Dreamy Kid and The Emperor Jones, the specter of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 cast its shadow over all of urban America. In the earlier work, Dreamy’s killing of a white man becomes a death sentence at the end of the play as he visits his dying grandmother. Pullman car porter Brutus Jones receives a twenty-year sentence for killing the dice-cheating porter Jeff, but he flees the country to avoid what he sees as certain death after striking and presumably killing the white guard who whipped him as he worked on the chain gang.

      Sheaffer and the Gelbs emphasize the role that the forests O’Neill knew—the tropical rain forests of Honduras and a dark, northern forest close to his boyhood home in New London—played in his conceiving the action of Brutus Jones’ flight. The tropical forests of Honduras could certainly provide a model of the forest into which Jones plunges, but island rain forests exist in the mountainous centers of the islands, and crossing to reach an opposite coast seems far-fetched in terrain where maroons lived hidden for years and wandering tourists would sometimes lose themselves for weeks. Thus Jones’ plan to reach, in just one night, the opposite coast and a French gunboat that will take him to Martinique defies geographical logic. But perhaps another factor can be gleaned from O’Neill’s Honduras experiences: he also must have been aware that William Walker, an American lawyer, adventurer, slavery advocate, and the one-time (1856-1857) President of Nicaragua, was executed in Honduras in 1860.

      So where is Jones’ island? Perhaps the only way O’Neill could get Jones to the imaginary Congo was via an equally distorted vision of the Caribbean. For cultural and political reasons, such a community of “natives” could not be located in the US. Thus the obvious corollary would be the just invaded and occupied Haiti, geographically the western half of the island of Hispaniola, but still a large and heavily populated land mass. Its majority to this day speaks Kreyol (“dier lingo”), its history records tumultuous and often violent political upheavals, and then as now, it was stigmatized by phantasmagorical Hollywood misconceptions of Vodun, zombies, and black magic. Yet from independence onward Haiti has maintained social structure, urban centers, and a political bureaucracy. Its formerly enslaved peasants would not have resembled the “native” image created by the loin-clothed Old Lem and his tribal followers. No Caribbean space, all colonies or ex-colonies of European powers, provided such a population at the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century. Historically, African-West Indian citizens, and especially those immigrating to the US, have received better educations on their home islands than the majority of African-Americans in the US. Writers and scholars such as Claude McKay (Jamaica), Arturo Schomburg (Puerto Rico), and C.L.R. James (Trinidad) provide a sample of the Caribbean contribution to the Harlem Renaissance.

      On the one hand, O’Neill was exceptionally attuned to the issues of race and racial politics of the first decades of the twentieth century, perhaps more so than any other European-American writer of his day. On the other hand, The Emperor Jones requires the creation of an imaginary, Conrad-like “heart of darkness” in Jones’ and the audience’s minds that primitivizes (or “Congolizes”) the Caribbean—the space of hoodoo and voodoo and the “ha’nts” that spook Brutus Jones as he moves back through time and space to his “primitive” origins. In fact, the selection of the Congo, as opposed to the rest of West or Central Africa, as the place to root Jones’ fantasy seems to remain another apocryphal curiosity.

      Notions of Caribbean otherness were perhaps less arbitrary. In the wake of the Spanish-American War and the US occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the US sent photographers and writers to justify the takeovers and document the need for colonial guidance.58 Furthermore, in the early twentieth century, anthropological contact with and writings about previously unknown traditional societies in the Kalahari Desert, elsewhere in СКАЧАТЬ