1. The Context
Cultural and political factors contributed to the race-conscious environment in which O’Neill created these plays. Ethnographic displays of African art were available in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century. The large collection of the American Museum of Natural History derives, in part, from a 1907 gift of Congolese art made by King Leopold II of Belgium, and the Buffalo Museum of Science and Hampton University Museum had collections of Congolese art before 1910.42 However, “[t]he year 1914 was a turning point for African art in America. As a direct result of the 1913 Armory show, it was pushed to the forefront of the New York contemporary art scene due to its recent role as primary catalyst for avant-garde creativity.”43 Photos and exhibits staged by Alfred Stieglitz and other avant-garde luminaries “powerfully positioned African art as an active participant in the modernist era.”44 If O’Neill did not attend the International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show), his intellectual and painter friends certainly did, and he worked and lived in the environment of creative excitement that juxtaposed works by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, and others with newly arriving objects of sculptural art via France from Africa. For Alisa LaGamma, “Americans viewed these traditions as ciphers for the conceptual shift that their own art world was undergoing”—“a new way of seeing art”45—rather than the veneration of ancestors tied to their origins in equatorial Africa.
O’Neill uses African art, masks, and cultural performance in a broader context that reflects racialized memory, characters’ notions of identity and “belonging,” and the tensions of individual, racial, class, and cultural difference. The iconic mask in Jim Harris and his wife Ella’s apartment in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (written in 1923) is the clearest signal of O’Neill’s intent: “In the left corner, where a shadow lights it effectively, is a Negro primitive mask from the Congo—a grotesque face, inspiring obscure, dim connotations in one’s mind, but beautifully done, conceived in a true religious spirit.”46 The mask remains open to differing interpretations, depending on the race and background of the viewer. Later in the play Hattie, Jim Harris’ activist sister, describes the mask to Ella: “It’s a mask which used to be worn in religious ceremonies by my people in Africa…it’s beautifully made—a work of Art by a real artist—as real in his way as your Michael Angelo.”47 Ella fears the mask and eventually kills it (rather than her African-American husband) with a large kitchen knife.
Yet, in the work of O’Neill, the evidence of the impact of Africa and African art began in The Emperor Jones. Charles P. Sweeney (1924) quotes O’Neill as saying, “One day I was reading of the religious feasts in the Congo and the uses to which the drum is put there; how it starts at a normal pulse-beat and slowly intensifies until the heart-beat of every one present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drum.”48 Other presumed Congolese elements of the play include the “Congo witch-doctor”: “wizened and old, naked except for the fur of some small animal tied about his waist, its bushy tail hanging down in front. His body stained all over a bright red. Antelope horns are on each side of his head, branching upward.”49 (See p. 88.) He holds a bone rattle and a charm stick with cockatoo feathers, and glass beads and bone ornaments adorn his entire body. Perhaps this vision also derived from the same unnamed reading on cultural practices in the Congo or, like the mask in the Harris apartment, from sculptural representations on display in New York from 1914 onward.
Another source frequently cited is O’Neill’s familiarity with ritual descriptions in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1899). According to Louis Sheaffer, “both the novelist and the playwright [are] telling the same story: the nightmarish disintegration of a man, an outsider, in an aboriginal land of omnipresent terror.”50 How close the Eurocentric imaginaries of Conrad or O’Neill (as well as those of the unnamed anthropologists or ethnographers O’Neill is cited as having read) came to creating representations that approximate the aesthetic and efficacious elements of ritual ceremony in the Congo remains debatable.
The dusk to dawn journey that returns Brutus Jones to an imaginary African “heart of darkness” takes place on a supposed West Indian island. Yet demographic accounts of post-emancipation Caribbean peasantries contradict the envisioned population of loin-clothed “natives.” Jones claims to have learned a few words of “deir lingo” or Creole language—Haitian Kreyol, perhaps—to help him rule, but no other bureaucratic or institutional structure except the role of emperor organizes the island’s social and political life. Finally, his imperial superiority—his sense of American exceptionalism and being civilized in comparison to the ignorant “black trash” that he feels he dominates so easily—begins to crack near the end of the first scene when he first hears “the faint, steady thump of a tom-tom, low and vibrating.”51 (See p. 68.)
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