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 Central and Southern Africa, and in New Guinea reinforced notions of primitive-versus-civilized peoples. In the early nineteen-nineties, performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco demonstrated that these ethnographic attitudes continued to persist in the popular imagination when they displayed themselves before gullible audiences in the US and Europe as the caged “natives” of a previously undiscovered Caribbean island.59
2. The Play
Edward Gordon Craig’s The Theatre Advancing is frequently cited as an aesthetic factor behind the play. Craig advocates a return to dance, pantomime, puppets, and masks to create the “magic” of ancient theater arts.60 The specific use of character masks to denote varying social and psychological selves plays a critical role in O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (1925). A degree of masking, as well as pantomime and human puppetry (discussed below), appears in The Emperor Jones, but O’Neill’s presumed knowledge of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,61 Part One of Strindberg’s Road to Damascus, and experimental German Expressionist plays, such as Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, seems even more consequential.62 Undoubtedly the play’s structure derives from these or similar symbolist or expressionist “journey” plays that take a solitary character from station to station in a linear or circular procession without the traditional supports of well-made dialogue or an organic plot structure. No American examples were available at the time O’Neill wrote the play, but like the paintings on display in the Armory Show, information about European avant-garde theater–especially of Expressionists such as Oscar Kokoscha, Walter Haseclever, Ernest Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Frank Wedekind—began to appear in the US immediately following the Great War. Numerous accounts cite The Emperor Jones as the first example of American Expressionism.
The play’s first and longest scene consists of static dialogue between the Emperor Brutus Jones and the Cockney trader Smithers. It reveals nothing of Jones’ upbringing or early life, but does provide conventional exposition of the violence of his recent past, his imprisonment and escape, his arrival on the island, and his meteoric rise to emperor. Jones arrived on the run but gains stature by helping with Smithers’ “crooked” and “dirty work.” When the gun of Old Lem, the local leader hired to murder Jones, misfires, the quick-minded Jones creates the myth that only silver bullets can kill him. That clever twist seals his position as emperor. The pearl-handled six-shooter he subsequently carries holds five lead bullets for his enemies and one silver bullet for himself. Thus, should his plan to escape go bad, like those of Christophe and Sam, Jones can turn myth into reality.
In spite of that romantic stance, Jones is a model of tyranny and corruption. He becomes rich by sucking the local population dry with taxes and bribes, at the same time that he deprecates the people as cowering, stupid, superstitious, “bush” and “woods niggers.” At the first scene’s beginning, he thinks he has six more months before they rebel; by its end, with the stables empty, Jones, in full uniform with a Panama hat cocked on his head, is on his way to the forest to escape by foot while pursued by drumbeats.
Scene two opens where the plain before the Great Forest ends. Jones, who enters exhausted, is unable to unearth the food and water he has hidden there. He panics and, as the drumbeats intensify, begins to lose grasp of his shaky Baptist Church beliefs. In the growing darkness of the forest’s edge, Little Formless Fears cloud his imagination and mock him. He shoots his first lead bullet to disperse them and regains some confidence before plunging