There can be no denying the historical and social importance of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. John Henry Raleigh hailed it as “an impressive monument in the history of enlightened attempts by enlightened white Americans to lend a helping hand in the Negroes’ fearsome struggle” (107-108). Virginia Floyd maintained that the play is a milestone in its portrayal of white persecution (208), “a landmark drama, not only in conception but also in production” (210). For the first time in New York theatrical and dramatic history, a black performer was allowed to perform a tragic and complex role which would otherwise have been reserved for a white actor.

Some critics, on the other hand, while acknowledging the richness O’Neill imparted to his black characters, feel that the playwright fell prey to white prejudice. Travis Bogard believed that the character of Brutus Jones is by “present-day perspectives—an unacceptable stereotype of the Negro in terms of a crap-shooting, razor-cutting Pullman porter.” The fact that Jones was “the first important role written for a Negro actor” does not redeem the play; such “theatrical excitement” only serves to disguise the “essential racism” of a play which can “no longer command respectful attention”(139). Edward Shaughnessy argues that O’Neill’s African-American characters are “often forced to behave in ways that confirm the very stereotypes others hold of them” (Manheim 149). Joel Pfister similarly contends that although progressive and sympathetic to the plight of African-Americans, O’Neill’s depiction of blacks merely mirrors the stereotypes found in the “American history of racist iconography”—stereotypes easily accessible to O’Neill because they inhabit “the cultural swamp of [his] literary imagination” (132). Even the critics who applaud O’Neill’s efforts feel that there is an undeniable degree of racial discrimination in his plays. Floyd believes that Jones’s exploitation of his own people is a “narrated betrayal” which is fortunately “overshadowed by the dramatized examples of white oppression” (208). In addition, most critics have remarked on what they believe to be the inherent racism in the language O’Neill gives to Jones, and in the character’s “typically negroid” features.

Despite their differing opinions, however, critics seem to agree that O’Neill’s Brutus Jones denies his racial and cultural heritage in order to, in the words of another O’Neill character, “buy white.” Ultimately, they argue, Jones is not successful; he is doomed to shed the trappings of white society and degenerate into his original form, falling into the abyss of his primitive nature. Some critics, Virginia Floyd for example, see this as a positive experience of self­discovery in which, after “having denied his cultural roots, Jones must make amends there” (Floyd 209); hence he not only regains his identity, but his native beliefs and ultimately his soul (209-210). Thus argue the critics who look favorably on O’Neill’s portrayal of African-American characters. Others regard Jones’s devolution to primitivism as a reflection of O’Neill’s belief that “the real cultural roots of the Negro lay in Africa,” and thus “the terrors of the jungle night [will] reduce the proud Jones to a cringing, crawling African savage, just before his end” (Raleigh 109). Pfister maintains that both Brutus Jones and Jim Harris (the black protagonist in All God’s Chillun Got Wings) “succumb to a racial psychological fate that overshadows other themes in these plays which suggest that social forces, not an atavistic black psychological self, crush the efforts of blacks to succeed” (136). Edwin Engel goes so far as to say that The Emperor Jones “is a simple representation of psychological naturalism for its own sake” (49). It seems that critics concur that Jones ultimately succumbs to a primitive racial past. But whether this shows O’Neill to be sympathetic or not toward African-Americans is an issue of debate.

Critics also seem to agree that O’Neill meant Jones to be representative of African-Americans in general, less an individual. Some critics relay this belief in simple, generalized statements, while others are explicit. Patrick Nolan, for example, laments that “little effort has been made to show Jones’s quest as only a slight permutation of the ancestral tribe’s quest” (6). Bogard believed that “Jones’s acts of will, his pride, his conscious individuality as Emperor are the false masks of a white savage” (141).

Thus it seems that most critics tend to characterize Jones as a rebellious and treacherous member of a collective, to which he must ultimately submit. At least one of them, Thomas Pawley, acknowledges the difference between the “Afro-Caribbean” and the “Afro-American,” “a distinction that is important because, although they have a common ethnic background, the racial experience of the two groups was not identical” (Liu 137). This opening statement promises a reading which can absolve Jones of the burden of cultural betrayal by emphasizing his individual heritage. However, Pawley himself remarks that Jones has “aped the behavior of those he served,” making the “culture he has acquired only a veneer, as he has had little if any formal education, which is insufficient to harness his primitive impulses” (Liu 147). And so another critic joins the ranks of those who believe that Jones somehow denies a heritage, specifically that of his African ancestors or his African­Caribbean subjects, thus causing his ultimate demise. But this view overlooks one simple point: Jones is African-American, which makes his experience radically different. Furthermore, the critics equate being African-American with an aspiration to be white, which makes Jones a traitor to his ancestry not only by denying it, but also by seeking to replace it.

It is my contention, however, that Brutus Jones is above all an individual who attempts to better himself and successfully make his mark on the world, as all human beings seek to do. His struggle is against the demands of a collective African experience imposed upon him, and ultimately a struggle to retain his selfhood as an individual. Gabriele Poole’s interpretation of Jones’s character as one whose “position with regard to the discourse of white civilization is in many ways one of successful identification, rather than unsuccessful parody” (22) still places Jones outside the “discourse of white civilization.” Although I agree with her that Jones is not merely parodying the white society to which he has been exposed as an African-American, I maintain that he does more than simply aping them successfully, as she seems to suggest. Rather, his use of “white discourse” is merely a reflection of his identity as a complex individual honed in racially heterogeneous America. My aim here is to conduct a close examination of The Emperor Jones so as to arrive at an understanding of the protagonist’s conflict with the “collectives” he is forced to join, but which he ultimately denounces.

* * *

The setting of Scene One provides significant clues to the character of Brutus Jones: “[A] spacious, high-ceilinged room with bare, white washed walls. The floor is of white tiles. In the rear ¼ a wide archway giving out on a portico with white pillars” (1:1031, my emphasis). Floyd believes that this dominating whiteness is “an appropriate blank background for the statement­making ‘dazzling, eye-smiting scarlet’ throne of the arrogant brutal despot” (203). It seems to me, however, that O’Neill does not simply wish to emphasize the bloody brutality of his emperor. Rather, the striking contrast between the pale “white” and the “eye-smiting scarlet” stands for Jones’s own conflicted character. He is an amalgam of two cultures, unlike the natives above whom he towers in his lofty palace. Even his name, Brutus Jones, suggests this alliance.

For the name Jones, like the color white, represents that which he absorbed and adopted from his experiences as an American. The name Brutus represents the African roots of the character—brutal, fiery as scarlet, as unrefined and earthly as his huge throne “made of uncut wood” (1:1031). As Jones, he is the shrewd, sophisticated, “white” colonizer of this “yet not self-determined” island (1:1030); as Brutus he is the primitive African native. Interestingly, Pawley reminds us that the name Brutus is “reminiscent of the practice of nineteenth century American playwrights who gave black characters Roman names such as Caesar and Cato as comic devices, thus making them appear outlandish” (Liu 143). Pawley, however, is only half correct, as playwrights only adopted this particular naming practice from slave-owners, rather than inventing it as a comic device. Either way, the name bears within it a sense of the subjugated and inferior black, fit for the amusement of an audience or a master. Hence, “Brutus” represents not only the brute, but also the colonized and enslaved African-American. This presents us with an interesting question. Is O’Neill’s use of the name thus an internalized extension of this racist practice? Or is it a parody of the same? I believe it is the latter; O’Neill strikes at the heart of this practice by making his “nigger” Brutus an uncharacteristically self-reliant and uncannily intelligent individual.

O’Neill’s physical description of Jones is also illuminating:

He 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. (1:1033)

Many critics have taken justifiable offense with O’Neill’s pivotal “yet,” which suggests the rarity of any black man possessing “distinctive” qualities. In some respects, O’Neill does indeed utilize an internalized language of racism; on the other hand, he sympathetically and without conscious discrimination attempts to create the image of a human being, a strong and willful individual who might look “typically negroid” but is not. O’Neill tries to communicate this sense to the racist audience of the 1920s. To expect O’Neill to meet today’s standards of political correctness is unreasonable. Thus I believe that O’Neill establishes Brutus Jones as a complex and exceptional man not lacking in his human fetishes and idiosyncrasies:

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 makeup. Yet ther. something not altogether ridiculous about his grandeur. He has a way of carrying it off. (1:1033)

When we encounter Smithers, the cockney trader, we really encounter the representation of the first cultural and social force fighting for possession of Jones’s individuality. When Smithers discovers the natives’ plan to revolt and overthrow the emperor, he is pleased and remarks “(with extreme vindictiveness),” “And I’m bloody glad of it, for one! Serve ‘im right! Puttin’ on airs, the stinkin’ nigger! ‘Is Majesty! Gawd blimey! I only ‘opes I’m there when they takes ‘im out to shoot ‘im” (1:1032-1033). Smithers is clearly meant to typify the white man who cannot bear to see a black man succeed. This stems partly from jealous vindictiveness but mostly from belief in the inherent inferiority of the black man who, by simply attempting to better himself, commits the unspeakable crime of rejecting his constructed standing in society as the complacent “nigger,” thus toppling the social, cultural, and even natural orders.

O’Neill makes it clear, however, that Jones is by far Smithers’ superior. He is physically his better; for while Jones is vibrant, “full-blooded,” “hardy,” (1:1033) and strong, Smithers is by contrast drunken, “stoop-shouldered,” and “sickly yellow” (1:1031), although ten years Jones’s junior. But it is not simply the physical appearance which makes Jones the finer man—indeed if it were, O’Neill could truly be suspected of simply extending the stereotypes of the black man as nothing but a physically fine specimen, an animal of nobility and savagery. On the contrary, Jones is also Smithers’ intellectual superior. He is “alive with a keen, cunning intelligence” while Smithers is “cowardly and dangerous.” But more so, O’Neill challenges the prevalent conception of blacks as passive, idle and lazy: “And ain’t I got to learn deir lingo and teach some of dem English befo’ I kin talk to ‘em? Ain’t dat wuk?” (1:1036). More than intelligence, O’Neill gives Jones the drive and the desire to be the best that he can be; and he succeeds—in two years’ time, Jones becomes Emperor of the island, not just through hard work but a great deal of intelligence and ingenuity. In addition, O’Neill turns the tables and gives Smithers the characteristics that have thus far been reserved for no-good “niggers”: “You ain’t never learned ary word er it, Smithers, in de ten years you been heah, dough you knows it’s money in you’ pocket tradin’ wid ‘em if you does. But you’se too shiftless to take de trouble” (1:1036).

Hence, O’Neill portrays Jones as having conquered the cultural force which Smithers represents: the white man who wishes to annihilate the black man’s ambition to rise out of the ranks of anonymity into a strong and self­reliant individuality. But it seems that our protagonist has much larger forces to contend with, ones which are much more powerful because they exist within his own psyche. Jones boasts to Smithers of his exploitative dealings with the natives of the island, admitting that he has acquired his wiliness “in ten years on de Pullman ca’s listenin’ to de white quality talk” (1:1035). He scoffs at the natives’ superstitions, gullibility, and susceptibility to myths. He mocks their native gods and declares himself to be, in contrast, a sophisticated, civilized “member in good standin’ o’ de Baptist Church” ( 1:1042). All of this seems to portray Jones as one who brutally denies his own heritage, which, to make matters worse, he now exploits. He dooms himself by pretending to be something he is not: he adopts the trappings of white society, talks their talk, and embraces their religion (although he “lays [his] Jesus on de shelf for de time bein’” while he goes “after de coin”) (1:1042). In a sense, Jones lives his entire life as a “Yankee bluff” (1:1036). The time has come, however, for this “bluff” to be called, and by his own people, the very ones he has exploited. Thus, Jones must leave his white ivory tower and descend into the darkness of the forest; he must embark on a journey into his ancestral and racial past in order to rediscover his roots and his identity and make amends for his past treason.

This interpretation is very attractive and indeed extremely plausible. It is also an argument which places O’Neill in a most unfavorable light, for it shows him to be one who believes in the intrinsic savagery of the black man, who can never escape his primitive past and the collective consciousness of his enslaved and subservient race. I believe, however, that O’Neill was trying to stress a different message. As I see it, Jones is guilty of colonialism and exploitation of a primitive people, but not of treason. He feels no strong affinity with the natives of this island, and his attitude of indifference and condescension toward them, although not justifiable, is understandable. They do not speak the same language nor do they share the same experiences or recent history. Their gods are not his gods; this becomes even more evident when he wholeheartedly pleads for the mercy of “Lawd Jesus” throughout his nightmarish experiences in the forest. His acquisition of the cunningness of whites is not an affectation; nor is it treason. Rather, Jones, as an African-American, has absorbed the experiences and ingenuity of those around him, including the whites. Remaining as true to himself as he can and seeking to better himself, Jones utilizes the tools which he adopted from his environment. Even his regular usage of the derogatory term “niggers” as an appellation for the natives (augmenting the critics’ belief that he is a traitor to his race) represents to me a manifestation of his lack of connection with the natives and their history. He superimposes upon them the terms to which he has been exposed as an African-American; Jones even calls himself “nigger.” Smithers, in contrast, refers to the natives as “blacks,” never as “niggers.” Moreover, the simple fact that Jones loses his way in the forest is additional proof of his lack of identification with the natives. For to be an islander and thus truly a “primitive” inhabitant of the jungle, Jones should instinctively know his way around the forest as he knows the back of his hand. Jones does boast knowledge of the trails of the forest, but it is a knowledge which he has had to learn; believing that he “knows it high an’ low like a book” (1:1040) is only additional proof that, as his rhetoric clearly implies, his psyche operates on a very different level from the natives’.

Now a most important series of questions pose themselves. Why then is Jones haunted by the memories of his race? Why is it that their history of slavery is embedded in his mind? Why is the primitive dance of the Congo witch-doctor and the crocodile god (in Scene Seven) so familiar to him? I acknowledge the validity of these questions, and I agree with the critics in their belief that embedded deep in Jones’s consciousness is a racial history of tribalism and of slavery. I believe, however, that Jones does not belong, nor does he wish to belong, to these histories. They are embedded in his psyche because they have been superimposed onto his consciousness by the people in his immediate environment. This brings us to the core of the play where O’Neill—understanding, as he saw it, the true plight of the black man—sympathetically depicts such a man: he is one plagued by the forces of his society which demand to possess and enslave him as he struggles for individuality. The social force which Smithers represents—that of the typical white man who expects the black man to remain the ever-complacent and comic “nigger”—is just one of these forces, and not even the most serious obstacle on the quest for individuality. The most dangerous threats are those forces represented by his very own race.

Thus we come to the nature of these forces, which are depicted in the sequence of hallucinations which Jones experiences as he travels through the forest. He enters the forest in order to escape the natives of the island whom he has wronged and who now seek to destroy him. However, in the thick of the forest he encounters a more dangerous enemy, against which he must truly fight the battle of his life in order to remain “emperor of his soul.” He becomes a hunted animal; the hunter, of course, is none other than himself. We know that Jones is his own enemy when we first hear the rhythmic beat of the native drums:

From the distant hills comes the faint, steady thump of a tom-tom, low and vibrating. It starts at a rate exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat—72 to the minute—and continues at a gradually accelerating rate from this point uninterruptedly to the very end of the play. (1:1041)

Bogard states that “[i]n the pulse of the contemporary black ¼ jungle drums beat” (141). Thus, the harder Jones tries to escape the natives, the harder he falls prey to his own native history—the faster his heart beats as he runs wildly through the forest, the faster the primal call of the jungle runs through his veins. Thus Jones is in a race against himself, and it is ultimately to be seen whether he can outrun his own heartbeat.

Hence, in the forest Jones comes face to face with the experiences and history of his race, which haunt his mind and seek to claim him as a part of their collective. But Jones will not give up his freedom: “I’se got five lead bullets in dis gun good enuff fo’ common bush niggers—and after dat I got de silver bullet left to cheat ‘em out o’ gittin’ me” (1:1041). Thus armed with six bullets Jones enters the forest; the five lead bullets are all symbols of selfhood which Jones will use when his selfhood is threatened. Poole maintains that Jones’s silver bullet stands for his “ultimate refusal to submit to any social sanction” which might be imposed on him by the natives of the island if they caught him (25). I would add that the silver bullet, Jones’s “baby,” his “rabbit’s foot” (O’Neill 1037), is also the final and supreme bullet which guarantees retention of his identity. It is a weapon not so much against the natives or external “social sanctions” as against the forces the natives represent, those conceptions within his own mind which would deny his individuality.

The forest is at “the end of the plain”; it is “a wall of darkness dividing the world” (1:1044). The metaphor is clear: Jones is an animal at bay, hunted by the natives and driven to the edge. Now, in order to escape, he must enter his past of “darkness.” This is not simply the darkness of his sins, but more importantly it is the dark history of his race. He must leave his immediate reality and enter the world of his mind. O’Neill consistently portrays Jones as an alien to this world, a man who, although this forest represents his ancestral past, does not want to and should not belong to that past. Such is the impression given by O’Neill’s reference to Jones as a dog: Jones is “dog-tired”(1:1044) and “(then shaking himself like a wet dog to get rid of these depressing thoughts)” (1:1045). It is as if Jones is reverting to a state of animalism, which is only appropriate as humans seem to revert to their animal instincts in situations of danger. But the dog is a domesticated animal, an image hardly fitting for the primitive brute who, when reverting to his original animalism and existence in the jungle, should at least become an animal fitting of such primal energy—a panther or a lion.

Returning to the events of the play, we see that Jones is already aware of the psychological dangers before him as the “Little Formless Fears” (1:1045) suggest. The setting of the play becomes the landscape that is Brutus Jones himself. The beating tom-tom is his heart, the forest is his mind, and the “Little Formless Fears” are Jones’s suppressed dread. Now “creeping [like] child[ren]” (1:1046), they will eventually grow stronger and more powerful as does Jones’s beating heart. His mind, blood, and heart, in a battle of wills where self is divided against self, will attempt to overcome his soul. The question remains: Will he succumb to them? For now, Jones fires one of his lead bullets, the “Formless Fears” scatter, and thus he temporarily allays the threat to his selfhood and “plunge[s] boldly into the forest” (1:1046).

In the feverish denseness of the forest, Jones begins to move from one memory pocket to another. As he arrives at the “small triangular clearing” surrounded by the “massed blackness of the forest” (1:1047), we see that the forest, and Jones’s history and the history of his race, are already attempting to divest Jones of his identity by slowly and symbolically divesting him of his Emperor garb: “He has lost his Panama hat. His face is scratched, his brilliant uniform shows several large rents” (1:1047). In the clearing, Jeff, a middle­aged black man “dressed in a Pullman porter’s uniform and cap,” is “throwing a pair of dice on the ground before him, picking them up, shaking them, casting them out with the regular, rigid, mechanical movements of an automaton” (1:1047). When Jones encounters Jeff and ascertains that he is indeed a “ha’nt” (1:1048) he raves significantly: “Nigger, I kills you dead once. Has I got to kill you ag’in? You take it den” (1:1048) and fires the second of his lead bullets. In Jones’s final words to Jeff, we see the determination in Jones’s voice to destroy him. It is very important for Jones to kill Jeff dead, and it was just as important for him to do so the first time as it is now. In Jones’s subconscious, Jeff represents what Jones hates most about the black man’s lot in life. Jeff is an “automaton” which typifies the “crap-shooting, razor-cutting Pullman porter” (Bogard 139). But while Bogard believes that O’Neill here merely extends the “unacceptable stereotype of the Negro,” what O’Neill really shows is the independent black man’s plight in fighting these stereotypes, and attempting to destroy them within himself in order to retain an independent selfhood and individuality.

Scene Four is comparable to Scene Three. Jones enters another memory pocket, barricaded by the “forest walls,” where the “road glimmers ghastly and unreal” (1:1049). He is gradually succumbing to the oppressive and enveloping darkness of the forest: “Damn dis heah coat! Like a straightjacket! “(He tears off his coat and flings it away from him, revealing himself stripped to the waist)” (1:1049). When he strips himself in order to “gits rid o’dem frippety Emperor trappin’s” so that he can “travel lighter” (1:1049), he ironically strips himself of one “straightjacket,” his individuality as I see it, only to wear another, more restrictive one. He is slowly succumbing to the forces of a collective consciousness by becoming more and more of a slave. It is not the Emperor’s coat which is the “straightjacket”—it is the “loin-cloth” underneath which is the true straightjacket of the slaves. For now, however, Jones has not completed his devolution into a slave. He is still in the realm of his own personal history. In Scene Four he relives his experience as a prisoner in an American jail. As he sits resting in the clearing, “a small gang of negroes enter” (1:1050). They are inmates followed by a white prison guard carrying a Winchester rifle and a heavy whip. Jones is at first “unmindful of their noiseless approach”; as he sees them, “his eyes pop out, he tries to get to his feet and fly, but sinks back, too numbed by fright to move” (1:1050). But Jones is not only numbed by fear, but also by the forces of the forest which have thus far been moderately successful in taming his individuality. Divested of his “Emperor trappin’s,” Jones is the perfect victim for a mindless abasement by the intimidating force of the white prison guard: “(The prison guard points sternly at Jones with his whip, motions him to take his place among the other shovelers. Jones gets to his feet in a hypnotized stupor. He mumbles subserviently) Yes, suh! Yes, suh! I’se comin’“ (1:1050). Jones, however, fluctuates between succumbing to the collective and fighting for his selfhood: “I kills you, you white debil, if it’s de last thing I evah does! Ghost or debil, I kill you agin” (1:1051). As in Scene Three, he reenacts the murder. Attempting first to use the shovel to kill the guard, he realizes it is not there, then “frees the revolver and fires point blank at the guard’s back” (1:1051). In this scene, Jones’s struggle for freedom and selfhood is not merely directed at the prison guard, who typifies the white oppressor. Perhaps, more importantly, it is directed at the other blacks present, his fellow Negro prisoners. When Jones appeals to his fellow convicts to give him a shovel and they stand “fixed in motionless attitudes, their eyes on the ground” (1:1051), Jones’s fight for freedom is a cry against their “motionless” automaton-like subservience, against their passivity and fear. Poole states that in this and the previous scene Jones expresses “guilt feelings for the wrongs he committed against specific individuals” (29). I would argue instead that Jones’s actions are directed not against “specific individuals” but rather against the stereotype which those individuals represent. His reenactment of these murders is not an attempt and subsequent failure to expiate his guilt. Instead, it reveals his determination to subdue the collectives which are now embedded in his mind.

As Scene Five opens, we see Jones stumbling into a circular clearing and looking about him with “hunted, fearful glances” (1:1052). He is clearly incensed now, haunted by the memories of his past. More so, however, he is exhausted from holding his ground against the forces in his psyche. His selfhood is faltering, and he starts to resemble more and more the stereotypical image of the southern plantation “nigger” well-known to the audience of the 1920s: “His pants are in tatters, his shoes cut and misshapen, flapping about his feet”(1:1052). Jones is slowly succumbing to the “collective consciousness” of blacks and to the painful history of his people. Both, although in the past, seem now on the verge of claiming his future and freedom. But in another show of defiance against these forces, Jones passionately and sincerely invokes his god, not the gods of his race which the critics seem to believe that he has denied: “(Suddenly he throws himself on his knees and raises his clasped hands to the sky—in a voice of agonized pleading) Lawd Jesus, heah my prayer!” (1:1052). Jones, however, is only “slightly reassured by his prayer” (1:1052). But he still holds on to the remnants of his identity represented by his emperor shoes: “You was real” (my emphasis) he laments, addressing those shoes. “He unlaces them and pulls them off—holds the wreck of his shoes in his hands and regards them mournfully ¼ staring down at the shoes in his hands as if reluctant to throw them away” (1:1052). But the forces of the collectives which have been superimposed on Jones are very powerful. They force him to move beyond his own personal past and into the past of his ancestors. Now he finds himself a slave to be sold on the auction block while white aristocrats of the 1850s appraise the human merchandise. Although he has not personally lived it, this experience is as familiar to Jones as if he had. He has so fully absorbed the memories of previous generations that he knows precisely how to act; he jumps onto the auction block, “cowering, paralyzed with horror” (1:1053). His subconscious realizes what this scene means even before his conscious mind does. When the latter does realize, he is “(convulsed with raging hatred and fear) Is dis a auction? Is you sellin’ me like dey uster befo’ de war?” (1:1053). Jones again uses his only weapon, his bullets, which signify his struggle for selfhood, and fires two shots in an attempt to destroy the man who sells him and the man who buys him, for he must show them that he’s a “free nigger” (1:1054). Of course, the expression Jones uses to describe himself, “free nigger,” is a contradiction in terms. Jones cannot be “free” and at the same time be the stereotypical enslaved, inferior, and subservient “nigger.” It is in this scene, as well as the next, that O’Neill seems to me truly sympathetic to the plight of the black man of the early 19^th Century. For he is one who cannot, no matter how hard he tries, escape the burden of pain and the memories of slavery which have been passed on from one generation to the next. Thus the black man grows not simply to remember the past but also to absorb it into his blood and thus, in a sense, hold onto it. He grows to believe that these experiences of his race are not only his own past but also his destiny. This is the forceful collective of which I speak, the memories which seek to claim Jones’s soul. His attempted murder of the auctioneer and the bidder is not simply his attempted destruction of the white oppressor; more importantly, the action is his attempt to destroy the forces within himself. The objects of his attack are the “rigid, unreal, marrionettish” (1:1053) puppets of his mind; and by killing them he attempts to kill the puppeteer, himself.

Scene Six opens onto a tightly enclosed space which seems “like the dark, noisome hold of some ancient vessel” (1:1055). Jones is now left with his final and most valued bullet, the silver one. He knows he must hold on to it because to do otherwise means his demise: “If I shoots dat one I’m a goner sho’!” (1:1055). He has reverted so far back into the history of his race that it is as if he has returned to the womb, as the enclosed space seems to suggest. However, this is a destructive kind of birth; it is the birth of the blacks as slaves, their beginning in a new world as inferiors and nonentities. This womb, this “vessel,” is the hull of the “mother” ship carrying the Africans from their previous life to begin anew as slaves. Physically, Jones now looks very much like a slave: “His pants have been so torn away that what is left of them is no better than a breech cloth” (1:1055). Barefoot, naked to the waist, and appropriately dressed in something which is meant to resemble a loincloth, Jones’s ancestral past looms large in his psyche. He has so succumbed to it that he falls “under some uncanny compulsion” and joins the huddled and shackled mass wail of despair. In unison with them, he sways back and forth, and “his voice reaches the highest pitch of sorrow, of desolation” (1:1056). As Jones scurries away, we can hear the tom-tom beat, “louder, quicker, with a more insistent, triumphant pulsation” (1:1056). Jones’s heart, blood and mind are slowly gaining on him.

When we next see Jones “his face is fixed and stony, his eyes have an obsessed glare, he moves with a strange deliberation like a sleep-walker or one in a trance” (1:1057). Thus Jones’s capitulation to the forces of the forest is much more complete in this last scene than in the preceding ones. This is because, in a sense, Jones has run out of bullets—his little doses of self-hood if you will—with which he could battle the collectives seeking to claim him. After every shot, Jones is able to annihilate the figures and feel reassured, more or less remaining Brutus Jones. But in the sixth scene, Jones is unable to defend his individuality against the river of painful collective memories. He has no bullets to fend them off, save the silver one which he is holding on to for himself. Thus this is the first scene in which the figures do not dissipate; rather, Jones scurries away, leaving them behind as darkness envelops the forest. His selfhood is now under severe threat as he succumbs fully to a collective. But he is yet to undergo the most dangerous threat of all, that which he encounters in the seventh scene.

In this scene, Jones has traveled far into the past of his ancestors; he is now in the cradle of their origin, long before they were carried across the seas to the new world where they were sold as slaves. In the clearing there is a large tree, an altar, and a great river. “In obedience to some obscure impulse,” much like his impulse to join the slaves in their desolate wails, Jones “sinks into a kneeling, devotional posture before the altar” (1:1057). However, he comes to himself and realizes what he is doing: “He straightens up and stares about him horrifiedly” (1:1057). Thus, for a brief moment he regains recognition of his identity. From behind the tree, the Congo witch-doctor appears. He is the epitome of all that is earthly and primordial. He captures the essence of the earth and its growth as he symbolically appears “from behind the trunk of a tree, as if he had sprung out of it” (1:1057). He also captures the spirit of the animals in their sexual primitivism: “some small animal tied about his waist, its bushy tail hanging down in front,” and in their most visceral desires for the hunt: “Antelope horns are on each side of his head, branching upward” (1:1057). He is at once marvelous and beautiful yet menacing and ghastly. As the witch-doctor dances, Jones is hypnotized: “The whole spirit and meaning of the dance has entered into him, has become his spirit” (1:1058). This interpretive dance, then, as we are meant to understand, really represents Jones’s life: his flight from his true identity, his accursed existence because of this denial, and now his responsibility to offer himself as sacrifice to the gods of the ancient ones in order to appease the spirit of his ancestors. Thus, O’Neill brings Jones face to face with one of the powerful collectives which seek to claim him: the ancestors who wish him to uphold their sacred traditions and their heritage.

This Congo witch doctor finds his counterpart in another of O’Neill’s plays which deals with the plight of African-Americans: All God’s Chillun Got Wings. It is the Congo mask, “a grotesque face, inspiring obscure, dim connotations in one’s mind, but beautifully done, conceived in a true religious spirit” (2:297). Hattie, Jim Harris’s militant sister, gives it to him on the occasion of his wedding to a white woman as a reminder of their beautiful African heritage. Hattie is proud to belong to a particular collective “in the heart of the Black Belt—the Congo—among our own people” (2:304), and declares Jim a “traitor to [his] race” because he symbolically refuses to join that collective. Instead, Jim acquires a different identity easily interpreted as submission to “white civilization.” Hattie’s attempts to convince Jim to “stand up for his race” and succumb to their collective (as signified by the Congo mask) bear a striking and not coincidental resemblance to the Congo witch doctor’s attempt to pull Jones into that same collective. Jim Harris, like Jones, is led to the conclusion that he is a traitor to his race who must pay with his life in order to appease the gods. But especially noteworthy is Harris’s response to his sister, which perfectly expresses what Jones could not: “Where does the human race get a chance to come in” (2:309, my emphasis). Ultimately Harris refuses to join the collective, electing instead to be human, to be himself, to be an individual even if that did mean that he was “buying white.” Jones does the same. In both plays, O’Neill delineates sympathetically the burden under which the black protagonist exists. Even in his own mind, he is torn between conflicting loyalties, conflicting communities that seek to claim him.

In the seventh scene of The Emperor Jones we see this conflict reach its full potential. Unlike the earlier scenes, in which Jones “loses” and then reasserts himself, he this time retains his own consciousness throughout the experience, submitting against his own will. While Jones is instinctively moving toward the crocodile god, he calls to his own god, the god he wants to belong to. This Christian God represents his new identity, the African-American Jones, while the crocodile god calls him to be something else from his ancestral past—something which has little or no relevance to Jones as an individual. This is the climactic battle between self and self where Jones almost gives in to the crocodile god, but at the same time remains horrified at his own capitulation. Near the end he finds the power to call up the strength of his individuality one last time:

(Jones cries out in a fierce, exhausted spasm of anguished pleading) Lawd, save me! Lawd Jesus, heah my prayer! (Immediately, in answer to his prayer, comes the thought of the one bullet left him. He snatches at his hip, shouting defiantly) De silver bullet! You don’t git me yet! (1:1058­1059)

The witch doctor disappears behind the tree and the crocodile god sinks back into the river. Jones “lies with his face to the ground, his arms outstretched” while the tom-tom beats with a “somber pulsation, a baffled but revengeful power” (1:1059, my emphasis). The tom-tom’s throb is baffled because it cannot understand the outcome of this encounter. Jones seems to be defeated, but really he is not. That he will be found by the natives and killed grants a kind of victory to the forces of the forest, but only over Jones’s physical self. They were unable, however, to claim his soul as a sacrifice to their collective. Jones won his struggle for individuality, using his last bullet, which although it ironically facilitated his death, ultimately fulfilled its purpose as the bullet which saved his soul. Floyd argues that Jones’s final posture is a symbolic one in which he resembles the crucified Christ, thus representing Jones’s sacrifice of himself to achieve atonement with the ancestral gods he had denied (210). I interpret the Christ-like pose in a different sense: Jones has not sacrificed himself for the crocodile god but for his own God, his own beliefs, distinctly African-American, which he maintained to the last.

In conclusion, The Emperor Jones shows O’Neill’s conception of the African-American man to be sympathetic, yet extremely pessimistic. It is true that there are moments when O’Neill seems to perpetuate stereotypes and utilize an internalized language of racism. His shortcomings, however, if not justifiable or acceptable to a modern audience, are understandable within their historical context. In this play, O’Neill portrays what he sees as the true plight of the African-American man. He is one who is inhibited, not simply by the oppressive white man, but also, and perhaps more so, by the history, pain and possessiveness of his own race. The black man, who like Brutus Jones seeks to carve an identity for himself, must contend with these internal and external forces. Otherwise he must accept them and live forever as a stereotype. But O’Neill’s view is pessimistic in the apparent belief that such a black man cannot succeed in his quest for individuality, his desire to join the “human race.” The Emperor Jones seems to say that the only success such a man can hope for is to die in his struggle for individuality, for a chosen death is the only alternative to a subservient life.