For the Reckord Page 12
How much is merely rumour? What are the facts? Has Annie, like some of the slave women, been taking powders to induce abortions? Is she really a witch? She herself informs us early that, back in England, when two of her brothers burned to death in a barn after killing a stable-lad who was her lover, ‘there was talk of murder by witchcraft’ and she was married off to Mr Palmer. ‘My dear it was the dock or the altar. I had to leave the country to evade arrest.’ Palmer doesn’t know all this at first, and is more and more disturbed by the stories he hears.
Annie is a disruptive element on the plantation, where women exist for the pleasure of men and to bear them children. Women, even white women, are an underclass, somewhat analogous to slaves; but ‘milady’s brought rebellion with her. Disorder and confusion.’ Mistress of the great house, she makes common cause with slaves, confiding with some of the women like their equal and openly seducing black men. She submits to Palmer’s sexual labours but is determined not to have children for him, and she often addresses him in a manner implying superiority.
ANNIE: Today my lord came home from the wars, and pleasured me twice in his topboots.
PALMER: Which wars?
ANNIE: It’s a quotation sir.
PALMER: Kneel down, but I mustn’t be long.
ANNIE: (Kneels, resting on the bed.) You’re seldom up for long sir.
PALMER: I never know when you mock me.
Her sexual aggression is seen as unacceptable. Though black or mulatto women may be lively in bed, a white woman must not seem to enjoy sex. ‘Pleasure,’ says old Dr Baillie, ‘is not part of the divine prescription. See to it she lies perfectly still, and with her eyes shut.’ But as Annie tells a black man she has targeted, ‘Witches have fought for centuries for carnal insurrection.’ She is in tune with the blacks (deemed animals by Dr Baillie and by Palmer). As she and Lucinda (a young slave woman) say to and with each other, the black God summoned from Africa by fierce drumming on the plantation is ‘Bigger than bakkra…and we take him and grind him and possess him…And grab his back and shudder…And God sinting stand up well strong…And never go down…Till he pleasure us…And free us.’
Belief may free their minds, but their bodies are plantation property. ‘You think I went clear to England for a mule?’ Palmer, enraged, asks Annie. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘clearly you went for a breeding slave.’ Crassly as ever, he insists: ‘I’m going to man you and breed you and lock you up for nine months till you drop, and nine months after that, one a year, till my quiver’s full. So help me God.’ When a slave gets ground up with cane at the mill (‘Joko’s blood make good rum’) discussion centres on how much he was worth, and on the failure to save something of the investment by severing his arm in good time.
The dead, however, walk free – ‘who can chain up the dead?’ Much that challenges the status quo is attributed to the ghost of Herrera, an executed rebel. Annie, with supernatural insight, sees him returning whole. ‘What a torso. And there’s his bleeding head. I have no idea how I’ll get those two together… Yes, I think I know.’ Annie says that when she was only twelve she ‘started seeing the dead walk.’ She envisions Palmer’s end. There are other suggestions that she is, as rumoured, a witch. Immediately after she hears her husband’s horse gallop away, she bears a candle-lit breast to the young Jamaican black man she intends to seduce. Even if we take drowning and flying to be sexual metaphors, we are also invited to place her as a witch.
ANNIE: You daren’t tell, and I daren’t tell.
RHONE: Right here quick.
ANNIE: Come to the sea, and swim in it.
RHONE: We can do everything right here quick.
ANNIE: I want to play. (She strokes it with her toe.)
RHONE: (Drowning.) I have my life. I have a woman.
ANNIE: She has black breasts, with purple nipples.
RHONE: (Grabbing at her.) Sea too far.
ANNIE: I’m a witch. Fly me.
What being a witch may mean is one of the questions raised in the play. According to Dr Baillie, ‘Witches have conspired in bed against us from the days of Eve and the snake… Sex and witchcraft is one word.’ Annie knows these views. She tells us: ‘when I was ten things flew around my room. Doctors said my carnal feelings were inflamed.’ She sees hostility to ‘witches’ as bound up with the historical subjugation of women. ‘For every malady of woman there’s a leaf in the forest, and the wise women who searched for them for centuries to stop their own pain and enjoy their desires, were called witches and burnt, and their knowledge destroyed.’
The play argues lustily against repression. The repressive extreme is represented by Dr Baillie, his fraudulence exposed in ‘speaking medically’. Told that Annie ‘thrashes about’ during coitus, he wants to know if she has pleasure in it. ‘Yes, doc. You mustn’t ask me again,’ says Palmer. ‘But, speaking medically, does she actually enjoy it?’ ‘Yes doc.’ ‘Even revel in it?’ ‘Yes, doc.’ ‘You should have a word with the bishop. This may be wickedness.’ At the liberated extreme promoted by the play, Annie, who fears ‘that the sexually disturbed rule the world,’ quotes Blake’s The Garden of Love, disapproving of ‘priests in black gowns…binding with briars [our] joys and desires.’ As a child she left home and lived with religious free-thinkers and free-lovers, who raised their children in common and gave them the time and affection they needed. The result, she says, was ‘the children weren’t mean in their affection, and were naturally carnal with each other.’ In a ritual sequence, to the sound of talking drums, when Abuku, Lucinda and Annie shed their clothes, Annie invokes ‘Satan, fallen angel of joy, fallen angel of love’ and they ‘kiss each others’ mons’, chanting ‘I see the body of Christ, neither sinful nor crucified.’ Annie would turn great houses into schools, and ‘bring children back to their senses.’ Pun intended. ‘There ought,’ says Annie, ‘to be a Royal Society for the protection of sensual children.’
White Witch proffers nudity, seductions, sexual humiliation, murder (a dagger in the groin), ghosts, madness and other challenges, and a lot of activity establishing the troubled plantation context. There is mention of ambushes and fear that rebellion may spread from Santo Domingo. Orders are given for punishment by whipping, cutting, hanging. Distrust is palpable. ‘You must wear shoes milady, so people can hear you.’ House-slaves get called ‘safe-niggers’, but ‘Are the safe-niggers safe?’ People talk in glances and whispers. African drumming is an insistent background, frenzied from time to time. A good production will make the audience see and feel the accelerating chaos in the great house, and the disintegration of Palmer.
While Palmer unravels, Annie projects unchanging self-assurance. Her role requires charismatic sexual presence and a playful intelligence. Cupid, with ‘a nose for dark truth,’ is the only character who can keep up with her in intellectual discourse. He ‘spends his life in his head,’ living ‘in the deep hell of yes and no and yes again.’ His mother, Princess considers him irresolute: ‘Do something for the liberty you prate about!’ she exhorts. Annie, in contrast, is glad ‘he isn’t a blind creature of his time, passing down tried and tested lies.’
Other roles are variously rewarding, with complexities to make real. Princess, dignified mother of Cupid, Palmer’s ‘favourite bastard’, dispenses a powder to induce abortions and is organizing a slave revolt. Her husband, Sammy, extravagantly subservient to Palmer (perhaps playing fool to catch wise), stays loyal to Princess until the pressure proves too much. Beautiful Chloe, a shade-conscious young mulatto who has slept with Palmer and Cupid, spies on Annie while pretending to serve her faithfully. Rhone, commanded into sexual service, is vividly fearful and then pathetically jealous. Dr Baillie (‘I’ll look at her clitoris… Amputation may be necessary’) is a richly repulsive cameo role. The Machiavellian Dawes manipulates nearly everybody, including Palmer, and announces his need for ‘sensual refinements’ and a predilection towards rape – ‘If I can get it, I don’t want it…Your tail must say yes, and your mouth must demurely say no.’ Chloe has
heard ‘unmentionable things’ about him.
When The White Witch of Rose Hall was staged in Kingston, Jamaica, late in 1975 reviewers, though reporting some disgusted responses, were not troubled by sex and violence and the supernatural. They recognized the play as entertaining, suspenseful and vibrant with ideas. The version printed here was given a reading in London at the Tricycle Theatre early in 1980s. It will be good to see a full production of this newer, tighter script.
Mervyn Morris
The White Witch of Rose Hall was first performed Sunday October 4th 1975 at the Creative Arts Centre, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica directed by Lloyd Reckord with the following cast:
CHLOE, Cyrene Tomlinson
PALMER, Thom Cross
DAWES, Volier Johnson
ANNIE PALMER, Sally Carey
RHONE, Samuel Walker
DOCTOR, Michael Reckord
BEA, Lorraine Smith/Beverly Marsh
CUPID, Trenton Allen
PRINCESS, Pauline Stone
SAMMY, Clive Walker
ATTORNEY, Barry Reckord
LEADER OF RUNAWAYS, Ronald Goshop
Set Designer, Colin Garland/Pat Stanigar
Costume Designer, Colin Garland
Lighting Designer, George Carter
Sound, Evan Williams
Text: White Witch is from the London production in 1985.
Characters
ANNIE PALMER
A young English lady
SIMON PALMER
White Jamaican in his thirties
CUPID
Young Mulatto
DAWES
Middle-aged Mulatto
PRINCESS
Black Jamaican in her thirties
RHONE
Black Jamaican. Late twenties
CHLOE
Beautiful young Mulatto
SAMMY
Middle-aged Black
DR. BAILLIE
Elderly Scot
LUCINDA
Young Black Jamaican
ABUKU
Young Black Jamaican
HERRERA
Young Black Jamaican
Place: Jamaica
Time: 1800
Note: There are three playing areas: the drawing-room of Rose Hall, PALMER’s great-house, sparsely but beautifully furnished, with a highly polished mahogany floor; stairs leading up to ANNIE’s bedroom, and the bedroom itself; and a courtyard.
Act One
Rose Hall great-house. Drawing room. Two slaves whispering.
ABUKU: I hear she was a terror. Even before she had breasts on ‘er.
LUCINDA: I hear worse.
ABUKU: (Hearing CHLOE about to enter.) If we don’t ask all will be revealed.
CHLOE enters.
CHLOE: The rumours Abuku! Lucinda, the rumours!
LUCINDA: Miss Chloe, if I listen to rumours bakkra will sell me.
ABUKU: And send me back to the slave-gang.
CHLOE: Criminal conversations no less.
LUCINDA: What is that?
CHLOE: I don’t know what that is, and it is not to pass my lips, but she miscarried on the boat, and she will miscarry again. Babies are a blessing from heaven, a gift from above, a benediction by Almighty God, and witches can never carry those little angels for long. She come straight from hell.
ABUKU: I hear she come straight from England, and I want to go there right now, right now.
CHLOE: (Sharply, to ABUKU.) Fan the room. Lucinda, what you doin’ down here?
Before ABUKU can use his giant fan, PALMER comes roaring down the stairs and both slaves vanish. PALMER complains about the African song drifting in from the garden.
PALMER: Chloe.
CHLOE: Yes bakkra.
PALMER: Mrs. Palmer’s asleep. Tell the gardeners to stop the blasted nyeng-nyeng. And Chloe…
CHLOE: Yes bakkra.
PALMER: I know the whole estate want to gawp at the wife but she’s just arrive and she must rest. She’s breeding and I want Dr. Baillie to see her through the first months. But she say she don’t believe in doctors.
CHLOE: (Darkly.) What she believe in?
PALMER: She grew wild like love-bush. Not brought up. Not much broughtupcy. Her house in England is full of niggers, and she sketched every black sailor on the boat. Her father is a madman. A wit and a poet. Left her at school in Paris during the revolution.
CHLOE: Well bakkra I knew the first second she landed off the boat.
PALMER: How?
CHLOE: Ghosts ran like rats through the house.
PALMER: (Rubbing her arse, mocking her.) Chloe I better put your tongue in me mouth.
CHLOE: All of a sudden the house is haunted. Bakkra, milady’s brought rebellion with her. Disorder and confusion. A witch can make her very thoughts come to pass. Nobody’s safe. She will change your luck. From this very day your luck change for she’s delinquent and will corrupt everybody round her. Witches are fearless.
PALMER: You’re jealous I brought back a wife?
CHLOE: Bakkra meetin’ a witch is a dreadful accident, like runnin’ into a coach and four. She will kill you.
PALMER: I lie down with her. You’re jealous of that?
CHLOE: You lay with me but you never pleasured me.
PALMER: No? My wife took to me like a shark to a slave-ship. Turned up her pretty white belly before the wedding.
CHLOE: Poor Mrs. Palmer. I hope you pleasure her. But bakkra if you pleasure a witch your testicles swell up big big and huge like The Roman Empire, and you have to carry ‘em behind you in a barrel.
ABUKU enters with PALMER’S riding-whip and hat, and helps him finish dressing.
PALMER: (Fondling CHLOE.) So who rudeness you while I was away?
CHLOE: Nobody sir. You talk naked like this to Mrs. Palmer sir?
PALMER: Lawd, Chloe no. I set me mouth and talk British. Me jaw tired. And me money ran away like hog-fat. That marriage settlement, lawd, if I die everything is hers and any child she has.
DAWES enters.
DAWES: That is an incitement to murder.
PALMER: If I die she’s the richest woman in England. But Dawes, lawd, I couldn’t get her for less, and I didn’t go so far to bring back a crow. I’m certain of one thing, that I, Simon Palmer, bring back the most aristocratic lady ever to park her arse in a great-house.
DAWES: And bakkra she prettier than money.
PALMER: But Chloe, tek warning, her spirit’s high. She passed the time gunning down rats on the boat.
DAWES: Well bakkra I can’t imagine her going to a school for ladies and not learning how to poison a chalice or handle a pistol. I hear on the boat she wanted to bathe over the side like the sailors. Naked.
CHLOE: When they’re arustocratic they not too ladylike.
DAWES: You must say aristocratic.
PALMER: Chloe arusto or aristo she must rest. She miscarried once already on the boat. Too much excitement.
DAWES: She’s breeding again?
PALMER: Yes. Night and day I was down there. Nothing else to do on the boat. My son will be the richest commoner in England. So mek her sit down on the couch and rest. She can sketch. Dawes I want you to introduce Mrs. Palmer to protocol. Tell her no dancing with coachmen. Tell her if you dance with niggers, they peep into your grave. And make arrangements for her ball. Invite members of the Assembly from all over the island. Let them come see the quality I bring back. Her mother dropped twelve.
DAWES: She is good breedin’ stock.
PALMER: Her sister died in child-bed, but her dam and sire are good. One granny dropped thirteen.
DAWES: Her pedigree’s good.
CHLOE: Bakkra your field-slaves are not breedin’.
DAWES: They goin’ to the witches for powders. I just arrest one. Come and sentence her.
PALMER: Dawes, I want you to wipe out every witch from this property.
DAWES: Stone them bakkra?
PALMER: Stone them, hang them, strangle them, anything, but terrify the bi
tches.
DAWES: Come and pass sentence. And we’re startin’ work on the new shit-pit. Come and look at it.
PALMER and DAWES exit in one direction, and CHLOE in another. Lights on ANNIE, in her bedroom, talking to LUCINDA.
LUCINDA: If you’re morning sick milady drink this.
ANNIE drinks.
Twelve weeks on a rolling boat. What a journey.
ANNIE: (Looking out to sea.) But colour is mined in the seas here. The waves run with it, the clouds draw it up. It tints the very moon… Do those men with dogs guard the house day and night?
LUCINDA: They’re safe-niggers. Promoted from the field.
ANNIE: They must be very wicked to get promoted. Were you promoted?
LUCINDA: Yes. I was wicked milady.
ANNIE: Then you must have gone, like me, to a convent.
LUCINDA: I was in the kitchen, and bakkra told me to kneel down.
ANNIE: (Laughing.) And will you still?
LUCINDA: I know not the position now. You and Miss Chloe might bear the brunt.
ANNIE: My dear men say we go to bed for love or money. Never for the real thing.
LUCINDA: I go to bed to sleep milady.
ANNIE laughs.
ANNIE: And breed dear. If sex be conquest and men the conquerors, what’s in it for women but submission and babies.
LUCINDA: I have three.
ANNIE: Where are they?
LUCINDA: Miss Chloe can’t breed, she’s a mule, and she was jealous of my three so bakkra sell them.
Appalled silence.
They’re in San Domingo, and there’s rebellion. Please don’t mention them again. We spoke in confidence.
ANNIE: Do we speak in confidence?
LUCINDA: If you tell bakkra, he will send me back to the slave gang.
ANNIE: I once exchanged confidences with a stable lad.
LUCINDA: He betrayed them?
ANNIE: He left marks on my body to prove to his friends that he’d shagged me.
LUCINDA: Were you in love with him?
ANNIE: Yes. So my brothers spat on me, and pitch-forked the stable-lad.