The Emperor Jones

O'Neill, Eugene. "The Emperor Jones." Ed. David L. Lewis. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 311-17. Print.

I’m not really sure what to say about these little snippets from O’Neill’s play, other than the obvious. Without reading the entire thing, a lot of the sections were out of reference and therefore I couldn’t get much in the way of symbolism or metaphor. The one point I was able to pick up on, however, was the black men chasing down another black man. Based on what I know about Eugene O’Neill (I’ve read The Iceman Cometh), my guess is that most of the characters in this play are exaggerated caricatures, intended to portray an absurdity. Given this, I’m going to assume that Jones is portrayed to be what typical black Americans view as the intellectual black (although Jones doesn’t really come off intelligent). I say this because of the implied meaning behind having a group of black natives chasing down a black man from America (or thereabouts); O’Neill is trying to say that black Americans and black Africans are not of the same culture and therefore not, by default, compatible. This is, of course, a statement against the likes of Marcus Garvey and B.T. Washington, who (as far as I can tell) never questioned the native African’s acceptance of western blacks back into their culture.

On the flip side, the native blacks chasing down Jones are aided and followed by two (presumably) white men. This could imply exactly the opposite of what I said initially; perhaps Jones represents the “greedy” black man out to take over Africa while the tribe aiding the two white hunters (or whatever they were) represents more complacent blacks who are willing to succumb to what white men tell them to do. I’m unfamiliar with O’Neill’s stance on racism, or if he was racist himself, but I can assume from these short little pieces of his play that he thought the Africa for the Africans movement (as well as Garvey and Washington) was unfair or absurd.