For Frentoria Green
Act One. An Old Colony.
Scene One. Aphra.
1664. It’s been four years since Charles II was restored to the English throne, and the undercurrent of Republicanism still runs deep and strong. The Roundheads are pardoned, but the Tower is full. London has swelled to half a million people. In the next year, the plague will bloom again on the city’s skin. In three years, most of London will burn. In a dark room at the back of a city tavern, the child prostitute Nell Gwyn has her foot poised above the first plank stair to the stage.
In ports around the world, British ships parlay goods and services into the beginnings of true empire. In the British colony of Suriname, which will soon be lost to the Dutch, a young lady of England is watching a slave ship unburden itself. She watches as, one by one, the disembarking slaves use their shackled hands to shield their eyes against the first sunlight of months—which the face wants but the eyes do not. Miss Amis is a blooming dramatist, and so appreciates the slaves’ dilemma, even as she appreciates the gleam of the metal-tipped whips. One individual in particular catches her eye, and our young Miss makes a quick study of him.
Scene Two. Oroonoko.
Oroonoko was first seized on, and sold to our overseer, , with seventeen more of all sorts and sizes, but not one of quality with him.
, as I said, he understood English pretty well;
and being wholly unarmed and defenseless, he only beheld the captain with a look all fierce and disdainful,
, and telling ‘em he would make no resistance, he cried,
“Come my fellow slaves, let us descend, and see if we can meet with more honor
and honesty in the next world we shall touch upon.”
Scene Three. Me.
1992. It’s the last years of a mean century and, though the century is probably no meaner than any other, it is more often caught at it. At present, America is smoldering from race riots ignited by video of police beating an unarmed black man. In three years, soldiers will be dispatched to end a genocidal conflict half a world away. Police officers will shoot an unarmed black man 41 times in an American doorway.
In rural New York, a young woman who is half black and half white comes to school one day to find that a truly black girl has arrived. She begins the solo tango, graceful and misbegotten, of trying to see without being seen, hear without being heard. She learns quickly that the girl is of a migrant worker family, and will only be there for some weeks. Just now our young Miss is watching as the subject of her study tucks books away, exactingly, into a locker devoid of any humanizing element.
She is faced with a dilemma. She feels she should befriend the girl. But she knows the girl will not stay. And if she will not stay, her role will be more mercenary than conscript. And mercenaries always, always leave a trail in their wake.
Scene Four. You.
Act Two. Setting Sail.
Scene One. Caesar.
I ought to tell you that the Christians never buy any slaves but they give ‘em some name of their own,
Scene Two. Mrs. Behn.
The thing about the past is that we can see into the future, albeit to an imperfect degree.
Aphra went back to England and married Mr. Behn, or — as is equally likely — made him up. In either case, he died. She went to Antwerp as a spy, didn’t get paid, borrowed the money for her return voyage, and was clapped into debtors’ prison. Someone got her out again — most likely the man who first staged one of her plays. She remained loyal to the royal family even after her own writing betrayed a growing displeasure with inherited authority.
There were affairs here and there, and some good friends — she was friends with Lord Rochester and consequently, we must assume, attended dinner parties with the famously witty and fabulously naughty of the day. Like most of her male contemporaries, Behn’s plots were often stolen, in part or sum, from historical occurrences or the works of her international peers. Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister, believed to be the first epistolary novel, was based on a contemporary scandal in which a prominent Whig ran off with his sister-in-law. The plot of Oroonoko, despite the narrator’s assurances of her witness, bears great resemblance to a contemporary Italian play. For all the success she had in her lifetime, Aphra died unmarried and childless, and for centuries her work was largely forgotten.
Scene Three. You.
When last I looked, fifty-four percent of migrant teenagers do not graduate from school.
The average age of migrant workers is 32.78 years.
As of 2012, seventy-six percent of farmworkers are men. Sixty percent are married.
Twenty-two percent of migrant workers have children.
A third of these children work in the fields.
The average income of a migrant worker is $1100 a year.
Since 1998, the share of farm workers who migrate has dropped by more than in half.
Scene Four. Me.
A friend once told me that his grandparents, refugees of the first genocide of the ’forementioned mean century, taught him never to feel sorry for anyone. Pity is the fruit of belief that you’re better, luckier, happier. But, the old Armenians say, you can’t know what’s in another’s heart. Or what waits around the corner.
The grandparents migrated through one country and then another. In many ways, they turned American, though they never acquired the American ability to feel pity for almost anyone, anywhere.
Maybe you became a nurse, you have a nice husband and house in the suburbs and two beautiful children who both do well in school. Maybe you got tired of homework and fell for some flash and an easy smile, then found yourself in the fields again.
Either way, I don’t feel sorry for you.
Act Three. A New Colony.
Scene One. Me.
Although it is not impossible, I doubt you have read Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave. I will tell you the end, though perhaps you’ve already gleaned it. Caesar is repeatedly promised his freedom and never granted it. He leads an abortive slave revolt, then is kept under even tighter wraps. His wife is pregnant, and knowing that he would rather die than live with his wife and all his heirs in captivity, he plans murder and mutiny again. His wife agrees, and agrees that Caesar should kill her lest she suffer the wrath of his masters. He kills her, loses his mind, is captured and put to death. He is cut to pieces while calmly smoking a pipe, finally, quietly, giving up the ghost.
Scene Two. Oroonoko.
He said he would travel towards the sea, plant a new colony, and defend it by their valor;
and when they could find a ship, either driven by stress of weather, or guided by Providence,
they would seize it, and make it a prize,
till it had transported them to their own countries:
at least they should be made free in his kingdom, and be esteemed as his fellow-sufferers,
and men that had the courage and the bravery to attempt, at least,
Scene Three. Aphra.
1664. Some months ago, the gentleman John Johnson of Canterbury found himself appointed lieutenant-general of Suriname by his cousin Francis, Lord Willoughby. He boarded a cross-Atlantic vessel with his wife and foster daughter. It wasn’t long before he found himself ill. His greatest discomfort in death was abandoning his wife and daughter to the looming pirate world, opportunity missed. He worried most about his daughter. Aphra had had a bit of the pirate in her all along — quick to board and sword forward, a fierce imagination and most unladylike scribblings.
Little could he know that her most lauded work, produced late in her life, would be set in this world, just now entering her eyes in the form of vibrant color and violent subjugation. That her reputation as an artist would be resurrected as much because of her views on race and the social structure of slavery than of any skill or innovation. Neither could she, of course. But the young Miss Amis takes it all in anyway, pockets it in the deep folds of her petticoats, steals it away to examine later. It is, perhaps, all any artist can do.
Scene Four. You.
I hope you will forgive my using you. This trip we have no compass, but our ship, driven by Providence or stress of weather, needs some constellation to point us home.