Emperor Jones, The

Emperor Jones, The, expressionist play by O'Neill, produced in 1920 and published in 1921. An operatic version by Louis Gruenberg was produced in 1933.

The giant black Brutus Jones, former Pullman porter and ex‐convict, becomes in two years the feared, autocratic “emperor” of a West Indian island. Exploiting the superstition of the primitive natives, claiming that only a silver bullet can kill him, he enriches himself at their expense, and brags to a cockney trader, Smithers, that when the inevitable rebellion comes he will escape to France, where he has sent a fortune. The uprising suddenly begins, but he is unable to locate his hidden supplies in the forest, where he loses his way. The incessant thumping of a tomtom undermines his courage, and a series of brief, symbolic scenes shows his mental return to earlier phases of his own and his race's history: his murder of another black, Jeff, in a gambling altercation; his escape from a prison chain gang; the slave auction block; the slave ship; the witch doctor and crocodile god in the Congo jungle. In each episode he fires a shot from his pistol, the last silver bullet being fired at the sacred crocodile. During this imaginative retrogression to a savage state, he circles through the forest; emerging where he had entered, he falls riddled by the silver bullets of the rebel tribesmen.