An Octoroon

“Time is like…so fecked up. You know?”

The Playwright, who is unnamed but represents Dion Boucicault, was celebrated when he was alive. His plays were performed internationally, and he was a household name. But when he appears in the 21st century, his name is all but erased. His plays have grown dusty and unperformed for reasons that he couldn’t have foreseen. This is a warning to BJJ as well—there’s no way to make sure that his work stays relevant, so it’s pointless to focus energy on enduring.

“I’m just going to say this right now so we can get it over with: I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you.”

This stage direction is a preface before Minnie and Dido enter for Act I. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins converses with readers, actors, directors, designers, and essentially everyone who isn’t the audience, through his wry, often comical stage directions. Minnie and Dido speak in contemporary AAVE, which the playwright acknowledges is an anachronism. But he is also challenging the pervasive stereotype of an enslaved people’s dialect that is generally viewed as racist but also stands in as a substitute for the unknown. Moreover, these fabricated approximations of their speech patterns were written by white men. Rather than reinforce stereotypes, the playwright calls attention to the absence of knowledge.

“MINNIE. Would you fuck him?

DIDO. No, Minnie! Damn! Would you? (Beat. She would.)

MINNIE. But I kind of get the feeling you don’t really get a say in the matter.”

The original play ignores the glaring truth that is inherent in Zoe’s existence: As a child of a white man and an enslaved woman, she is a product of rape. Minnie and Dido gossip about the late Judge Peyton’s pastime of raping enslaved women before moving on to talk about George. As they talk about whether they find him attractive, Minnie quickly brings it home that this seemingly normal exchange isn’t normal at all. Their consent wouldn’t be asked for or even acknowledged, much like their lack of consent.

“Dem trashy darkies? Born here? What? On beautiful Terrebonne?! Don’t believe it, Mas’r George—dem black tings never was born at all; dey growed up one mornin’ frum da roots of a sassafras tree in the swamp.”

Before George and Dora enter, Pete has a moment in which he speaks normally to Minnie and Dido, with no dialect or quaint pandering. But he puts it on for them automatically, as do Minnie and Dido when they’re addressing one of the white characters. This form of code-switching, performing to match the expectations of those in power, points toward the theme of Performing Constructions of Race.

“Ha ha ha—How I enjoy the folksy ways of the n*****s down here. All the ones I’ve ever known were either filthy ape-like Africans of Paris or the flashy uppity darkies of New York. Here, though, the negro race is so quaint and vibrant and colorful—much like the landscape. And so full of wisdom and cheer and tall tales. I should write a book.”

This is the audience’s first impression of George, who is the play’s romantic lead. His love for Zoe, even after learning about her lineage, might suggest that his racism is at least more redeemable than that of the villain McClosky. But this cheerfully racist musing shows what he sees when he looks at Black people. In Paris and New York, where they weren’t enslaved, he found them offensive. But now that he owns them, he enjoys the act they put on for his sake, even considering their stories as his property to be turned into a book.

“I know this place like the back of my pretty lily-white hand. Our families have been historically quite close, you know.”

Dora has noticed that George seems to be too interested in Zoe, and she tries to put him off her by mentioning that Zoe is his half-cousin. She doesn’t say that Zoe is an eighth Black, perhaps because she assumes that he’ll see that himself, or possibly to avoid seeming improper. But Dora does call attention to her own whiteness, which is a major advantage that she has over Zoe, and which she sees as part of her beauty.

“Curse these old families—a snooty lot of dried-up aristocracy. Just because my grandfather wasn’t some broken-down Virginia émigré or a stingy old Creole, I ain’t fit to sit down to the same meat with them. It makes my blood so hot I hear my heart hiss.”

McClosky is certainly an irredeemable villain, which he demonstrates by becoming a murderer and a would-be rapist. But with this statement, he shows that the Peytons are villainous too. They’ve treated him as lesser and refused to let him eat at their table, making his contempt for them—if not the actions that are borne from that contempt—seem justified.

“Come, Zoe, don’t be a fool; I’d marry you if I could, but you know I can’t, so just say what you want. I’ll put back these Peytons in Terrebonne, and they shall know you done it; yes, they’ll have you to thank for saving them from ruin.”

McClosky approaches Zoe with the expectation that her innocent exterior is hiding the animosity she ought to feel for the position that the Peytons have placed her in. She has been allowed to live as if she isn’t enslaved, but only at the family’s discretion, and she is not allowed to forget that she is lower. But Zoe doesn’t share McClosky’s anger, and she prefers to continue in her naïve belief that the Peytons will take care of her.

“The more I see of George Peyton the better I like him; but he is too modest—that is a very unattractive virtue in a man.”

Dora gossips to Zoe as if they are girlfriends, but she punctuates her confidences with jabs at Zoe’s status. She presumes that George must be interested in her, since she thinks he couldn’t possibly be interested in Zoe. What Dora sees as modesty is in fact George’s disinterest in her. She sends Zoe to speak to him on her behalf, but as an enslaved person who owes her subservience rather than as a friend.

“Zoe, listen to me, then. I shall see this estate pass form me without a sigh, for it possesses no charm for me; the only estate I value is the heart of one true woman, and the slaves I’d have are her thoughts.”

George’s choice of metaphor is both humorously abysmal and ironic. He’s attempting to say that he wants Zoe to love him and think only about him, but he uses the language of ownership and slavery. If he owns her heart like property and enslaves her thoughts, she has no agency at all. But George finds slavery to be quaint, and Zoe, who has never fully experienced slavery for herself, finds his words romantic.

“George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a…bluish tinge? […] Look at my eyes; is not the same color in the white?”

Zoe, who is so fully white passing that she is played by a white actress, is showing George that she is Black. Racial identity can be difficult to pin down, particularly based on physical appearance, which does not necessarily reflect bloodlines. These bluish tinges are a myth meant to dispel the threatening notion that race might not always be physically visible. If a person who is designated Black based on her lineage can go undetected, that challenges the race rhetoric that holds together the entire institution of slavery.

“Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the rest; those seven bright drops give me love like yours—hope like yours—ambition like yours—passions hung from life like dewdrops on morning flowers; but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing—I’m an octoroon!”

Zoe’s relentless optimism is broken through to show that she does feel hatred, but only for herself and her Blackness. She views the blood from her mother’s family as poison, having spent her life benefitting from her father’s white privilege, which was always limited in certain ways by her Black heritage. Rather than recognize that her white, enslaving family is wrong for subjugating her Black family, she has internalized feelings of inferiority.

“Can you stop actin’ fieldhand for like a minute? You work in the house now! You gotta behave yo’self! […] I’m only telling you this for your own good. I don’t want you to get hurt. You see what happened to Two-fingered Tommy when he got caught stealing from the pantry. Now he only got one finger.”

When Dido reproaches Minnie for dancing and singing about getting drunk, she does it too abrasively. And although she walks it back as concern, Dido shows that the hierarchies among the enslaved people are also internalized and used to signify superiority and inferiority. Soon, they discover that they were left out of plans to escape because they work in the house, demonstrating how these divides keep them from working together.

“I know now what I ought to do. I can’t marry Zoe, though I love her, but Miss Dora is in love with me and her fortune would redeem a good part of this estate, so I will sell myself, so that the slaves shall be protected!”

Once again, George refers to love and marriage via the language of slavery and ownership, showing that he doesn’t have any real empathy for actual slaves. He can’t be with the woman he loves, so he has decided instead to use Dora for her money, yet he sees this as an act of self-sacrifice and himself as a victim. The irony of this comparison is that the actual enslaved people that he owns are about to be auctioned off and torn away from the only home and people they’ve known.

“Forgive him, Dora. You are right. He is incapable of any but sincere and pure feelings. You know you can’t be jealous of a poor creature like me. He loves me—but what of that? If he caught the fever, were stung by a snake, or possessed of any other poisonous or unclean thing, you could pity, tend, and love him through it, and for your gentle care he would love you in return. Well, is he not thus afflicted now? He loves an octoroon.”

Zoe’s manner of speaking and proper social graces demonstrate that she has been raised and educated like a white child, and supposedly, Mrs. Peyton happily raised her husband’s affair child as if Zoe were her own. But Zoe has also clearly been taught that Blackness and whiteness are separate parts of her within her blood and body, and the Blackness is malicious, violent, and animalistic. There is also no discussion as to what happened to Zoe’s mother, suggesting that she was likely separated from her infant and sold as punishment for being raped by Judge Peyton.

“Because it was the truth. I had rather be a slave with a free soul than remain free with a slavish, deceitful heart.”

Although Zoe is technically enslaved, she is similar to George in that she uses slavery as a metaphor, unacquainted with the terrible realities of enslaved life. Her sheltered upbringing has distanced her from the conditions of slavery, but unlike the other enslaved characters in the play, Zoe is the only one who seems to believe that she deserves it. She makes no attempt to escape her fate, as if being stoic and graceful when she is being sold accomplishes anything other than making easier the lives of those who are selling. The original play perpetuates the myth that there were good enslavers and bad enslavers, and that Zoe was fine with the Peytons. But her sale to McClosky makes clear that her relative freedom was always conditional.

“Yes, for you, for me, dem white folks cried. Dey cried! Fo’ us! Fo’ us sorry, no good nothing n*****s.”

Pete’s deferential gratitude toward the Peytons serves to highlight how he performs inferiority for the sake of any white people in the room. Of course, the tears in George’s eyes are for himself and his realization that he has to sacrifice himself and marry Dora. He accepts that he can’t be with Zoe, and it doesn’t seem to cross his mind to defy the racial norms of his environment and accept the consequences.

“There is either 1 or 99 people playing various bidders. Or maybe there’s some clever way to force the audience into doing this.”

The audience is already in the uncomfortable position of being spectators at an auction in which human beings are bought and sold. The stage direction suggests finding some way to heighten their discomfort by forcing them to participate in the auction as bidders. The use of the word “force” is especially significant here. In contrast with Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins goes out of his way to make the deny his audience easy pleasures, instead forcing them into an uneasy confrontation with the history of slavery and white supremacy.

“You basically sort of give your audience the moral, then you overwhelm them with fake destruction.”

The Playwright, who represents Boucicault, is explaining to the audience the formula for constructing a melodrama. Part of the appeal of melodrama to middle class audiences was the simple morality and piety of the plays, in which good and evil are easily recognized, and good always wins out in the end. The Octoroon does not challenge the morality of slavery. Rather, it excuses the racist institution by blaming its evils on a few “bad” enslavers like McClosky.

“BJJ. If anything, the theater is no longer a place of novelty. The fact is we can more or less experience anything nowadays. So I think the final frontier, awkwardly enough, is probably just an actual experience of finality, I think.

PLAYWRIGHT. Like—death, basically?

BJJ. So for a while I was thinking maybe I could actually just set this place on fire with you inside—

PLAYWRIGHT. Bring you as close to death as possible…That would be amazing…

BJJ. And then, of course, rescue each of you one by one— […] But that would be crazy.”

Another major draw of melodrama was the increasingly innovative spectacle that audiences came to expect, and which playwrights worked to oblige. Whether it was a train speeding through the stage or, as in The Octoroon, an exploding cargo ship, it needed to seem real to the audience. But theatergoers during the Industrial Revolution were certainly easier to amaze with the rapidly changing technology than audiences for An Octoroon, who are no longer impressed by realistic illusions. Instead, BJJ imagines looping past special effects and back to reality, as a near-death experience, followed by an actual death experience, is the next level up to truly stun an audience.

“Then the boat explodes. […] Sensation. (Beat.) Anyway. The point of this whole thing was to make you feel something.”

With this description, the Assistant closes out Act IV, which is the climax of most melodramas occurring with dazzling effects. The Assistant’s explanation is anti-climactic, telling the audience that they’re supposed to have feelings instead of making them feel. With this, Jacobs-Jenkins is pushing audiences to think rather than simply following their emotions.

“I think you can get too worked up over small stuff. Stop being so sensitive and caring so much about other people and what they think about you or you gonna catch yourself a stroke, for real. You can’t be bringing your work home with you. If Zoe’s lightskinned ass wanna call you and go poison herself over some white man, then you need to let her do that and move on. She’s an adult. You can’t change her.”

Minnie’s words of wisdom to Dido are an attempt to help her reframe her perspective. They also speak to Black people on a larger scale to suggest that they shouldn’t let white people define who they are and what they’re worth. Minnie and Dido can’t be responsible for saving a Black woman who has decided to sacrifice herself to fill a white man’s wishes. They can only help themselves and those who are willing to receive help.

“DIDO. This life—I didn’t ask for it.

MINNIE. Didn’t nobody ask for they lives, girl.”

Dido doesn’t understand why she’s stuck in her unhappiness, or what she is supposed to be doing to become happy. But Dido and Minnie didn’t cause and aren’t responsible for the injustice that characterizes Black women’s lives in the antebellum South. As Minnie suggests, all Dido can do is look after herself and do what she can to find things to make her happy. The rest is out of their control.