The Emperor Jones (Characters)

Characters

Jeff

The black man Brutus Jones killed over a crap game in the United States before the action of the play began. Appearing in Scene III as one of Jones’s hallucinations, Jeff is brown rather than black-skinned, thin, middle-aged, and dressed in a Pullman porter’s uniform. In Jones’s hallucination, Jeff tosses the dice like a robot.

Brutus Jones

The main character in The Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones is a tall and powerfully built American negro man of middle age. Formerly a Pullman (train) car porter in the United States, Jones comes to the West Indian island where the play takes place and becomes “emperor” after convincing the natives that he has magical powers. Before coming to the island, Jones had escaped from an American prison, where he was being confined for killing a man over a crap game. Jones exudes a strength and confidence that commands fear and respect from all around him even while he reigns quite ruthlessly as Emperor. His eyes indicate extraordinary cunning, intelligence, and a careful shrewdness.

To make himself appear regal, Jones wears a light-blue uniform decorated with brass buttons and heavy gold chevrons and braids. His pants are bright red with a light-blue stripe down the side and he wears patent leather boots with brass spurs and a holster with a long-barreled, pearl-handled revolver. In the play he speaks with a strongly marked black dialect, as in, “who dare whistle dat way in my palace?” Jones is filled with contempt for the former exploiter of the islanders, the white man, Smithers.

Lem

A former chieftain on the island and the leader of the natives who finally rebel against Jones’s dictatorial rule. The heavy-set Lem appears on stage only in the last scene, where he is dressed in a loincloth with a revolver and cartridge belt around his waist. Lem hates Jones and once hired another native to shoot him, but when the gun misfired in the assassination attempt, Jones proclaimed that only a silver bullet could kill him. As the play opens, Lem has finally convinced the rest of the natives to forge their own silver bullet, and they spend the night working up the courage to attack Jones. Lem and his men finally kill Jones in the forest where Jones had desperately run in circles trying to escape.

Little Formless Fears

In the second scene of the play, these fanciful creatures represent Jones’s first hallucinations in the forest and they stand for his general anxieties. These “fears” are “black” and “shapeless,” like “a grubworm about the size of a creeping child,” and “only their glittering little eyes can be seen.” These shapes “move noiselessly, but with deliberate, painful effort, striving to raise themselves on end, failing and sinking again.” When these fears mock Jones with their laughter, Jones shoots at them and they disappear.

Henry Smithers

Smithers is the tall, bald, stoop-shouldered Cockney Englishman, about forty-years-old, who was successfully exploiting the black natives before Brutus Jones arrived on the island. Smithers has a long neck with an enormous Adam’s apple, which looks like an egg. Deeply tanned, Smithers’s naturally pasty face has taken on a sickly yellow color, and his nose is red from extensive drinking of native rum. Smithers has small, sharp features, including a pointed nose and little, red-rimmed eyes that dart around like a ferret’s. He is mean, cowardly, and dangerous — afraid of Jones but openly defiant, as far as he dares to be, and is clearly delighted with Jones’s downfall.

Smithers carries a riding whip and is dressed in a dirty white suit with a white cork helmet and a cartridge belt and revolver around his waist. Smithers speaks in a (British) Cockney dialect, which O’Neill indicates with idioms and spelling like “I got me ’ooks [hooks or hands] on yer [you].”

Witch Doctor

Jones’s last hallucination, in Scene VII, includes this dancing and chanting shaman or medicine man of primitive African society. The Witch Doctor is shriveled, old, and “naked except for the fur of some small animal tied about his waist, its bushy tail hanging down in front.” His body is stained a bright red, he has antelope horns on his head, and he carries a bone rattle and a “charm stick” made of white cockatoo feathers. The Witch Doctor finally indicates that Jones must serve as the ritual sacrifice for a crocodile god that rises from the nearby river. However, Jones’s last act is to defy the sacrifice and shoot his pistol and the remaining silver bullet into the crocodile apparition.

Media Adaptations

• The Emperor Jones was adapted as a full-length feature film in 1933 and starred Paul Robeson as Brutus Jones and Dudley Digges as Smithers. The screenplay adaptation for this black and white, seventy-two-minute film was written by Du Bose Heyward and directed by Dudley Murphy for United Artists. In 1980 the film was released on videocassette by Hollywood Home Theatre. In 1993, Janus Films joined Voyager Press to issue the 1933 film coupled with a thirty-minute documentary of Paul Robeson’s life taken from the Janus Film Collection and originally released in 1980. The documentary, in color, is narrated by actor Sidney Poitier.
• In 1933, an operatic version of the play had its World Premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The composer and librettist was Louis Gruenberg, the conductor Tullio Serafin. The set was designed by Jo Mielziner, and the role of Brutus Jones was sung by baritone Lawrence Tibbett. The opera followed O’Neill’s script faithfully except for the omission of the final scene and the changing of Jones’s death to suicide (using his last silver bullet on himself). O’Neill approved the changes. As a result of the orchestration, the drum-beat was less effective.
• In 1971, Everett and Edwards released a thirty-two-minute audiocassette lecture on the play as part of their Modern Drama Cassette Curriculum Series. The lecturer is Jordan Yale Miller. In 1976, Everett and Edwards released a thirty-six-minute audiocassette lecture on the play as part of their World Literature Cassette Curriculum Series. The lecturer is Howard F. Stein.
• In 1974, Jeffrey Norton Publishers released a fifty-five-minute audiocassette interview between Heywood Hale Broun and O’Neill biographer Louis Sheaffer as part of the Jeffrey Norton Publishers Avid Readers in the Arts tape library.
• In 1975, Educational Dimensions Corporation released an eighteen-minute audiovisual filmstrip that examines and analyzes O’Neill’s play.