The Liquid Plain (TCG Edition). Naomi Wallace
BOOKS BY NAOMI WALLACE AVAILABLE FROM TCG
The Fever Chart
In the Heart of America and Other Plays
ALSO INCLUDES:
One Flea Spare
Slaughter City
The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek
The War Boys
Inside/Outside:
Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora
Edited by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi
The Liquid Plain
The Liquid Plain is copyright © 2016 by Naomi Wallace
Introduction is copyright © 2016 by Robin D. G. Kelley
The Liquid Plain is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.,
520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Ron Gwiazda, Abrams Artists Agency, 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, (646) 461-9325.
Page 37, 93: “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, Songs of Innocence, 1789. Page 39: “America: A Prophecy” by William Blake, 1793. Page 96: “All Religions Are One” by William Blake, 1788; “The Clod and the Pebble” by William Blake, Songs of Experience, 1794. Page 121: “A Divine Image” by William Blake, Songs of Experience, 1794.
The publication of The Liquid Plain by Naomi Wallace, through TCG’s Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wallace, Naomi, author.
The liquid plain / Naomi Wallace.
First edition.
ISBN 978-1-55936-841-4 (ebook)
DDC 812/.54—dc23
Cover design, book design and composition by Lisa Govan
Cover art by Bruce McLeod
First Edition, August 2016
This play is for my three daughters,
Nadira, Caitlin and Tegan,
and for Bruce. Always.
CONTENTS
Introduction
By Robin D. G. Kelley
THE LIQUID PLAIN
Further Reading
SPECIAL THANKS
THIS PLAY WOULD NOT have come into being without the brilliant works of Robin D. G. Kelley and Marcus Rediker.
The watery world in this play is for Ellen Gallagher, an underwater visionary, whose portholes give us dangerous and daring insight.
By Robin D. G. Kelley
NAOMI WALLACE found the title The Liquid Plain in Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 poem “A Farewell to America,” a stanza from which serves as the play’s epigraph. Do not skip over it, for Wheatley’s verse does much more than serve up a neat, picturesque metaphor for the Atlantic as a vast highway between Old and New Worlds. The play and the poem share much in common. Both are based on actual events: “A Farewell to America” tells of Wheatley’s real life journey from Boston to London in 1773 whereas The Liquid Plain takes off from the trials of James De Wolfe, a slave ship captain and prominent New England citizen indicted in 1791 for throwing an enslaved woman overboard because she contracted smallpox. John Cranston, a crew member who refused orders to assist in the killing, testified against De Wolfe causing something of a sensation. Once feted by abolitionists and reviled by slave traders, Cranston faded from historical memory until Marcus Rediker’s magnificent book, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), resurrected him.
And yet, in both cases “actual events” mask deeper, more fundamental truths.
The African-born Wheatley, early America’s most famous poet, took off for “Britannia’s distant shore” partly to improve her health, partly to seek out a publisher. Paradoxically, she traveled in the company of her slave master’s son, Nathaniel Wheatley. In other words, she was property. The poem’s apparent nostalgia for New England veils her recognition that the England of old had just become liberated territory for the enslaved. A year prior to her journey, a fugitive from slavery named James Somerset successfully sued for his right to freedom in the British high court. Chief Justice Lord Mansfield ruled that because England never passed a law legalizing slavery, masters could not force fugitives back into slavery as long as they were on English soil. So when Wheatley writes in the same poem, “But thou! Temptation hence away / With all thy fatal train / Nor once seduce my soul away,” it is not clear whether she is speaking of England or America—the former, the temptation to seize her freedom; the latter, the temptation to return home without it. Either way, we know it was on her mind when she penned “A Farewell to America,” however camouflaged behind flowery verse. We also know that she returned to New England a slave, choosing to negotiate her freedom over a fugitive life in the sanctuary of Britannia. She was finally freed upon the death of her master, John Wheatley, in 1778, and she herself died six years later at the age of thirty-one, broken and penniless.
In The Liquid Plain, reversing sail across the Atlantic also serves as a possible path to freedom. The rough, cold waters first experienced as the nightmare of the Middle Passage—young men, women and children packed tightly into dark cargo holds, chained together, suffering from dysentery, fever, malnutrition and brutality—appeared as the dream of returning home. Except that Wallace’s characters chose fugitivity, self-liberation, and Africa over the kindness of white men, the fairness of white law, and the paternalism of England. Indeed, she succeeds in transforming a tale of white bourgeois villainy and white working-class courage into a story that centers on the struggles of black women for freedom and justice.
Set in Bristol, Rhode Island, the first act takes place in 1791, the year of De Wolfe’s trial and the first year of the Haitian Revolution—the massive slave insurrection that not only destroyed slavery on the island but established the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Act One opens with two lovers, Adjua and Dembi, fugitives from slavery, hustling along Bristol’s docks with