The Lamplighter, стр. 8
Mammy. Mammy. Filthy, dirty. Dirty, dirty, clean.
BLACK HARRIOT:
A lick and a promise.
MARY:
I was always at the field driver’s beck and call.
BLACK HARRIOT:
I wouldn’t let them take me. I took them.
I grabbed their balls and pulled them.
I licked their faces. I rode them like
I was wild on a wild horse, Yahoooooo!
I took him and took him and took him again!
Till his red face got redder,
His red chest got weaker.
I knocked the breath out his chest
And he was panting like there
Was never going be any tomorrow.
I took him for everything he got.
I took him till I finished him off.
CONSTANCE roars with laughter.
MACBEAN:
Thomas Sutherland made free with the slave women. He used to say that a likely negur wench was fit to be a Queen. It is not known how many queens he fitted into his plantation. He was a gentleman greatly addicted to his women slaves.
SONG:
(The next part is sung.)
LAMPLIGHTER:
The rich man comes from down below
CHORUS:
Yo ho, yo ho
LAMPLIGHTER:
What he comes for I guess I know
CHORUS:
Long time ago
LAMPLIGHTER:
He comes to take his slave girl
CHORUS:
Yo ho, yo ho
LAMPLIGHTER:
The mistress pretend she don’t know
CHORUS:
Long time ago.
FX:
(Quay.)
MARY:
She stood on those cobbles and was sold for eighty pounds.
She was sold to the plantation.
We call her The Lamplighter.
LAMPLIGHTER:
I imagined I could see light on water,
A tall house with light
Guiding me to shore
CONSTANCE:
I imagined one day I would find my daughter,
A small girl,
With dark curly hair.
LAMPLIGHTER:
I carried the light from the day
You lost her.
A bright light across the deep dark sea.
CONSTANCE:
I carried a light for my sons, my daughters. One day
I’d find the wings to fly away.
LAMPLIGHTER:
I carried the light to light the lamps
The lamps across the wide dark sea
CONSTANCE:
I carried the lamp inside me,
And it was glowing deeply
LAMPLIGHTER:
I never did ever part
With that constant flame
Not even when they broke my heart.
CONSTANCE:
I protected it from wind and rain;
I’d see my children one more time.
LAMPLIGHTER:
They call me the Lamplighter.
They call me the Lamplighter.
Scene 7: Shipping News
MACBEAN:
The weather, still dirty.
Buryed a boy slave of the flux.
Buryed a man slave of the flux.
The general synopsis at Midday Atlantic –
Low 967. The Dorothy. The Windsor.
Coming soon.
MARY:
Tobacco, sugar – coming soon.
BLACK HARRIOT:
The British sweet tooth – coming soon.
Hot puddings, cold puddings, steamed puddings, baked puddings, pies, tarts, coming soon. Moderate or good. Creams, moulds, charlottes, bettys, trifles, fools. Coming soon.
MACBEAN:
Buryed a man slave. Buryed a boy.
Buyed a boy slave of the flux.
LAMPLIGHTER:
Into the shark infested Atlantic,
The black deaths slipped. The sharks
Followed the slave ships for the pickings.
And the seagulls that carried the souls
Of the dead sailors flew over the dead.
MACBEAN:
The right hand and foot of one
Across the head and foot of the other
So that they are fettered together
And cannot move either hand or foot.
From head to toe and toe to foot.
Two days before docking in
The slave galley could be smelled,
The putrescence of blood, faeces, vomit and rotting bodies,
Wafting downwind,
The smell of the dead carried
Across the water to the Port.
Permanent trade winds blow
From the Northeast and East
Across the Atlantic.
BLACK HARRIOT:
Dire is the tossing. Deep the moans.
MACBEAN:
Buryed a woman slave of the flux.
No 29. Buryed a girl slave. No 74.
Later Decreasing Four or Five.
CONSTANCE:
The slavers followed the sugar.
The sharks followed the slave ships.
The slaves’ bones sunk to the bottom of the sea.
LAMPLIGHTER:
I would rather die on yonder gallows
Than live in slavery.
BLACK HARRIOT:
Demerara. Muscovada.
Molasses. Treacle. Syrup.
Brown sugar. White sugar. Moist sugar.
Castor sugar, raw sugar.
Scene 8: Sugar
FX:
(During the scene we hear the sound of sugar cane being cut and the sound of a sugar mill.)
MARY:
Mrs Hannah Glasse’s first cookery book in England. The Art of Cookery made plain and easy.
BLACK HARRIOT:
Take three quarters of a pound of best moist sugar to make a cake the Spanish way.
CONSTANCE:
Rum had a wonderful history of success in Britain, so did jam. La dolce vita!
BLACK HARRIOT:
This is the dawning of the Age of Sugar.
LAMPLIGHTER:
My story is the story of sugar.
MACBEAN:
The owner of Worthy Park, Jamaica declared, ‘The white man cannot labour under a burning sun without certain death, though the Negro can in all climates with impunity.’
LAMPLIGHTER:
My story is the story of sugar.
My story is not sweet.
MACBEAN:
The careful benevolence of providence has provided the Negroes with thick skins.
MARY:
I carried manure in baskets, weighing eighty pounds, on my head. The holes dug for the cane were deep and wide.
LAMPLIGHTER:
The sun baked the heavy soils.
The sun baked my skin.
The cakes were baked. The cakes were baking. The cakes had been baked. The cakes will be baked.
BLACK HARRIOT:
Pound cake! A pound of floor. A pound of butter. A pound of sugar. One dozen eggs.
MARY:
The cut cane was heavy and cumbersome.
CONSTANCE:
20 tons of cane to produce one ton of sugar.
MARY:
At Worthy Park, 89 of the 133 field slaves were women.
LAMPLIGHTER:
We did the planting, cutting, burning, carrying, loading, slicing and stripping.
MACBEAN:
The long sweep of Jamaica’s fertile southern coast was pitted with plantations.
MARY:
I was always hungry. I never stopped being hungry especially in the summer. We got breakfast at nine when we’d been up since four. When the belly is hollow, when the ground feels like it is moving up to meet you, when the emptiness inside you is like something moving. You are all the time imagining food.
LAMPLIGHTER:
One time I run away
Crawling through the tall sugar cane
Watching out for snakes
I get as far as the forest in the hills.
Dogs are sent after me.
When the people catch me
They flog me
Till my back is so crisscross
It looks like cut cane
MACBEAN:
The posterior is made bare and the offender is extended prone on the ground. The driver, with his long and heavy whip, inflicts the lashes under the eye of the overseer.
LAMPLIGHTER:
My story is the story of sugar.
BLACK HARRIOT:
In 1775 the British West Indies Colonies produces 100,000 tons of sugar
CONSTANCE:
Syllabubs and fancys, junkets and ices, milk puddings, suet puddings.
LAMPLIGHTER:
I cut the cane. After I cut the cane, the cane is crushed in the sugar mills and processed in the noisy factories and boiling houses.
MACBEAN:
As we pass along the shore, the Plantations appear to us one above the other like several