1

Repossessing the Slave Past: Caribbean Historiography and Dennis Scott’s An

Echo in the Bone

John Thieme

The potential of a country is the mass of its people.

(Derek Walcott, Drums and Colours1)

During the 1990s I worked in Hull, where in the Old Town the iconic presence of

William Wilberforce looms large. Wilberforce sits atop the city’s equivalent of

Nelson’s Column and the Wilberforce House in cobbled High Street, now very much

a back street, has been the home to a museum, which, for a century, has curated the

story of Atlantic slavery and the work of Wilberforce and his associates in the

campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire.

Hull’s museums have strong proletarian traditions. The Old Grammar School,

where Andrew Marvell and Wilberforce were once pupils, houses an exhibition of

“The Story of Hull and Its Peoples” that devotes most of its space to a narrative of the

social history of the city, memorializing the lives of its ordinary inhabitants rather

than such luminaries as Marvell and Wilberforce. However, not surprisingly, the

Wilberforce House Museum, the finest and best-preserved seventeenth-century

residence in Hull, has been concerned with chronicling the life of the single most

important figure in the abolitionist struggle. Until recently it offered a two-part story

of slavery. Visitors were exposed to the horrors and brutality of the trade and the

conditions on New World plantations, particularly through a gruesome three-

dimensional mock-up of the hold of a Middle Passage ship, complete with sound

effects in the form of the groans of slaves. Then, after this journey through trauma,

they progressed into a more redemptive narrative, viewing exhibits that illustrated
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ways in which Wilberforce and his Evangelical contemporaries pursued their

campaign to eradicate the trade.

To commemorate the bicentenary of abolition, the museum’s exhibits have

been expanded as part of a development project that has redirected emphasis by

highlighting the African perspective and exploring contemporary issues. This change

of focus seems salutary. One does not want to dispute the abolitionist narrative,

simply to say that, if history rewrites the present, shifting the emphasis, so that the

story is told from the side of those who were the victims of one of the most inhumane

episodes in world history provides a more appropriate perspective. It would be

invidious if commemorating the bicentenary privileged abolition at the expense of the

horrors that occurred. Serious narratives of other “unspeakable” chapters in human

history, such as the Holocaust have not generally placed their main stress on the forces

that brought them to an end and in this respect the historiography of slavery runs the

risk of being exceptional, even if popular representations of other genocides,

including films such as The Killing Fields (1984), Schindler’s List (1993) and Hotel

Rwanda (2004), have centred their attention on individual stories of rescue.

Down the road from the Georgian Wilberforce House, there is another

historical building: a modest back-street pub called “Ye Olde Black Boy”. It dates

from the early eighteenth century, but its history is less well documented. It became a

pub in the twentieth century, after reputedly having previously been a coffee house

and a brothel. The provenance of the pub’s name is particularly uncertain. Although a

major port from the medieval period onwards, Hull, unlike Liverpool and Bristol, was

not a terminus for the triangular trade; facing East, its commerce was mainly with

mainland Europe. So, while the presence of a single real-life “black boy” is very

conceivable, the name would seem to attest to a different situation from those in the
 3

West coast ports. Hull is a town which, despite the Wilberforce legacy, has

historically been more monocultural than most British cities, albeit a location in which

European migrants have frequently shored up. What is known about the “black boy”?

One theory has it that he was a Moroccan, who worked in the building when it was a

coffee house in the eighteenth century. The rest is rumour and prominent among the

rumours is a popular tradition that the pub is haunted. So, altogether less celebrated

than the Wilberforce House, the pub is nevertheless something of a heritage site in

itself, but it attests to a history of silence, anecdote and rumour. A silence which

perhaps haunts the very well-documented, humanitarian work of William Wilberforce.

The restaging of the Wilberforce House exhibits is thankfully going some way

to remedying the occlusion of the African side of the story and in this essay I should

like to consider work by Caribbean dramatists, which also re-envisions slave-related

experiences in ways that suggest the inadequacy of the abolitionist narrative unless it

is complemented by an engagement with the African legacy. After some brief

remarks on Derek Walcott’s 1993 Walker, originally a libretto set in nineteenth-

century Boston, my main focus is on Dennis Scott’s 1974 play, An Echo in the Bone,

which develops a brilliant strategy to demonstrate how the slave past permeates its

twentieth-century Jamaican present.

The task of recuperating the silenced voices of history’s dispossessed is, of

course, never easy and sometimes nigh-on impossible; and in this case the cliché that

history is written by the victors is an understatement, since the victims of the trade

and plantation slavery seldom had any access to the written word at all, unless, like

Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Phillis Wheatley, their writing was used

to argue the abolitionist case. And even today, at this bicentennial moment, the story

of African slavery continues to be told in tandem with accounts of abolition which,

 4

not unreasonably given their focus, accord equal space to British reformers. In

Murray Watts’s acclaimed recent play African Snow (2007),2 for example, Equiano is

thrown into dialogue with John Newton, the reformed slave-trader, who in later life

assisted Wilberforce and is now best remembered as the composer of the hymn

“Amazing Grace”. Newton is another abolitionist whose memory has been only too

well curated by a British museum, the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney.

Equiano less so? Not altogether. He, too, has been given a voice, then and now, but

primarily as a vicarious, iconic spokesman for his mute African contemporaries and in

a context that has been dependent on the work of the abolitionists.

When the slaves and the freed diasporic Africans of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries were literate, the pressure to comply with the gradualist tactics

favoured by many white abolitionists often led to a dilution of their protests. Derek

Walcott dramatizes their dilemma in Walker, originally a libretto commissioned by the

Boston Athenaeum for an opera by T.J. Anderson and subsequently revised as a play

with music by Walcott’s long-time collaborator Galt MacDermot.3 The first scene of

Walker includes a dialogue between the historical figures of its hero, the black

abolitionist David Walker, and the Irish abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Set at

Thanksgiving in 1830, in the years between the abolition of the trade in the U.S. (in

1808) and Emancipation, this dialogue debates the relative merits of gradualist and

militant approaches to ending slavery. Garrison counsels the literate and highly

articulate Walker against publishing what he sees as a seditious text,4 while a chorus

locates Walker’s vision in the context of such African American pathfinders as the

painters Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin and Romare Bearden as work in the true

“American grain”.5 Walker is at its most effective in stylized passages such as the
 5

following, which underline the revolutionary potential of black print as a means for

voicing African retentions in the snow-white world of Boston:

I was walking alone through a forest

of black trees whose leaves were like print,
but their language was different
and the leaves were letters I had learnt
but forgotten from the African kingdoms,
and I was lost and not lost. […]
I was remembering an alphabet
from a language I did not know,
then I looked outside the window
and the drums no longer beat,
and saw Boston smothered in snow […].6

The emphasis on the scribal in passages like this clearly speaks to the continued need

to give voice to African American experience as part of the fight against slavery in the

period after the abolition of the trade. Walcott’s Walker is silenced – apparently

poisoned to collect a bounty placed on his head, as, “rumour” has it, he was in real

life7 – but the dramatic reconstruction of his last hours revives and articulates his

uncompromising message and ultimately Garrison is no more than a bit-player in a

production that places Walker centre-stage.

With literacy comparatively rare among the slaves in the southern American

states and the anglophone Caribbean, orally transmitted histories became the main

conduits for preserving, transforming and revivifying African-derived cultural

practices. However, these potent storehouses of ancestral memories more frequently

functioned as repositories of communal strength and survival rather than as

testimonies to the atrocities of the slave trade and slavery. In the mid twentieth-

century Caribbean, the era in which Walcott and Dennis Scott were coming of age,

slavery remained the unspoken Ur-narrative of Afro-Caribbean life, as well as a

crucial sub-text underlying the experience of Caribbean peoples of other ethnicities.

George Lamming highlights the omission of slavery from the late colonial educational
 6

curriculum in a memorable passage in his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953).

A group of colonial schoolboys find it hard to believe that slavery ever existed in

Barbados.

[Queen Victoria] was a great and good queen, the head teacher had said, and
the old people had said something similar. […] They said she made us free,
you and me and him and you. […] It was disturbing. The thought of not
being free. […] An old woman said that once they were slaves, but now they
were free. And she said that’s what the good and great queen had done. She
had made them free. […] [A small boy] asked the teacher what was the
meaning of slave, and the teacher explained. But it didn’t make sense. He
didn’t understand how anyone could be bought by another. He knew horses
and dogs could be bought and worked. But he couldn’t understand how one
man could buy another man. […] People talked of slaves a long time ago. It
had nothing to do with the old lady. She wouldn’t be old enough. And
moreover it had nothing to do with people in Barbados. No one there was ever
a slave, the teacher said. It was in another part of the world that those things
happened. Not in Little England.8

“Little England” may have been an extreme case and clearly Lamming’s response is

all too aware of both the erasure of slavery in the colonial school curriculum and the

brainwashing that has led to the emphasis on Emancipation in the collective memory

represented by the old woman. Nevertheless the major concerns of In the Castle of

My Skin have more to do with mid twentieth-century decolonization than the

historical legacy of slavery and in this respect Lamming is only too typical of the

independence generation of Caribbean writers, who were both shaped by, and in most

cases came to write against, the late colonial cultural climate in which they grew up.

In the plays of both African and Caribbean dramatists of the independence

generation, there is a recurrent trope that seems to relate to the stifling of independent

consciousness in the colonial era: it is the figure of a half-born or mute subject, used

to express the need to give voice to silenced discourses. Wole Soyinka introduces the

character of a “half-child”, based on the traditional Yoruba figure of the abiku,9 into

his play A Dance of the Forests (first performed at the time of Nigerian Independence

in 1960) in a manner that suggests the earlier suppression of an embryonic

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independent consciousness. Prior to this, Walcott had concluded his play Ti-Jean and

His Brothers (1957), which has attracted interpretation as an allegory of the

development of a post-colonial sensibility,10 with the coming into life of a bolom, or

unborn foetus.11 Mutes also people the pages of several post-colonial novels,

appearing for example in the figure of Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

(1983) and J.M. Coetzee’s Friday in Foe (1986). In both these cases the novelists

decline to speak for their silent protagonists or to explain the origins of their

dumbness. In contrast, Scott’s An Echo in the Bone, which also includes a mute

character, Rattler, lays bare the cause of his voicelessness. Rattler has had his tongue

sliced by slavers, an action that seems to serve as a metonym for the silencing of the

dispossessed slaves more generally and which the play’s revisionist historiography

contests through a highly effective use of the aural resources of theatre.

First staged by the Drama Society of the University of the West Indies’ Mona

(Jamaica) campus in May 1974, An Echo in the Bone is centrally concerned with

issues of ownership and possession, particularly the question of who owns and can

relate history. At one point a white character cites Bryan Edwards’s History of the

British Colonies in the West Indies (1793),12 an influential text in the period prior to

abolition which promulgated a view of Caribbean history that opposed the abolitionist

lobby. It strikes a discordant note in Scott’s play, which employs a complex dramatic

structure that re-imagines various moments in the history of slavery and its aftermath

from a subaltern point of view and relates them to its contemporary twentieth-century

action, set in 1937. At the opening of the play the smallholder Crew has gone

missing, after having murdered the estate owner Mr Charles. Crew is dead, but when

his son Sonson assumes his role in scenes that reveal what has happened in the days

immediately preceding the opening, he is unambiguous not only in asserting the

 8

centrality of his right to the land, but also the significance of this in historical terms as

part of a process of emancipation and the maintenance of ancestral continuity:

I know every step of it. Every bush; like the back of me hand. Is a history
behind every foot of it. […] I don’t have nothing except what I get from the
ground. I born by it and marry by it and one day it going to kill me. Maybe
even now, but is what I know, it is what nothing can change. I trying to tell
you, and I don’t have the word to tell you, I am like a dumb man trying to tell
you what happen to him. I can only trace the line here in the hard dirt, see?
And the line going from here to there, and this end is where them bring my
great grandfather, here, and this is me. If you take away the line from the
ground I am nothing. I am nobody! […]
It is everything! Everything! […] My father and his father sweat for
it, year after year. It is my birthright that say I am not a slave anymore.
(Echo 128)

In 1970, at a time shortly after the more heavily populated Caribbean nations

had attained their independences (Jamaica in 1962), Scott who had received awards at

the Jamaica festival literary competitions in the 1960s, expressed the view, when an

ex-slave society “imposes discipline on itself from within, it begins to wipe out a

tradition of submission. […] It is the beginning of a freedom to choose”13 and the

specific choice that he made in An Echo in the Bone was to renegotiate the terms of

Jamaican historiography, by restaging episodes from the past within the context of the

Afro-Caribbean rite of the Nine Night. Like wakes in many other cultures, the Nine

Night is a form that transcends the mourning aspects of funeral customs to celebrate

and release the dead person’s spirit.14 As such it has some affinity with the musical

performances of New Orleans jazz funerals, where the solemn music of the procession

to the cemetery and during the burial itself gives way to upbeat, celebratory music

(such as “When the Saints Go Marching In”) after it has taken place. Olive Senior

explains Nine Night as an:

Old folk custom which is still observed in many parts of Jamaica. It is similar
to a “wake” […] details of the nine night ceremony vary from place to place in
Jamaica. Basically it is a ceremony held on the ninth night after death at the
home of the deceased. The idea is to give the dead person a good departure
from this world. It is believed that unless this is done, his spirit or duppy will
 9

hang around to haunt the living. […] Although nine night in its various forms
is held to fulfill a specific function it has also served as the means of
preserving a great deal of Jamaican folk culture as this is manifested in songs,
fames, riddles, stories, etc.15

Scott’s choice of the Nine Night as the fulcrum on which his play turns is,

however, far from straightforward. In addition to dramatizing the rite, he draws on

what Senior identifies as its anthologizing role as a preserver of folk culture and he

specifically associates it with spirit-possession religions such as myal and pocomania.

As in the work of Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite and Erna Brodber, his

emphasis on “possession” involves more than one meaning of the word.16 To be

possessed is to be taken over by the creolized African elements in Caribbean culture

and to claim ownership of one’s history, land and language and most importantly

one’s “birthright that say I am not a slave anymore”. In Renu Juneja’s words:

The use of the Nine-Night ceremony is, of course, a brilliant theatrical choice.
Because the phenomenon of spirit possession is central to this ceremony, Scott
is able to multiply his cast of characters to take us back to the past effectively
and economically to selected episodes without making the action appear
disjointed or incoherent.17

The brilliance of the theatrical choice operates in other ways too, since it allows Scott

to reverse those Western casting conventions that sanctioned Olivier’s playing Othello

in blackface, legitimizing what Caryl Phillips has referred to as “a procession of sun-

blotched Oliver Hardy lookalikes waddling across the English stage” 18 who have

played the Moor. Scott’s note on the staging of the play makes it clear that “All

characters are black” (Echo 75) and, although this is literally true of the parts the

actors play in the present action, the historical scenes contain numerous white

characters whose identities are now appropriated by the ensemble cast of black

players. In short, in a strategic reversal of common (albeit far from universal)

Western casting conventions, the ownership of the dramatis personae of An Echo in

the Bone is to be entirely in the hands of a black cast.

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Juneja’s comments on the significance of possession in An Echo in the Bone

continue by outlining its importance in relation to history:

[I]t is also the most appropriate choice in terms of the history that Scott is
making or remaking because it signals at the outset that history is a possession
of the black people and very different from the sanctioned colonial accounts.
The Nine-Night ceremony is a cultural survival from the African past. The
ceremony is associated with Pocomania […] a syncretist religion responsive to
the needs of the black populace [which] partakes of the ancestor possession
cults of the Ashanti. […] The Nine-Night ceremony, then, is not only
evidence of cultural continuities with Africa but is also associated with direct
political resistance.
There are other associations with this possession by spirits of the dead
which make the ritual a particularly appropriate vehicle for recreating history.
The dead tell the truth.19

Whether Nine Night is always associated with pocomania (pukumina) in quite the

way that Juneja suggests is questionable, but certainly her emphasis on the dramatic

use of possession foregrounds the central theme of An Echo in the Bone. The play

connects the slave history of the Caribbean with the recent personal history of its

small group of rural Jamaican characters through its emphasis on ownership. And the

use of a rite which anthologizes a range of Jamaican folk forms at its centre does work

brilliantly in dramatic terms, since it allows for a new performance of the past, in

which the apparent fixity of Caribbean historiography is refashioned by being

restaged in a context that allows history to be creatively reconstructed. Given that the

official historiography of the Caribbean has been dominated by written accounts that

have at best provided a partial and partisan version of the past, as seen from the point

of view of those who have had author-ity, an alternative historical praxis needs to

develop strategies that subvert or sidestep this record. Scott’s choice of a dramatic

form based on folk custom provides an ideal vehicle for such imaginative re-

envisioning.

In one of his most famous essays Derek Walcott has written of the need to

escape from the determinism inherent in most approaches to the Caribbean’s history
 11

of slavery. Walcott argues that it is necessary to wipe the slate clean, to escape from

“servitude to the muse of history”, which “has produced a literature of recrimination

and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature

of remorse written by the descendants of masters”.20 Scott takes a different view in

dramatizing the need to go back to the past and give voice to the silenced, in order to

transform what will otherwise remain a crippling legacy. He achieves this through a

complex set of variations on the transformative power of role-playing. Drama

becomes the medium through which the past can be imaginatively re-enacted, so that

scenes from the culturally encoded discourse of colonial historiography are given a

completely different inflection.

Even the play’s use of theatrical space functions to suggest the possibilities of

metamorphosing received versions of history. The set is an old sugar barn. Scott’s

note on staging suggests the need to economise on props and scene changes, along

with ways in which the present is permeated by the slave past and the Middle Passage:

Objects present in the beginning of the play (i.e. the present) may be used as
substitutes for props in scenes from the past. Similarly, the set should provide
playing areas needing a minimum of resetting to suggest the various places of
the action.
The barn is large, with thick but deteriorating walls, and anonymous
articles of rusting metals creating a feeling of age and disuse. Perhaps the
ceiling slopes. Four huge girders rusting, support the roof and its gaping
holes. The stage is dominated by a huge chain that is looped to the roof in two
places, falling to the ground in coils past a broken shelf of wood a few feet
across, on one side and ending in mid-air on the other. (Echo, 75)

So, just as the various roles assumed by the play’s ten characters are expedient for

production purposes, as they avoid the need to have a vast cast, the potential problems

inherent in producing a play with multiple scenes are neatly solved by the

transformative use of a single setting. In both cases stage directions that facilitate

economic performance dovetail neatly with the play’s stress on the interpenetration of

present and past. As An Echo in the Bone develops, the small repertory of actors take
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on completely different roles in scenes set in 1792, 1820, 1833, 1834, as well as four

years earlier and in the days immediately preceding the Nine Night. Similarly, the

rusting girders and the chain become a backdrop for a harrowing scene set aboard a

slave ship, again suggesting continuities across the centuries and particularly that the

corrosive legacy of the slave past frustrates the possibility of attaining total freedom in

the post-Emancipation present. Continuities between past and present are repeatedly

evoked through recurrent motifs such as vendors’ cries, drumbeats and references to

the killing of a wild boar. There is also a persistent emphasis on the way that black

subjectivity has been dehumanized, with the use of animal tropes in the speech of

Europeans in a scene set on the Guinea Coast in 1792 being echoed and contested in

the words of Crew’s daughter-in-law, Brigit, in an episode set four years before the

contemporary action. Brigit says: “Black people used to work this land for nothing

and they used to treat them like beast, they could amount them anytime. I not

breeding for any man just because of pleasure. I is not an animal. I is a human being”

(Echo 115). Similarly, the conviction that little has changed across the centuries is

repeatedly asserted during the play. Sonson takes the view that “from slavery days

them don’t change” (Echo 112), an opinion shared by the ironmonger Stone, who says

that nothing has changed since “two hundred years ago, when all of us worked the

land for nothing, like animals” (Echo 109).

Unlike Walcott, then, Scott is intent on reinvoking the trauma of slavery and

insisting on the continuing impact of its legacy on twentieth-century Caribbean

society, but his decision to set the present action of a play first performed in the post-

independence period in the 1930s is arguably significant. The ’thirties was a decade

in which there were riots and strikes in several parts of the Caribbean, particularly

Jamaica and Trinidad, and, although the play’s microcosm is never related to these
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public events, setting it in a period when the forces that would make independence

inevitable were taking shape is highly appropriate. At the same time, if history

rewrites the present, the events depicted would seem to have had relevance for the

1970s in Scott’s eyes; and given that the earlier historical scenes are all set within a

fairly short period, in years (1792 to 1834) before and after the abolition of the trade,

the play continues to have resonances that echo into our bicentennial moment.

These resonances include Scott’s insistence on revisiting the horrors of

slavery, demonstrating the interpenetration of past and present and asserting ordinary

Jamaicans’ claims to the ownership of history. All of this is integral to the play’s

movement and resolution, but the ending goes further in positing a response to the

trauma of the slave past. There is little mystery surrounding Crew’s murder of Mr

Charles. This is a given from the outset; only the details of means and motive are

withheld. It comes as little surprise to the audience to find out that his action has been

instigated by a dispute over land rights: Crew has gone to see Mr Charles after a river

has been diverted, effectively depriving him of his livelihood, since without irrigation

farming his smallholding is no longer sustainable. The impetus to approach the estate

owner comes when his wife Rachel (who unbeknown to him has slept with Mr

Charles four years before) tells him that she is going to work as a housekeeper in the

Great House to support them. Crew, played by Sonson in the imagined re-enactment

of what has happened, naively believes that Mr Charles will understand “how a man

like me feel about the land and […] will listen” (Echo 128). The play builds towards

climax in an expressionistic scene in which he approaches the estate house, making

his way through a taunting chorus of whispering white voices. Predictably Mr

Charles (played by Stone) is unreceptive to his complaint and tells him to go to the
 14

back door and wait. At this point the action “freeze[s]” (Echo 131) with Crew raising

the murder weapon, his machete, above Mr Charles.

If An Echo in the Bone ended here, it might be possible to see it as simply

adopting an opposite position to Walcott in “The Muse of History”, to view it as a

theatrical articulation of “a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves”.

It has used the Nine Night to dramatize episodes illustrating the atrocities of slavery

and at this point it attracts sympathy for Crew’s anticipated act of violence, which

both expresses his devotion to the “land” and contests the historical dispossession of

his people. Earlier scenes, such as the slitting of Rattler’s tongue, have borne witness

to their discursive as well as their social deprivation, and the play has staked a claim

to the ownership of history. It does not, however, end, depicting a polarized view of

culture and society in its present-day situation. Despite the freezing of the action,

there is no real doubt that Crew has murdered Mr Charles and is dead himself, but like

the earlier historical scenes this past event is re-enacted during the course of the Nine

Night. Sonson’s playing of the part of Crew opens up the possibility of an alternative

version of this event.

Sonson and his younger brother Jacko represent contrasting responses in both

the present and past actions of the play. In an episode set in 1833 they are Maroons,

who take very different attitudes to their situation: Sonson favours violent rebellion

against the regime; Jacko prefers to remain apart from colonial Jamaican society in

the Maroons’ isolated hill encampments. In the 1930s action they occupy similar

positions and the episode set four years before the Nine Night sees Brigit choosing

Jacko’s reliability and “liking for the land” (Echo 114) over Sonson’s more belligerent

nature, though Rachel suggests to her that she may care more for her older son. When

Sonson plays his father in the Nine Night dramatization of Crew’s encounter with Mr
 15

Charles, his assumption of the role is potentially very appropriate in that his own

confrontational nature seems to render him well suited to re-enacting the murder. At

this point, though, it becomes clear that Crew’s confrontation with Mr Charles is not

the ultimate tearing-point of the play. In the restaging of the scene, Sonson’s own

response to violence is as much at issue as his father’s action, which it has seemed

would provide the climax.

Possessed by the spirit of his father, Sonson goes up the chain that has been

suspended over the set throughout the play, as it were climbing back through slave

history, and hovers above the stage in a limbo-like predicament. Along with the other

players, Jacko watches him from the ground, with Brigit trying to convince him to

desert his characteristic stance of non-involvement and intervene to bring his brother

down. When Jacko eventually does so, he persuades Sonson/Crew that his talk of

having murdered Mr Charles is “stupidness” (Echo 134) and that the blood on his

shirt is that of a hog, whose killing has been referred to at several points in the earlier

scenes. Sonson comes down and acts out a different version of Crew’s meeting with

Mr Charles, in which he goes to the estate owner “to beg a small help out” (Echo

136). Given that Crew is dead and the Nine Night is being held to commemorate him,

this version does not exactly supplant the earlier one, which of course has also been a

product of Sonson’s imagination. Nevertheless, within the context of the Nine Night’s

ritual re-enactment, it provides an alternative narrative, which is relevant as an

expression of his own psychic conflict and his rapprochement with his brother. The

Nine Night is the frame for virtually all the action and within this Sonson and Jacko

have had major parts to play in the story of their dead father, while he has never been

a character in his own right, only a vicarious presence, a part to be acted by others.21
 16

So the dénouement of An Echo in the Bone moves beyond violence, without

closing down the possibility that, given the historical legacy of slavery, this is one

possible response. Appropriately, since she has been the initiator of the Nine Night,

the last words are given to Rachel:

No matter what is past, you can’t stop the blood from drumming, and you
can’t stop the heart from hoping. We have to hold on to one another. That is
all we can do. That is what leave behind, after all the rest. Play, Rattler. Play
for what leave behind. Play for the rest of us. (Echo 136)

And the play ends with the mute Rattler’s drum beating “louder and louder” in

“celebration” (Echo 136-7). So the conclusion reasserts the unquenchability of the

community’s spirit and Rattler’s drum. These are the echoes in the bone which ensure

that the disenfranchized will survive. The play has given them total ownership of the

theatrical space in which history has been repossessed and it has drawn on the

continuities of shared Afro-Caribbean folk culture, which it renews and extends

through its own theatrical performance and without recourse to European mediation.
 1
NOTES
Derek Walcott, The Haitian Trilogy, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 259. Drums and Colours was first
performed in the Royal Botanical Gardens, Port of Spain as part of an arts festival held to mark the opening of the Federal
West Indian Parliament in April 1958.
2
A co-production of the York theatre companies, York Theatre Royal and Riding Lights, first performed at York Theatre
Royal in March 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade and originally commissioned by the Church
Mission Society, founded in the late eighteenth century by members of the abolitionist movement.
3
Best known as the composer of Hair, MacDermot’s previous collaborations with Walcott had included The Joker of Seville
(1974), O Babylon! (1976), Marie Laveau (1979) and Steel (1991). The rewritten version of Walker, with his music, was
premiered by the Boston Playwrights Theatre in 2001.
4
Not named in the play, the publication in question most obviously relates to the third edition of Walker’s Appeal (first edn.
1829), which demanded the immediate emancipation of all slaves.
5
Derek Walcott, Walker and Ghost Dance, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 27, 61, 97, 114.
6
Walker and Ghost Dance, 33.
7
Walker was found dead shortly after the publication of the third edition of his Appeal and is widely believed to have been
poisoned, though the official record has tuberculosis as the cause of his death.
8
George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, London: Michael Joseph, 1953, 56-7.
9
Soyinka’s poem “Abiku” glosses its title with the words: “Wanderer child. It is the same child who dies and returns again
and again to plague the mother – Yoruba belief”, Idanre and Other Poems, New York: Hill and Wang, 1968, 28.
10
E.g. Albert Olu Ashaolu, “Allegory in Ti-Jean and His Brothers”, World Literature Written in English, 16, 1 (1977), 202-
11.
11
Cf. Rawle Gibbons’s rather later Shepherd (1981). In Shepherd a group of Spiritual Baptists struggle over the life of an
unborn child in the context of a mourning ritual which, as in An Echo in the Bone, provides a frame for the re-enactment of
scenes from the past. See Judy S. J. Stone, Theatre: Studies in West Indian Literature, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1994, 151.
12
Originally published in 1793 as the History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Edwards’s
work was later expanded into the History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, which went through several editions.
Scott’s citation comes in a scene set in 1792, An Echo in the Bone, in Plays for Today, ed. Errol Hill, Harlow, Kingston and
Port of Spain: Longman Caribbean, 1985, 92. Subsequent references are to this edition.
13
Quoted in Stone, Theatre: Studies in West Indian Literature, 146.
14
Other plays that draw on the dramatic potential of the nine night include Edgar White’s The Nine Night (1983), in White,
The Nine Night and Ritual by Water, London: Methuen, 1984; and Glenville Lovell’s When the Eagle Screams (1992). As
indicated in Note 11, Rawle Gibbons’s Shepherd also uses a mourning ritual for dramatic purposes.
15
Olive Senior, A-Z of Jamaican Heritage, Kingston: Heinemann and the Gleaner Co., 1987, 118.
16
See particularly “Possession”, Section IV of Brathwaite’s Islands, The Arrivants, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973,
230-57, Brathwaite’s note on the centrality of possession in Afro-Caribbean religious service, Islands, 271 and Brodber’s
use of the Jamaican magico-religious cult of myalism in Myal, London and Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1988.
17
Renu Juneja, “Recalling the Dead in Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone”, ARIEL, 23, 1 (1992), 98.
18
Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe, 1987; London: Picador, 1993, 45.
19
Juneja, “Recalling the Dead”, 98-9; italics in original.
20
“The Muse of History”, in Is Massa Day Dead?, ed. Orde Coombs, Garden City: NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976, 2; repr. in
Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, London: Faber, 1998, 37.
21
In the first part of the play, the “hard-drinking, womanizing peasant” (Echo 74) Dreamboat is possessed by Crew’s spirit
(Echo 80-82).