Remembrance and Pantomime

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Remembrance

Pantomime

Note

By Derek Walcott

Copyright

Remembrance

For Alix Walcott

and

Ruth and Joe Moore

Characters

ALBERT PEREZ JORDAN
,
a retired schoolteacher, aged sixty-five

MABEL JORDAN
,
his wife, late fifties

FREDERICK JORDAN
,
their son, early thirties

MR. BARRLEY
,
an American tourist

ESTHER HOPE
,
an Englishwoman, late twenties

ANNA HERSCHEL
,
an American
(
same actress as for Esther Hope
)

MR. PILGRIM
,
editor of
The Belmont Bugle,
early sixties

AN INTERVIEWER
from
The Belmont Bugle,
early twenties; also
A SCHOOLBOY
and
A WAITER

SET
: The living room of the Jordans’ house in the old section of Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the present.

Remembrance
was commissioned by the Courtyard Players, St. Croix, and premiered at the Dorsch Centre, St. Croix, on April 22, 1977, directed by the author, with the following cast:

The play was produced by Joseph Papp, and opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York, on April 24, 1979, directed by Charles Turner, with the following cast:

Act One

PROLOGUE

Pre-dawn. The drawing room of
ALBERT PEREZ JORDAN
’s house in Belmont. Dark wood, a fanlight of stained glass, ferns in a corner, a couch with a fading floral pattern, a fringed standing lamp, and a large antique desk at which
JORDAN
,
in waistcoat, no jacket, slippers, is sitting stiffly, hands clasped in his lap. A grandfather clock strikes four. The
INTERVIEWER
is sitting in the half dark, some distance away, holding a cassette recorder. A small microphone is in front of
JORDAN.

INTERVIEWER

     Is Remembrance Day today, Mr. Jordan, seven years after the February revolution to which you lost a son, and tomorrow there will be marching in the streets of Port of Spain, and the marchers will stand with red flags for one commemorative minute outside this house …

JORDAN

     Whose windows will be closed … Wait. You going to leave in the sound of the clock?

INTERVIEWER

     The clock will strike again, Mr. Jordan. So we have all the time in the world. Ready?

JORDAN

     Is like one of them launchings at Cape Canaveral. Boy, I sitting here feeling like a spaceman, except I taking a journey through time.

INTERVIEWER

     I had it on that time. Lemme erase.

JORDAN

     Not “lemme erase,” boy! Let me erase. You write for Ezra Pilgrim’s paper and is so all you does talk? All you young Trinidadians does so handle machine without reading book.

INTERVIEWER

     Mr. Pilgrim instructed me to show you the machine, when you have to use it by yourself. Press both here for Record. Backward. Forward. Your turn.

JORDAN

     No. The only machine I ever trusted was my old Raleigh bicycle. It behaved erratically and suddenly died.

INTERVIEWER

     Of what, Mr. Jordan?

JORDAN

     Rabies. Some rabid pothound snapped at my trouser clip and bit the bike. It’s out there in the back yard, rusty as my Latin. I’m ready.

(
INTERVIEWER
turns off the machine, as
JORDAN
exasperatedly paces
)

     I would have written all this down, but that stubborn red ass, your editor, wouldn’t hear. What about your eyes? he said. Before your memory goes, too, I’ll send a boy over with a tape recorder, and if you can’t write you could talk it out. Talk out what? I said. And he said, The story of your life, and I said, My life is nothing, Ezra, I have been a damn fool, and he said, Nobody’s life is nothing, especially yours, and besides, I said, I cannot write prose, Ezra, I am a poet, and he said, Everybody’s eyes does dim a little as they get old, but as your eyes grow dim so your memories brighten, and if you can’t write prose, at least you could talk it, and I told him, You got that from Molière, because I was a schoolmaster, you know. They called me One Jacket Jordan.

(
Long pause
)

     I was a schoolmaster. I was for a while Acting Principal of Belmont Intermediate. They never appointed me. A schoolmaster.

(
Pause
)

     Who taught the wrong things.

(
He crosses to coat rack and puts on schoolmaster’s jacket. He has become a younger man. He crosses to desk, sits down, opens a book, and recites
)

     “Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

            The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:

       Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

            And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

     Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

            The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

     Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

            Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

(
A cough. He pauses
)

     Th’ applause of listening senates to command…”

(
Hands clapping
)

     We’ll have none of that, please. To talk in all you dialeck, I ent in the mood for no heckling this Monday morning, so whoever feel he was a listening senator applauding now, mind I ent use this ruler on his same hand for it to really smart, which is a pun in case all you didn’t know. So. The page is page 43, the author is Thomas Gray. My mother, who was also a teacher, used to recite this same passage to me when I was your age, and the poem is an elegy.

(
Voices off: Schoolboys, faint, then louder
)

VOICES OFF

     L-E-G! Leg.

     B-E-G! Beg.

JORDAN

     You hear those voices? You hear those voices, boy? They grew into a rabble and they fooled my son.

(
In the past, confidently
)

     And Thomas Gray is saying …

VOICES OFF

     
Gray is ofay, black is beautiful,

     
Gray is shit,

(
Chanting
)

     
Jordan is a honky

     
Jordan is a honky

     
Jordan is a honky-donkey white nigger man!

(
JORDAN
whirls and seizes a ruler from the desk
)

JORDAN

     Put out your hand, boy!

     I say put out your hand!

     Good! Good. Now turn it round!

     Boy, I said to turn it round!

     What color is the palm, eh? Pink.

     What color is the back, eh? Black!

     Well, you go learn, little nigger,

     that, just like your hand,

     what is called poetry, and art,

     color don’t matter! Color don’t matter!

(
His own palm is extended. He begins to beat it
)

     So learn! Learn! Learn! Learn!

(
Pause.
JORDAN
stands there with extended palm. Then he rubs his forehead, smiles
)

INTERVIEWER

     Your two best-known stories, the ones that get into anthologies the most, are, of course: “Barrley and the Roof,” a satire on independence, and “My War Effort,” a romance. How closely did you draw on your own experience; can we say that the work of Albert Perez Jordan was his life?

JORDAN

     You could say it, if you prepared for libel. It is fiction. I always added a little truth to my stories. Pepper sauce on the meat.

(
Reads. Projection: print
)

INTERVIEWER

(
Hands
JORDAN
a small locally printed volume and announces into the mike
)

     Here then, in A. P. Jordan’s inimitable manner, is his last story … “Barrley on the Roof” … published in
The Beacon,
May 1971.

JORDAN

     “Barrley
and
the Roof,” boy!

(
The
INTERVIEWER
withdraws.
JORDAN
in a spotlight, the printed or manuscript page, in fastidious hand, behind him. Reads
)

     Epigraph from William Blake:

     “A Man’s worst enemies are those of his own House and Family.”

(
PILGRIM
staggers in
)

PILGRIM

     Correct!

(
JORDAN
crosses to coat rack, changes jackets, and puts on sash and hat.
PILGRIM
begins to sing a calypso tune
)

     “Run your run, Adolf Hitler, run your run. Run your run, Adolf Hitler, run your run.”

(
As
PILGRIM
sings,
JORDAN
crosses to him, and together they stagger
)

JORDAN

(
Reads
)

     “Whenever Wilberforce P. Padmore, part-time poet, returned home with his bosom friend, Roddy Broadwater, from lodge meetings of the Oddfellows Society, in black suits, sashes, and homburgs, whose angle suggested two irresponsible morticians, they were inevitably, indubitably, inebriated.”