LITMIR.BIZ

      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.

       INTRODUCTION

       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

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