Walker and The Ghost Dance: Plays - Softcover

Walcott, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528144 ISBN 13: 9780374528140

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate

On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion -- Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents -- into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history.

In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

About this title

About the Author:

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CAST OF CHARACTERS
(IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

A FIGURE, white, fifties, Southern

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, Irish

ELIZA WALKER, David Walker's wife, black, late twenties, Southern

DAVID WALKER, black, aged forty-five, Southern

CATHERINE HEALEY, Irish, early twenties

BARBADOS, black, ex-slave, thirties

CHORUS PLACE: Boston, 1830 TIME: The action takes place on Brattle Street on the last Thanksgiving Day of David Walker's life.

SCENE ONE

Brattle Street. Walker's house. Thanksgiving. Early snow. A FIGURE, in a long black coat ,waits under a streetlamp. GARRISON is going towards the house.

FIGURE

Sir! Forgive me.

GARRISON

Yes?

FIGURE

Is that David Walker's house?

GARRISON It is.

(TheFIGURE walks up to the window, then returns to GARRISON.)

FIGURE

And that machine is the press?

GARRISON

Yes.

FIGURE

That now does the work of the devil.
Keep the niggers from printing machines.
Deliver us from that evil.

GARRISON

I don't quite know what that means.

FIGURE

Sir, I stand here swaying with hunger
because of my brotherhood's vow.
I won't eat until I see that nigger
spread-eagled in the snow.
I'm as starved as a crow in winter
cawing on a field-fence,
keeping its keen yellow eye
on all who leave and enter.
I've learnt to wait quietly
until what must happen, happens.

(The FIGURE waits in the shadows; GARRISON approaches it.)

GARRISON

Come into the light,
this damned street's cold and dark.

FIGURE

No. The light is too late.
Too late to do business.

GARRISON

What business? What business?

FIGURE

You're asking me a lot.
The pamphlet must not be printed.

GARRISON

Whom do you represent, sir?

(Pause)

Sir, whom do you represent?

FIGURE

You insist on an answer?
I go where I am sent.
Unless you want him dead,
the pamphlet must not be printed.

GARRISON

You've got a Southern accent.
Are you from where, Georgia?

FIGURE

Mr. Garrison, I can change my accent
if it'd make you happier.

GARRISON

You know damned well why I ask.

FIGURE

Why?

GARRISON

There're certain men from Georgia
who're out to skin his hide,
who've put out a reward, sir,
to capture or have him killed.

Copyright © 2002 Derek Walcott

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374528144
• ISBN 13: 9780374528140
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246