Ti – Misery

It does seem an odd thing to say, but I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is an exemplary anti-colonialist film.  Producer Val Lewton was given the title and told to make a low-budget horror film.  What he made was certainly low-budget and had the outer shell of a horror film, but in itself it was more a family melodrama, sculpted in light and shadow, and, amongst other things, a critique of slavery and race relations that broke completely with the conventional representations of blacks in Hollywood at the time. And it made a barrel of money for RKO.

The film takes place on the island of St Sebastian in the West Indies.  It economy is based on sugar cane.The port of St. Sebastian is a drab little village.

What follows is based on the original shooting script, modified to accommodate changes in the final film. Betsy is a nurse, coming to the island to take up a position with a rich planter family, caring for Jessica, the planter’s wife who has become mysteriously catatonic. In this scene Betsy, followed by a black sailor with her suitcases, comes down the gangway.

Parallel to this gangway is another.  Up the second gangway, in file, black stevedores with bundles of sugar cane and small bales of sisal hemp on their heads, go up to the boat.

On the dock, Betsy makes her way through a group of clamorous children, vendors and beggars.  As the black sailor puts her luggage into an umbrella-topped surrey drawn by a gaunt mule.

Dissolve to:

The surrey, piloted by an old coachman, is making its way along a dusty road between fields of sugar cane. Betsy, seated on the back seat of the carriage, is bending forward to listen to the old man.

COACHMAN:  Times gone, Fort Holland was a fort…now, no longer. The Hollands was a most old family, miss. They brought the colored people to the island– the colored folks and Ti-Misery.

BETSY:  Ti-Misery? What’s that?

COACHMAN:  A man, miss — an old man who lives in the garden at Fort Holland – with arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face.

BETSY:  (incredulous) Alive?

COACHMAN (laughing, softly) No, miss. He’s just as he was in the beginning — on the front part of an enormous boat.

BETSY:  You mean a figurehead.

COACHMAN:   If you say, miss. And the enormous boat brought the long-ago Fathers and the long-ago Mothers of us all – chained  to the bottom of the boat.

BETSY:  (looking at the endless fields and the richly clouded blue sky) But they came to a beautiful place, didn’t they?

COACHMAN:  (smiling and nodding) If you say, miss. If you say.

Dissolve to:

On the garden side of the tower is the fountain. The outstanding feature  of this spring or fountain, which flows from a crevice in the stones of the tower, is that instead of falling directly into the cistern it falls first onto the shoulders of the enormous teakwood figurehead of St. Sebastian. From the shoulders of the saint it drips down in two runnels over his breast. The wooden breast of the statue is pierced with six long iron arrows. The face is weathered and black. Only a few bits of white paint still cling to the halo above his head.

The figurehead is thus quickly established as a remarkably rich symbolic object.  As part of a slave ship it stands metonymically for slavery; as a black image of St Sebastian, it references the suffering of the slaves, the more so as the fountain makes it appear to weep.  As the centrepiece in the garden of Fort Holland, it indicates the true source of the wealth all about it.  In the dialectic of life and death which is encapsulated in the figure of the zombie, it takes its place as a memento mori.

Its significance is developed throughout  the film. Firstly, when Betsy is woken by the sound of weeping, the sequence begins with a shot of the figurehead, and when Betsy investigates she learns that the weeping relates to the birth of a baby in the family of Alma, her maid.  She learns that the blacks weep at a birth and rejoice at a death. Shortly after, Paul Holland and Betsy stand in front of the figurehead as Holland expands on what we have already learned from the coachman.  Late in the film, a shot of the figurehead is inserted between two sequences relating to the voudun priest’s attempts to draw Jessica to the voudun temple in order to kill her.

Finally, Jessica’s lover Wesley, in a trance-like state, opens the gate to allow Jessica to walk out and then goes to the figurehead to take one of the arrows.  He has to loosen the arrow by pushing it, and we see him from behind pushing the arrow into the figurehead, its agonised countenance looming over him.

Wesley, controlled from afar by the voudun priest, kills Jessica and carries her body into the sea.  Their corpses are discovered by fishermen and brought back to Fort Holland.  This final sequence is accompanied by Biblical -sounding voice-over:

“O Lord God most holy, deliver them from the bitter pains of eternal death.  The woman was a wicked woman, and she was dead in her own life, yea Lord, dead in the selfishness of her spirit, and the man followed her.  Her steps led him down to evil, her feet took hold on death.  Forgive him, O Lord, who knowest the secret of all hearts.  Yea, Lord, pity them who are dead, and give peace and happiness to the living.”

It is a deep, resonant black male voice, and as he speaks, the fishermen carry their burden past the figurehead.  The final shot is a dolly-in on the figurehead, its significance as a religious icon now fully realised.

I Walked With a Zombie is more than an anti-slavery film, though.  I suggested earlier that it is anti-colonialist, and this is due to its presentation of black-white relations.  The population of St Sebastian is overwhelmingly black, the only whites we know of are the four at Fort Holland, the doctor, the police commissioner, who has no police, and a few men glimpsed in the streets of the port.  When Betsy arrives, various characters give her information and suggest the role she is to play.  Paul Holland explains her duties as nurse to his wife.  His brother Wesley makes her aware of undercurrents in the family. Alma, the maid who attended Jessica, coaxes Betsy into the role of lady of the manor.  A calypso singer in the town sings to Betsy, a song that tells her what has gone on in the family and where she fits in.

The black characters are materially better off than their slave ancestors, but they still have essentially the same roles of townspeople, agricultural workers and servants.  As we see them they are in no way inferior to the whites as people, they are merely lower in the social hierarchy.  This contrasts sharply with conventional representations of blacks in American films of the time.  Stepin Fetchit doesn’t shuffle down the mean streets of St Sebastian.  When Alma advises Betsy to take Jessica to the voudun hounfour (temple), her pride and self-assurance transcend the mistress-servant relation.  Voudun is a religion emphasising community, like some forms of Christianity, and this is sharply contrasted with the dubious solidarity of the apparently irreligious whites.

Within their compound, the whites live a transplanted European life, dressing for dinner, playing Chopin in the drawing room.  The lives, the religion the customs and the music of the blacks are utterly different.  The isolation and the infighting of the whites is a direct consequence of the colonial structure.  There is a happy ending of sorts, like the ending of Hamlet when things settle down, but the unshot final scene of Paul and Betsy happily married and back in Ottawa and the decision instead to end with a slow dolly  in on the figurehead gives no reassurance about the future of St Sebastian.

But surely the black people of St Sebastian are happy with their lot?  If you say, miss, if you say.