Summary
The first act of the play follows Gros Jean’s response to the Devil’s challenge. At the beginning of the act, he sets out from home to make his own way in the world. Gros Jean is confident that his strength will protect him against any dangers. His mother responds by warning him that there is always someone stronger, and that ultimately even the strongest man ends up dead, his corpse weaker than the tiniest animal. She goes on to remind him to avoid the Devil, who can hide in plain sight, but who often appears as an old man in the forest. She also advises him to ask for directions from the animals, and to imitate them in their navigation of the forest.
Gros Jean dismisses her warnings, reassuring her of his strength and insisting that he already knows all of her lore. He remarks that the world has changed since she was young, suggesting that now he knows better. Then he sets out into the forest. Strangely, as he leaves he sings “There's a time for every man/To leave his mother and father/To leave everybody he know/And march to the grave he one!” This song acknowledges that in growing up, we begin our journey towards death, even if Gros Jean represses that reality in his speech.
Once Gros Jean has left home behind, the animals from the prologue come on stage. Gros Jean meets them with hostility, kicking the frog, attempting to stomp on the cricket, and yelling at the bird for directions. All the animals run and hide. They are replaced on stage by an old man carrying a bundle of wood. He wears a skirt, and has one leg like a goat. This last attribute tells the audience that this old man is the Devil, the same man of the forest who Gros Jean’s mother told him to avoid. However, Gros Jean doesn’t notice the old man’s hoof, and asks him for advice on achieving success.
The old man tells Gros Jean to have patience, and the brother responds that his strength gives him all the patience he needs, even as he yells at the old man to give him advice more quickly. He accuses the old man of selfishness, and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t give Gros Jean the advice he wants. The old man responds by telling the strong young man to travel to a plantation owned by a white planter. There, Gros Jean will be able to “work like the devil,” which the old man tells him is the only way to get rich. Gros Jean decides to follow the old man’s advice. When the old man is left alone on stage, he describes his personal philosophy, which is all about power; ultimately, what differentiates God from man is that God is the strongest of all. For the old man, nature also works this way—the strong eat the weak.
When Gros Jean arrives at the plantation, he realizes that the planter is the Devil, although he still doesn’t realize that the old man was also the Devil, only in another form. Sitting in the woods, Gros Jean remembers how the planter expressed the challenge, “the one that get the other one vex, the one who show the first sign of anger will be eaten.” In other words, both the planter-devil and Gros Jean will attempt to provoke anger in the other, and whoever loses will be eaten. On the plantation, even this strongest Jean brother is exhausted. After a day of work, the Devil continues to harass him long into the night, forcing him to do nearly impossible, arbitrary tasks like collecting seventy fireflies.
These kinds of tasks force Gros Jean to take a break, even though he is prohibited from doing so. While sitting in the woods, the planter arrives. He repeatedly gets Gros Jean’s name wrong, which makes him more and more frustrated, although he tries to rely on his strength to remain patient. The planter specifically suggests that he is unable to get Gros Jean’s name right because all Black people look the same to him. During this enraging conversation, Gros Jean tries to encourage the planter to rest, but the planter asserts that he can only achieve success by always thinking about work.
Gros Jean tries to go back to smoking, but the planter keeps interrupting him to deliver more platitudes about success. Gros Jean gets more and more frustrated, and eventually exclaims in anger. He tries to take it back, but it's too late—he’s lost the bet. There is an explosion, and when the smoke clears, the Devil sits alone on stage with his planter mask removed, “calmly nibbling the flesh from a bone”—eating one of Gros Jean’s limbs. As the stage fades to black, he repeats the song from the end of the prologue, “Bai Diable-là manger un 'ti mamaille Un! (Give the Devil a child for dinner) (One! . . .)”
Analysis
The opening conversation between Gros Jean and Mother draws out death’s important role in the story of Ti-Jean and His Brothers. Mother tells her strong son, “The arm which digs a grave/Is the strongest arm of all./Your grandfather, your father,/Their muscles like brown rivers/Rolling over rocks./Now, they bury in small grass,/Just the jaws of the ant/Stronger than them now.” Mother is describing a hierarchy of strength that stretches all the way from the tiny, weak ant, to infinitely strong death. Even as a young man, Gros Jean’s strength only places him halfway up this ladder—death is always “the strongest arm of all.”
Additionally, by referring to the ant and the grass in conjunction with the bodies of men, Mother implies that the difference between men and animals is less absolute than it appears to her son. Death is absolutely distinct from life: it is always strongest. But all living things change over the course of their lives, becoming more or less like one another. Aging renders the body of even the strongest man as weak as an ant, and eventually, death transforms the body of that man into gentle grass. In Walcott’s philosophy, death touches all parts of mortal life, but it also ties together all things that die, from the strongest man to the smallest ant.
This idea directly ties into Gros Jean’s defeat by the Devil. His mother advises him to listen to the advice of the animals, but he instead rejects them as hideous, defaulting instead to the wisdom of the old man he finds in the forest. By associating wisdom with old age, Gros Jean assumes that intelligence can be easily identified from external features. However, as both the prologue and the character of Mi-Jean suggest, Walcott believes that intelligence cannot be discovered so easily, and that wisdom can come from anywhere.
With the introduction of the Devil, Walcott begins introducing more explicitly political themes, like race and economics, into the play. Along with the continuing focus on the inevitability of death and the place of mankind in the natural world, the second half of Act 1 concerns the daily frustrations of living under anti-Blackness. The Devil takes the guise of a plantation owner who forces Gros Jean to work impossibly hard. In the process, he continually addresses Gros Jean in coded racist language, as when he remarks “sometimes we people in charge of industry forget that you people aren’t machines” or when he says “can’t tell one face from the next out here” to explain why he can’t get Gros Jean’s name right. In both of these moments, the planter never explicitly refers to Black people, but he establishes an “us vs. them” dichotomy between landowners and workers.
Within that dichotomy, the workers are implicitly Black. The planter’s tendency to see all of his workers as identical machines is rooted in his racist dehumanization of Black people. Part of what makes the Devil so frustrating is precisely the coded nature of his racism. It’s difficult for Gros Jean to articulate exactly what is so frustrating, but he nevertheless becomes more and more frustrated. Furthermore, the planter’s power makes it impossible for Gros Jean to do anything but patiently wait for the torment to be over. By casting the planter as the Devil, Walcott emphasizes the fundamentally unequal distribution of power between owners and workers. The Devil’s challenge, that Gros Jean patiently live through frustration, mirrors the real-world dynamics of labor, in which workers have no choice but to undergo injustice if they want to feed themselves. Although the audience knows that Gros Jean hasn’t been very clever in out-maneuvering the Devil, we also see that he is in a deeply unfair position either way.
