The Lamplighter

coffin. One African woman in three did not survive the first three years in her new country. The death toll is inconceivable, a great black missing population thrown to the sharks at sea. They said the sharks followed the slave ships for the pickings. John Newton, a slave-ship captain, better known for writing ‘Amazing Grace’, wrote a log of the deaths: ‘Captain’s Log, 23 May 1709: Buryed a man slave No 84, Wednesday 29 May. Buryed a boy slave No 86 of a flux. Buryed a woman slave no 47 …’
We don’t like to think about that, or the children who were sold in British pubs and inns and coffee houses, in London, Bristol, Liverpool. Or the Church’s complicity: on a Sabbath day, at the door of every church and chapel, the proclamation was put up by the parish clerk or reader of the church requiring all runaway slaves to surrender themselves immediately after divine worship. In Liverpool, 1756, there was an auction at Merchants’ Coffee House for eighty-three pairs of shackles, eleven slave collars, twenty-two pairs of handcuffs, four long chains, thirty-four rings and two travelling chains. Travelling chains?
After we had finished recording the production of The Lamplighter, we sat around talking about the complex business of what we remember and what we forget. Pam Fraser Solomon said that her great-grandmother, whose mother had been born enslaved, often had an enigmatic expression on her face. She’d say: ‘I’m just listening to where the breeze is coming from.’ I thought of all the silences – the silences from African people who do not want their children to hear about slavery, and from white people who do not want to discuss the family tree with its roots in a plantation in the Caribbean.
The history of the slave trade is not ‘black history’ to be shoved into a ghetto and forgotten, or to be brought out every hundred years for a brief airing then put back in the cupboard. It is the history of the world. It concerns each and every one of us. Here’s Pitt to Parliament, again in 1792: ‘And Sir, I trust we are now likely to be delivered from the greatest practical evil that has ever afflicted the human race, from the severest and most extensive calamity recorded in the history of the world.’
Jackie Kay, 2020

THE LAMPLIGHTER
Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter was first broadcast by the BBC on Radio Three on Sunday 25 March 2007 with the following cast:
THE LAMPLIGHTER
Clare Perkins
BLACK HARRIOT
Aicha Kossoko
CONSTANCE
Martina Laird
MARY
Mona Hammond
MACBEAN
John Dougall
ANIWAA
Jordan Loughran
SINGER
Gweneth-Ann Jeffers
DIRECTOR
Pam Fraser Solomon
ORIGINAL MUSIC
Dominique Le Gendre


For Pam Fraser Solomon with love


Time with its murderous gums and pale, windowless throat, Its mouth pressed to our mouths,
Pushing the breath in, pulling it out’
CHARLES WRIGHT: ‘Time Will Tell’
There are things one does not say for a long time, but once they are said, one never stops repeating them.
BENJAMIN CONSTANT: ‘Adolphe’, 1815


Scene 1: Interior Fort
The noise of the sea slapping against the walls of Cape Coast Castle. The sound of many different African languages, talking fast, scared.
ANNIWAA:
I am a girl. I am in the dark. I don’t know how long I’ve been kept in the dark. High above me, there is a tiny crack of light. Last time I counted, I was eleven, nearly twelve. I am a girl. Last time I saw my mama, I was carrying a water gourd on my head. The water was sloshing-sloshing all over my clothes. Mama was clapping her hands and laughing at me. I am frightened of the dark. I don’t know where I am. I don’t even know why I’m here.
Once upon a time, I lived in a house with a cone-shaped roof, in a big compound. My mother grew okra and pumpkin in her yard. My father shaped woods and metals.
A time now ago, I had my hair just done fresh. Pretty, my Mama say. Small sections coiled with thread. My brother and I were playing and laughing. My brother says my laugh is funny and that my laugh makes him laugh.
All of a sudden, some men come and take us. I know those people. They have the marks on the face of the enemy. I kick and scream and shout. Furious. They bundle us off through the woods. Pushing and shouting. Move. Move. Beating us. I hold on to my brother. My brother holds on to me.
We are dragged through the forest for days and nights and days. It is a long time. I am tired and heavy as an elephant. I cry loud for my Mama to hear me. I cry loud for my Papa to see me.
One day, we arrive here. A place that is bigger than the palace of the Paramount Chief. Some call it a palace, a fort, a factory, a prison, a dungeon. My brother is pulled away. I reach out but I cannot hold him. My tears dry up inside me. My mouth goes dry and my lips. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. After that, I stop talking. The words dry under my lips.
Outside this place, where I am trapped and kept like an animal, there is a sound I never hear before. A crashing and thudding. They say it is The Sea. I think it is a wild monster. I think it is coming for me.


Scene 2: Shipping News
The voice of the Shipping Forecast will be interrupted by the voices of the four black women. These women form a chorus throughout the play. Behind their voices there’s the roaring, crashing of the big Atlantic.
MACBEAN:
There are warnings of gales
In the Viking North.
The general synopsis at midday – low.
971 moving steadily Northeast and filling.
New High expected Trafalgar
By the same time.
LAMPLIGHTER:
By the same time.
MACBEAN:
Saturday, August 11, 1707
The weather in Liverpool was close.
Gales running between the south and west.
Dirty