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Act 1, Scene 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gem of the Ocean, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Meaning of Freedom
Economic Exploitation
The Value of Community
History and Trauma
The Power of Belief
Summary
Analysis
Black Mary and Eli sit in the kitchen talking about Citizen. Eli wants to know how he got into the house, since Aunt Ester hasn’t answered the door herself in 25 years—she also hasn’t left the house in decades. He suspects that Citizen came through the open window upstairs, since there’s some missing paint on the sill. Although he’s glad to have some help with the wall, he doesn’t trust Citizen and tells Black Mary to be careful around him.
Eli is somebody who helps the people in his community, which is why he’s guarded about Citizen’s presence in the house: he wants to protect the people he cares about from anyone who might do them harm, and since he doesn’t know Citizen yet, he sees it as his duty to warn people like Black Mary to be careful around the newcomer.
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Solly enters and says there’s a riot happening at the mill. The police tried to force the striking laborers to go back to work, but the crowd retaliated. At least one person has been seriously trampled by a police horse, but the workers refuse to give up. Solly gives Black Mary a newspaper and asks her to read it aloud. She reads Garret Brown’s obituary, which notes that his parents were enslaved when they had him in 1862. He lived his life in poverty but had many close friends and family members—all of whom will miss him and mourn his “unfinished life.”
Solly grew up in slavery, which is why he doesn’t know how to read. His illiteracy is a good example of how white oppressors actively ensured that Black people would be at a disadvantage in the United States, where literacy is often a necessary skill for upward mobility. Thankfully, though, Solly has people like Black Mary who can help him get the information he needs, underscoring the importance of communal support.
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Solly will be leaving shortly for Alabama. He just bought some new shoes, but he unfortunately will have to make the journey alone. Citizen comes inside to take a break from building the wall, and Solly introduces himself, explaining that his real name is Alfred. Everyone called him Uncle Alfred in the time of slavery, but he had to change his name after running away from his enslavers. He chose the name Two Kings, after the biblical figures David and Solomon, but most people just call him Solly. As for Citizen’s name, Solly points out that it’s quite the burden, since it’s “hard to be a citizen,” which is something people often have to fight to become.
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Solly always carries a walking stick, which he can use to protect himself. Citizen, for his part, has a knife, but Solly says he should get a stick instead. Solly has never killed anyone, largely because he doesn’t have a knife. He has beat many people and has come close to killing them, but he’s never actually taken a life. Carrying a stick instead of a knife has therefore saved him from doing something he might regret.
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Because he wants someone to accompany him on his journey to Alabama, Solly tells Citizen to get a walking stick (a “bone breaker”) and invites him on the trek. But Citizen just came north from Alabama and fears that he won’t be able to escape again if he goes back. Instead, he needs to find a job in the North. Solly, for his part, says that Black Americans like to think they’re free. In fact, freedom is the only thing his own father ever talked about, but he never even got to experience it. Solly is technically free, but he doesn’t really know what that means. Eli chimes in and notes that freedom is simply “what you make it.”
Solly wholeheartedly agrees that freedom is “what you make it.” The only thing freedom means right now, he says, is that Black people have their own land but none of the resources to farm it. People obsess over getting freedom, but it’s not always as rewarding as they assume it will be.
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Caesar knocks on the door. When Eli answers it, he reminds Caesar that this is a peaceful house. Rushing inside, Caesar complains about the striking workers at the mill, saying that they’re rioting and vandalizing the mill itself. The city authorities have put him in charge of getting things under control. If the laborers don’t go back to work the next day, he says, there’s going to be a major problem.
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Caesar sees Citizen and assumes that he’s yet another person who has come to Aunt Ester to have his “soul washed.” He peppers Citizen with questions, saying that he doesn’t want to catch him stealing or misbehaving—if he does, he’ll promptly put him in jail. According to Caesar, Citizen should find himself a good job and stay out of trouble. In fact, he should go down to the mill and tell them that Caesar sent him. If he doesn’t find a way to support himself, Caesar is confident he’ll end up in jail. At the same time, he claims to like Citizen, saying that he just wants to give the young man some good advice.
Caesar gives Citizen a quarter. He believes that most young Black men don’t think wisely about money. It’s important to be entrepreneurial, but most people waste their money on foolish things. And yet, Caesar thinks a quarter can lead to great things. A man can buy shoe polish with a quarter and then make $25 shining shoes. From there, $25 can buy even more opportunity. Citizen, however, is skeptical. He gives Caesar the quarter back and says he doesn’t want his charity. When Citizen goes back outside to work on the wall, Caesar tells Eli and Black Mary to keep an eye on him.
Falling into conversation with Solly, Caesar expresses his frustration about the strike happening at the mill. He argues that the country relies on places like the mill to produce tin. If the mill doesn’t function, everything will grind to a halt and—as a result—nobody will be able to find jobs for themselves. It angers Caesar that his fellow Black Americans can’t see how important it is to keep a sense of order when it comes to such things. He even blames Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery, saying that some people were better off in enslavement, since they don’t know how to make use of good opportunities.
Solly doesn’t say anything in response to Caesar’s rant about industry, opportunity, and slavery. Instead, he decides to leave. But Caesar stops him before he’s out the door and tells him to stop carrying around his walking stick. He has told him before that the stick counts as a weapon, but Solly won’t listen. Both Abraham Lincoln and General Grant carried walking sticks, he points out. Cursing the law, he stomps out of the house.
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Once Solly leaves, Eli joins Citizen outside to work on the wall, leaving Caesar alone with his sister. He criticizes Black Mary for being so close and kind to Solly, suggesting that it’s a disgrace because he makes his living picking up dog poop. Caesar wishes Black Mary would come back to work for him, but she refuses. She deeply respects Aunt Ester and doesn’t want to leave her. Plus, she doesn’t approve of the way Caesar takes advantage of people by doing things like selling “magic bread” and overcharging for rent. But Caesar is unashamed, explaining that he tells people his bread will make them twice as full, which is why he charges more for it. His advertising, he claims, gives people the hope and strength to make their bread last longer, so he’s really helping them.
Black Mary used to help Caesar with his business ventures, selling hoecakes with him. He misses the way they used to stick together as a family, but she left because he killed a young boy for stealing. Caesar thinks he was justified—after all, what the boy did was against the law. And the law, he believes, counts more than anything in life. People think that the law exists to “serve them,” but Caesar thinks it’s the other way around: people serve the law.
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There was a time when Caesar didn’t mind breaking the law himself. He had to make do with what he had in life, but his options weren’t great. Slavery was over and he was technically free to do whatever he wanted, so he went to places where Black people were hungry, and he started selling hoecakes and beans. Business was good until a police officer chased him away because he wasn’t licensed to sell food. When he finally got licensed, his customers started complaining. They wanted bigger portions or higher quality food, so he stopped cooking and decided to open a boarding house.
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To open a boarding house, Caesar needed land and a building. But the bank wouldn’t lend him money unless he had collateral to borrow against. So he opened a gambling operation in the back of a barbershop and started selling whiskey. Running this establishment forced him to shoot some customers, which landed him in jail. When a few of his fellow inmates tried to run away, he caught them, figuring that they were just making everyone else’s life harder, since the other prisoners would have to work extra hard in their absence.
Caesar also stopped a riot in the prison because he didn’t think it would benefit him. In doing so, he attracted the attention of the mayor, who put him in charge of the Third Ward in Pittsburgh, giving him a gun, a badge, and the power to deal with small disturbances in the community. He then took his new gun and badge back to the bank and asked if he could use those for collateral. He managed to buy a house from a white man who grossly overcharged him and then skipped town, since the white community wanted to kill him for selling property to a Black man. Because of his success, he says, other Black people resent him—including Black Mary, which upsets him because family is deeply important to him.
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