Zombies

Zombies are the living dead in an embedded tale of plantation exploitation: after workers rebel against their owners, a witch doctor kills them, revives them, and makes them labor without control over their own actions. First introduced as a frightening legend, they later become part of a more detailed account of how a wealthy family’s fortune was built. Their enforced silence and obedience give the supernatural story a human and political dimension: the workers’ revolt is suppressed, while their labor continues under new, grotesque conditions.

Identity and Place in the Tale

The Zombies are described as people whom a witch doctor brings back to life soon after their deaths. In the housekeeper’s explanation to a girl, they have no will of their own and obey the witch doctor’s commands. They are made to work, but cannot speak or protest. The account makes their condition more than a change from death to life: they remain conscious enough to suffer, yet are denied the ability to choose or communicate.

The housekeeper presents this account as a legend that may not even be true, although it frightens her. That qualification leaves the story’s supernatural claims uncertain rather than establishing them as ordinary fact. Within the tale, however, the Zombies are treated as the result of a deliberate practice: the witch doctor kills people with a prepared poison and then uses his power over them. The contrast between the housekeeper’s guarded telling and the later, more specific account lets the legend acquire the shape of a family history.

From Rebellion to Forced Labor

The legend’s social background is a conflict between plantation workers and owners who pay them very little. When workers from several plantations decide to rebel, the owners join forces with the island’s chief witch doctor. Rather than accept the workers’ demands, they arrange for the workers to be killed and turned into Zombies. The dead are then put to work harvesting bananas, so the rebellion is answered not by negotiation but by the forcible removal of the workers’ agency.

A fuller telling describes how the workers were lured under the pretense that the witch doctor would bless them. The gathering becomes an ambush; the workers are killed with poison-tipped arrows, and their bodies are hidden in the jungle. Afterward, they rise at the witch doctor’s command and are sent to the banana groves to work through the night. This account supplies a sequence of deception, killing, revival, and coerced labor, making clear how the supernatural mechanism serves the plantation owners’ economic interests.

Concealment and Inherited Wealth

The plantation owner’s son witnesses these events as a child. His father arranges for small huts made from dried cane stalks to conceal the Zombies during the day; at night they are sent out to cut bananas. Their existence and labor are hidden from the other workers, while the father accumulates a vast fortune from the harvest. The tale thus links the family’s wealth to a system that depends on both the exploitation of living workers and the secret use of the dead.

The son’s later decision to end his dealings with the witch doctor, after his father dies, marks a change in the story’s account of that arrangement. It does not undo what the father has done or alter the Zombies’ earlier fate, but it distinguishes the son’s response from the system that produced the fortune. Because the son saw the process when he was young, the history is not merely rumor passed on by the housekeeper: the expanded narrative presents it as something witnessed within the family, even as its supernatural elements remain part of the film’s uncanny world.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The Zombies’ defining condition is the separation of labor from will. They continue to work, yet cannot refuse, speak, or make their suffering known. The tale makes that loss of agency literal, while grounding it in the plantation owners’ effort to defeat a rebellion and secure cheap labor. Its horror therefore lies not only in revival after death, but in the preservation of an exploitative order through the destruction of workers’ capacity to act for themselves.

The movement from a whispered legend to an account of the son’s childhood also changes how the Zombies function in the narrative. At first, they are an alarming possibility explained by the housekeeper; in the expanded story, they become evidence of the hidden basis of a fortune. The same image—workers compelled to harvest bananas without being able to protest—joins supernatural fear to economic power. The tale does not resolve the contradiction between their apparent life and their loss of freedom; it makes that contradiction the source of their significance.