Chancre – a painless ulceration formed during the primary stage of syphilis. A transmission and transmutation of a memory couched in shame. This essay video is bookend with performance documentation from the re-enactment of Brother Cane in Chicago, 2011. Featuring excerpts from The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Malay Magic (1900) by Walter William Skeat and T.S. Eliot's Fragment of an Agon (Sweeney Agonistes).