Plumes (play)

Last updated

Plumes is a one-act, folk drama written by Georgia Douglas Johnson in 1927 (first produced at Chicago's Cube Theatre in the same year). [1] It was played at the Harlem Experimental Theatre between the years of 1928 and 1931. This play won first prize in a playwriting contest sponsored by the influential opportunity magazine.

Contents

This play was written during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a literary movement based around African-American literature and art. [2] [3] During this time, lynching plays were created as African-Americans expressed the devastation brought on their families because of lynching, which was a common practice in the south. [4] Johnson was one of the most famous writers during this time and much of her work focused on lynching plays and the hardships many African-Americans faced during their lifetime. Plumes falls into this category and is one of the very few works of Johnson that survived after her death. [5]

Setting

Plumes takes place in the kitchen of a two-room cottage. There is a window looking out to the street, a door that leads to the street, and another door that leads to the other room. It is dressed with a rocking chair, a cane bottom chair, a stove, a table (with sewing supplies on it), and a wash tub.

The scene opens with Charity Brown cooking in the kitchen.

Characters

Charity Brown: The Mother

Emmerline Brown: The daughter (this character is only a voice heard from offstage)

Tildy: Charity's friend

Dr. Scott: A physician

Plot Synopsis

The scene opens on Charity Brown cooking poultice in the kitchen. We can hear groans coming from the other room. Her friend, Tildy, enters the kitchen. They discuss the poultice, hemming a dress in order to make money, and Charity’s ill child in the next room. After going to check on Emmerline, she returns to the kitchen and resumes talking with Tildy. Charity tells Tildy that the last time the doctor visited, he said that Emmerline would need surgery to live. The women do not believe in medical care and are convinced that doctors will only take your money. We find out in this conversation that there were two other children, assumed to be children of Charity, who died and did not receive the extravagant funeral that she had hoped to be able to afford for them. Charity washes clothes for a living, earning $1.50, and saving every penny in order to pay for her daughter’s doctor.

After a cup of coffee back in the kitchen, Tildy reads Charity’s coffee grounds where she predicts a vision of what is in store for Charity’s future. They are interrupted by church bells as a funeral parade walks by their house on the way to the grave yard.

Doctor Scott comes to the house to check on Emmerline. He doesn’t allow Charity to come into the room with him while he checks on her heart and current condition. While he is in there, all she panics while wondering if he will come back to say that her daughter needs to have surgery, which she cannot easily afford. To her dismay, the doctor comes back to reveal that the operation is Emmerline’s last chance at survival, and that he will perform the surgery at a discount. The doctor exits allowing Charity to decide whether or not Emmerline should have this operation.

Both women sit in silence in the kitchen before hearing a strangling noise coming from Emmerline in the other room. They both rush to her, Tildy carrying the white dress for her before going to get a water pitcher. Before she can exit the kitchen Charity comes back, stops in the door way and tells Tildy to rip out the hem on the dress.

Publication

1927

1928

1929

Related Research Articles

James Weldon Johnson American republican writer and civil rights activist

James Weldon Johnson was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novel, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which later became known as the Negro National Anthem.

Angelina Weld Grimké American journalist and playwright

Angelina Weld Grimké was an American journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet. "Race" was a major issue in her life; although she was 75% white — a white mother and a half-white father — she was still a "woman of color". She was one of the first American women of color to have a play publicly performed.

Niggerati Harlem renaissance intellectual group

The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.

Richard Bruce Nugent

Richard Bruce Nugent, aka Richard Bruce and Bruce Nugent, was a gay writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. Despite being a part of a group of many gay Harlem artists, Nugent was among only a few who were publicly out. Recognized initially for the few short stories and paintings that were published, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture.

Regina M. Anderson American playwright and librarian

Regina M. Anderson was an American playwright and librarian. She was of Native American, Jewish, East Indian, Swedish, and other European ancestry ; one of her grandparents was of African descent, born in Madagascar. Despite her own identification of her race as "American", she was perceived to be African-American by others. Influenced by Ida B. Wells and the lack of black history teachings in school, Regina became a key member of the Harlem Renaissance.

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson, was a poet. She was one of the earliest female African American playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

May Miller was a poet, playwright and educator. Miller, who was African-American, became known as the most widely published female playwright of the Harlem Renaissance and had seven volumes of poetry published during her career as a writer.

Harlem Renaissance African-American cultural movement in New York City in the 1920s

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater and politics centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

Marita Bonner

Marita Bonner, also known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. On December 29, 1921, along with 15 other women, she chartered the Iota chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Color Struck is a play by Zora Neale Hurston. It was originally published in 1926 in Fire!! magazine. Color Struck won second prize in the contest for best play. Color Struck was not staged during the Harlem Renaissance.

<i>The Blacker the Berry</i> (novel)

The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by American author Wallace Thurman, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. The novel tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Emma Lou in her journey to college at USC and a move to Harlem, New York City for work. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel explores Emma Lou's experiences with colorism, discrimination by lighter-skinned African Americans due to her dark skin. She learns to come to terms with her skin color in order to find satisfaction in her life.

Mary P. Burrill was an early 20th-century African-American female playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, who inspired Willis Richardson and other students to write plays. Burrill herself wrote plays about the Black Experience, their literary and cultural activities, and the Black Elite. She featured the kind of central figures as were prominent in the black society of Washington D.C., and others who contributed to black women’s education in early twentieth century.

Night and the Doctor is a series of five made-for-DVD mini-episodes of Doctor Who which were written by Steven Moffat. They were released as bonus features in the Complete Sixth Series DVD and Blu-ray box sets in November 2011. The first four are narratively linked, centring on the question, "What does the Doctor do at night when his companions are asleep?" and take place in the console room of the TARDIS. The fifth one precedes the events of the episode "Closing Time", possibly a prequel or deleted scene, though this remains unconfirmed by the BBC. No cast or crew were credited for any of the five episodes except for writer Steven Moffat.

And Yet They Paused is a dramatic, one-act play presented in four scenes, by Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson wrote the play in 1938, in reaction to lynching. Like the rest of Johnson's lynching dramas, the play was not published during her lifetime.

Blue-Eyed Black Boy is a 1930 one-act play by Georgia Douglas Johnson, one of the earliest African-American playwrights and an American poet that was a member of the Harlem Renaissance.

Songs of the Harlem River: Forgotten One Acts of the Harlem Renaissance is a collection of five one-act plays written between 1920 and 1930 by several African-American playwrights at the time including Marita Bonner, Ralf M. Coleman, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, and Eulalie Spence. Also included are poems by Sterling A. Brown, Langston Hughes, and Jessie Fauset.

A Sunday Morning in the South is a 1925 play about lynching written by Georgia Douglas Johnson.

Harlem Duet is a 1997 dramatic play by Canadian playwright Djanet Sears. Billie, a young graduate student in Harlem, deals with her husband Othello leaving her for a white woman named Mona. The play moves through time to show Billie and Othello's relationship being torn apart by racial tensions at a Southern US cotton plantation in 1860, and in Harlem in 1928 and the present. Though the characters draw inspiration from Shakespeare's play Othello, Billie and the story are original creations.

The Bedgebury Forest Woman refers to an unknown female whose body was found in Bedgebury Forest, Kent, England, on 23 October 1979. Despite multiple investigations, an arrest and a trial, the woman has never been identified.

Harold Jackman Educator, model, patron of the arts

Harold Jackman was a British-born teacher, model, and patron of the arts with emphasis on African American art and literature. Raised in Harlem, Jackman was known for his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance and his dedication to preserving African American cultural artifacts. He founded the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection at Atlanta University and contributed to the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Yale University, the Literary Collection of Fisk University, and to the Schomburg Collection at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. He was also a co-founder of the Harlem Experimental Theater.

References

  1. ↑ Johnson, Georgia (2006). The plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. pp. 74–82. ISBN   0-252-03092-3.
  2. ↑ "Harlem Renaissance - Black History - HISTORY.com". HISTORY.com. Retrieved 2016-04-14.
  3. ↑ Huggins, Nathan (2014). Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN   9780195063363.
  4. ↑ "Deaths Of Unarmed Black Men Revive 'Anti-Lynching Plays'". NPR.org. Retrieved 2016-04-14.
  5. ↑ "Academic OneFile - Document - Georgia Douglas Johnson". libraries.state.ma.us. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
  6. ↑ "Plays by American Women: 1900-1930 | Samuel French". www.samuelfrench.com. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.