Summary Of Plumes By Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson was a playwright of the Harlem Renaissance whose social commentary delved into the hardships of African Americans in the early 20th century. As an African American woman of the time, Johnson often brought to light the difficulties of her race and gender. In Johnson’s play Plumes she invites her audience into an everyday kitchen, with two hardworking early 20th century African American women trying navigate their way through a racially oppressive and patriarchal society. Johnson uses the characters’ desires to provide for those that they love, as an illustration to the adversity of everyday life of the African American in her time, particularly the African American woman. In this paper, I will explore the complications

depicted in Johnson’s Plumes, and how they mirrored the systemic oppression that she herself, as well as the other African American women of the early 20th century were forced to operate in.
Despite the fact both white and African American’s returning home from fighting together in the first World War, and African American families moving north in the great migration to take on open factory jobs, racial tensions were still high in the late 1920’s.

Likewise, regardless of great strides being made for women’s rights, including the passing of the 19th amendment in 1920, women were still battling for legitimacy outside of the household. With both of these truths, it is an amazing feat Georgia Douglas Johnson came to be one of the most influential pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as one of the most prolific poets and playwrights of her time. Through the use of periodicals and advertisements, one is able to see the parallels between Johnson’s struggles and the characters she creates, specifically in her play

Plumes.
Plumes is a one act folk play set in the kitchen of a southern two room cottage contemporary to Johnson writing. The one-act shows falls into the category of lynching play, made popular during the Harlem Renaissance as a way for African Americans to speak out against lynching happening in the American south. In the play we see the relationship between two women and learn of the hardships they have gone through trying to provide for their families, the loss they have gone through in their families, and their inability to provide what they see as fit accommodations for their loved ones after they have passed. Likewise, we watch as one of the women, Charity, tries to decide whether to spend money on her daughter who is currently sick to get a surgery that may or may not cure her, or save the money in order to produce a funeral service for the inevitable death she sees coming for her daughter.
It is through the struggle of these characters one can first examine the racial disparities for African Americans of the time through the quality of life they were able to attain. When asked, Charity tells Tildy that she is able to make $1.50 washing clothes. While still providing for her family, Charity describes how she saves every penny she can so to be able to provide a suitable funeral for the next person in her family to have a proper funeral (Johnson). In Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, in 1929, Reinhold Niebuhr says about the quality of life made available to African Americans, “hampered both by their own inadequacies and the hostility of a white world they have a desperate fight to keep body and soul together, to say nothing of developing those amenities which raise life above the brute level, “(CITATION). Charity’s situation embodies the essence of this quote, demonstrating the African American’s ability to rise in socioeconomic status, due to the oppressive system in place in the time pf the play. According to James Weldon Johnson in his article Black Manhattan, African American’s, “Still has far, very far yet, to go and many, very many things yet to gain,”(CITATION). Seeing Johnson is writing of those peoples in the northern states where African American’s had, “achieved political independence,” as well as, “fundamental rights of citizens,” it can be assumed the culture and area the play takes place, where lynchings happen regularly and discrimination was at its highest, African American’s had even farther to go and even more things to obtain (CITATION). As a final note to the difficulty of race din which Johnson writes, a contemporary, Jessie Redmon Fauset, in her novel There is Confusion published in 1927, a character, Brian, demonstrates in one scene the disparate accommodations to the disparities of being colored saying, “to have an ordinary job of living is bad enough, but to add to it all the thousand and one difficulties which follow simply in the train of being colored –well, all I’ve got to say, Sylvia, is we’re some wonderful people to live through it all and keep our sanity,,”(CITATION). This quote reinforces the idea illustrated throughout Johnson’s Plumes, that simply making it through life in early 20th century America was a feat for African American persons. However, this feat was two fold for both the character’s in Johnson’s play, as well as for Johnson herself, for they had to also battle another inadequacy, as seen by society, which is being a woman.
As previously mentioned, Johnson often wrote about the hardships of women and the isolation and restricted role women played in her contemporary society.

Some of the issues she wrote into her play Plumes, closely paralleled with her own life circumstances. According to Maureen Honey of Illinois University, despite loving writing, Johnson’s husband, Howard Lincoln Johnson, kept Johnson somewhat geographically removed from major literary circles as to have her primary role to be raising their two sons. When Howard died in 1925, Johnson then had to provide for her sons and herself while also continuing to uphold the expectations of a woman of her time (CITATION). Much like Johnson, in Plumes, Charity has survived her husband, has been working hard to provide for her family, while also saving for the future, along with filling all of the roles of a woman in the house. This struggle to fulfil all of these roles is best demonstrated by Charity’s need to heat a poltis, trying to hem her daughter’s dress, as well as get the laundry she is cleaning for someone all at the same time. These impossible standards that women like Johnson and her character, Charity, are forced to meet were often created by media of the time. For example Appendix A shows two advertisements found in a popular African American Magazine The Messenger in 1927. This advertisement for “Madam C.J. Walker’s” cosmetics, tells the reader that personality, and talent only impress a man so much, and that a woman mush

also be beautiful to, “know the joy of being a preferred person,” (Appendix A). These advertisements both imply the importance of beauty to be important for a fulfilling life. These advertisement paired with the political cartoon (Appendix B) shows the impossible standards that these women were forced to embody to be seen as successful. Appendix B is a 1925 political cartoon depicting an African American woman busting out of a mold from the Antebellum stereotype of “Black mammy” which was a racial stereotype of a passive, cheerful, enslaved black woman who took care of the children of slave owners (Appendix B). In contrast to the women depicted in the Madam C.J. Walker advertisements, this woman is drawn in a head scarf and what appears to be work clothes. Another interesting contrast between the two contemporary rederings of women, is that the cosmetic advertisements indicate a need to continue to adhere to the stereotype of being a beautiful woman, however in the political cartoon the woman is busting through the mold with a gun of sorts with the words, “New Race Spirit” written across it, busting rocks away inscribed with old stereotypes such as, “fear,”, “ignorance,”, and, “superstition,” (Appendix B). Thus, while these women, such as Charity and Johnson herself, were allowed to try and break the conventions of race, the conventions of gender and beauty expectations were not allowed to be broken. There is an evident hypocrisy that created an standard of living for women of the time, that created heightened expectations on top of the hardships that came with the label of their race.