## SYNOPSIS

The third play of the COLOR PARADE trilogy is now in the process of being written. This is a short synopsis.

J. Seabright Moore is a light colored negro who has prospered as a lawyer among his people. He has a light colored wife, Anna, and two daughters. Lavinia is twenty-three and has a beautiful but dark brown complexion. Adelaide is twenty and fairer than either parent. In fact, Adelaide would never ordinarily be taken for a negro. She could easily pass for an Italian or Spaniard.

The Moores have favored Adelaide, their fair daughter, in every way. Her part in life is to look beautiful and acquire learning and culture. She is relieved of all the drudging of house work. By dint of hard work and many sacrifices her parents have given her a college education. The play opens the week preceding Adelaide's graduation from Barnard College of Columbia University.

Lavinia, on the other hand, because of her dark brown skin has been made the family Cinderella. Her schooling ended with high school and she is now family cook, maid, and seamstress. Her parents and sisters are a bit ashamed of her because of her dark skin and keep her in the background on all occasions. She spends most of her time in the kitchen, and Aunt Julie, the washwoman, and Buster (Robert) Brown, the elevator boy, are really closer to Lavinia than her own family. In fact, Aunt Julie, is intent on making a match between Lavinia and Buster.

2.

Buster Brown is a handsome but very black negro.
He attends trade school along with working at his job and
is studying stationary engineering with the idea of
eventually becoming the superintendent of an apartment
building. He has character and humour. There is a bit of
the poet in him and he extemporizes love songs which he sings
to Lavinia in the kitchen to the accompaniment of his banjo.

The Moores hope Adelaide will marry Doctor Vincent
Andrews, a brilliant young negro surgeon who could also easily
pass as a swarthy Latin. In fact, both Adelaide and her
parents expect the doctor to propose that very evening of the
first act.

As a foil to J. Seabright Moore who is a "striver"
and a "blue blood", there is his brother Arthur Moore who
is a prosperous caterer. He ridicules his brother's family's
pride in their light skins and their co-incident feeling of
superiority over the darker members of their race. Arthur
Moore especially condemns his brother's action in investing
all his own savings and the intriguing of many of his clients
to also invest their's in the exploitation of a restricted
negro "blue blood" colony; i.e: a real estate development in
which only "light"negroes can own property and build homes.

The crisis of the first act develops around the
discovery by Doctor Vincent Andrews of the love affair be-
tween Lavinia and Buster, and the Doctor's consequent
precipitate abandonment of his courtship of Adelaide. The
whole family then jump on Lavinia and insist that she give up

3.

her dark-skinned lover. She sticks to Buster in spite of
all their threats.

The second act crisis results from the financial
debacle of the "blue blood" colony and the "going over" into
the whites of the Doctor and Adelaide, whom he marries only
on the condition that she abandon her family and her race.
The Doctor has changed his name to Andree and is moving to a
new city, where he will begin his practice among the whites.
When the father learns of Adelaide's apostacy, he becomes
violent and is stricken with an apoplectic stroke.

The third act shows J. Seabright Moore a broken man,
deserted by friends and clients. He and his wife are being
supported by Buster and Lavinia, now happily married. Into
their tenement home comes Doctor Andree and his wife Adelaide.
They have prospered greatly but their first child is brown-
skinned and the Doctor forces Adelaide to give the child to
Lavinia. The crisis develops around Adelaide's unwillingness
to abandon the child, but the doctor's threats conquer her
mother-love, and she leaves with him, never again to see her
child or her family.