“There Were Three” is a disturbing account of
a single mother named Lucille and her two chil-
dren, Little Lou and Robert. Lucille’s creamy skin
and blondness are coupled with her voluptuous
body and air of sensuality that, according to the
narrator, “made you know that underneath...
there lay a black man—a black woman.” Although
she is a loving mother who dotes on her children,
Lucille is despised by the women in her Frye Street
neighborhood. They regard her as a “flamboyant
symbol of uncleanness that always sets the psalm-
singers of all earth into rhapsodies.” Despite his
mother’s prohibition, Robert gets work as a bellboy
in a downtown Chicago hotel. One fateful
evening, he delivers champagne to a room and dis-
covers that the prostitute in the room is his
mother. The client, angry about the bellboy’s
seeming inappropriate reaction and clearly un-
aware of the relationship between the mother and
son, hurls Robert out of the hotel window and to
his death. The vignette closes with shocking
glimpses of an institutionalized Lucille ranting and
suffering from visions of the fateful night.
“Of Jimmy Harris,” the shortest of the three
stories, recounts the sudden death of Harris, a 38-
year-old man with “seal-smooth skin coupled
with the straight cast features and hair of a natu-
ral smooth waviness that constitutes ‘a good-
looking brown.’” Jimmy, who prefers to stitch his
clothes rather than gamble with the men of Frye
Street, falls unconscious. The hysterical reactions
of his mother are not enough to rouse him from
his stupor. At one point, Jimmy seems to rally, is
aware of his condition, and struggles to gain con-
trol of his body. Unable to do so, however, he be-
comes “reconciled to die,” and within moments,
he is gone.
“Corner Store,” the final piece of the story
triad, features a Jewish shopkeeper and his family
who, despite their best efforts to maintain their
culture, become involved with individuals outside
their religion. Anton Steinberg, a besieged man
who cannot bear to look at his wife Esther and her
“flabby body, slouched in faded grey house dress
and muffled in ragged black sweater,” falls into a
caring relationship with one of his customers. His
wife encounters a woman in the shop, one who ap-
pears to be Semitic but who, upon closer inspec-
tion, is African American. When Anton appears
and shoos away his wife, she goes to deal with her
daughter Meta, who wants to date an African
American. When she returns to find her husband
engaged in a clearly caring conversation with the
unidentified woman, Esther runs back into her
house and, symbolically, in the hallway between
the public shop and her private home, begins to
scream.
Bonner’s grim portraits of real life, betrayal,
and encroachment are especially powerful for their
depiction of human nature and desire. Like her
other works of short fiction, A Possible Triad on
Black Notesaddresses the overwhelming and often
disorienting aspects of daily life.Bibliography
Flynn, Joyce, and Joyce Occomy Striklin. Frye Street &
Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.Poston, Robert Lincoln(1890–1924)
A journalist who became an ally of MARCUSGAR-
VEYand a leading figure in the UNIVERSALNEGRO
IMPROVEMENTASSOCIATION(UNIA). Poston, a
native of Kentucky, was the son of Ephraim and
Mary Cox Poston. Two of his siblings, Ulysses and
Ted, pursued careers in journalism. Poston first
forged his connection with the Garvey movement
by joining the staff of NEGROWORLD,the official
newspaper of the UNIA.
In 1923, the year in which he married AU-
GUSTASAVAGE, the renowned sculptor, he repre-
sented the UNIA in a mission to Liberia. The
December voyage with Henrietta Vinton Davis and
J. Milton Van Lowe was a serious effort to make ar-
rangements for Garvey followers and UNIA mem-
bers to settle in Liberia. Despite the seemingly
positive interactions with Liberian officials, the
plans failed to gain Liberian government approval.
Poston died in March 1924 when he con-
tracted pneumonia. At the time of his death, he
was sailing from Liberia following the close of his
unsuccessful 1923 meetings.Bibliography
Cronon, Edmund. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Gar-
vey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.430 Poston, Robert Lincoln