style, staging only noises that suggest that all three
have fallen victim to the well.
The play is a straightforward glimpse into fam-
ily frustrations and a meditation on the life-threat-
ening consequences of infidelity.
Bibliography
Flynn, Joyce, and Joyce Occomy Striklin. Frye Street &
Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr. (1865–1953)
The influential minister known for his leadership
of the ABYSSINIANBAPTISTCHURCHand legacy of
social reform in and beyond HARLEM.
Powell was born in Franklin County, Virginia,
to Anthony Powell, a German man, and Sally
Dunning Powell, a formerly enslaved woman of
African and Native American descent. After Pow-
ell’s father died during the Civil War, his mother
joined the family of Anthony Dunn, a former
slave. Powell, who lived with his family in West
Virginia before striking out on his own, moved to
Washington, D.C., in the late 1880s. A newly con-
verted Christian, he enrolled at Wayland Seminary
in Washington, D.C.
Powell, who married his childhood sweetheart
Mattie Fletcher Schaefer in 1890, graduated from
the seminary in 1892. In 1908, he was appointed
minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a his-
toric congregation founded in the early 19th cen-
tury by Boston minister Thomas Paul and several
disenfranchised New York City African Americans
who were not satisfied with the church options
open to them in the segregated city. Mattie Pow-
ell, with whom Adam Powell had two children, a
son, Adam Jr., and a daughter, Blanche, died in
- Adam Sr. remarried one year later. His sec-
ond wife was Inez Means, a native of Clifton,
South Carolina.
During the Harlem Renaissance, Powell Sr.
was an active advocate of social justice who used
his powerful position to lobby on behalf of African-
Americans rights. He worked alongside Ruth Stan-
dish Baldwin and George Edmund Haynes to
establish the National League on Urban Condi-
tions among Negroes, the group that in 1920 was
renamed the NATIONALURBANLEAGUE. Powell
Sr. also played a visible role in the NATIONALAS-
SOCIATION FOR THEADVANCEMENT OFCOLORED
PEOPLE, serving on the organization’s first board of
directors.
Powell retired from the Abyssinian Baptist
Church in 1937. His dynamic son, Adam Clayton
Powell, Jr., assumed his position and maintained the
family’s impressive history of evangelism, social out-
reach, and political activism.Bibliography
Clingan, Ralph. Against Cheap Grace in a World Come of
Age: An Intellectual Biography of Clayton Powell,
1865–1953.New York: P. Lang, 2002.Prancing NiggerRonald Firbank(1924)
A novel by RONALDFIRBANK, a prolific white
British writer, that focuses on the Mouths, a West
Indian family of color with high social aspirations
and whose patriarch often is referred to by his wife
as “Prancing Nigger.” The work, originally entitled
Sorrow in Sunlight,was solicited by the publishing
firm of ALBERT ANDCHARLESBONIand was pub-
lished in America by the NEWYORKCITYfirm of
Brentano’s.
The novel opens as Miami Mouth considers
her mother’s plans to move from the family home
in Mediaville to “the Celestial city of Cuna-Cuna”
(Firbank, 593). Miami’s ruminations about how
one enters society set the tone for the rather con-
voluted and melodramatic tone of the novel. “In
what way, she reflected, would the family gain by
entering Society,and how did one enter it at all?
There would be a gathering, doubtless, of the elect
(probably armed), since the best Society is exclu-
sive and difficult to enter. And then? Did one bur-
row? Or charge?” (Firbank, 593). Mrs. Ahmadou
Mouth, the matriarch of the family, is perennially
distressed by the lack of good suitors for her
daughters and the potential options for her son.
She is motivated to relocate in order to secure a
better education and social prospects for them all.
Her husband, Mr. Mouth, however, does not share
her sense of urgency. On one occasion, the frus-
trated Ahmadou accosts him: “Prancing Nigger,
from dis indifference to your fambly be careful let
you do arouse de vials ob de Lord’s wrath” (Fir-
bank, 595). The novel taps into popular Harlem432 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr.