students in 1969. In 2001 Shirley Tilghman became
the first woman president of the institution.
The playwright EUGENEO’NEILL, author of
the popular Harlem Renaissance play The EM-
PERORJONES,began his college studies at Prince-
ton in 1906.
“Prison Bound, The” Marita Bonner(1926)
A melancholy vignette by MARITABONNERthat
features little dialogue and much angst in the
home of an unhappily married couple. Published in
the September 1926 issue of THECRISIS,the story
opens as Maggie, a dissatisfied and depressed
housewife, wonders how her cup of tea has salt in
it. Over the course of her silent wonderings, she
gazes around the awful apartment that she shares
with a husband for whom she has little desire.
When Charlie looks up at his wife and sees her
crying, he is overcome by distaste and beats a hasty
retreat. The story closes as Maggie begins to clean
up the dishes and hopes that heaven will help her
to overcome. The story closes, as it opens, with
lines from a prayer: “God help the prison-bound /
Them within the four iron / walls this evening!”
“The Prison Bound” is one of several portraits
that Bonner created of unrealized happiness and
distressed couples. Her relentless critique of dys-
functional domesticity and frustrated women con-
tributed to the literary realism that was so much a
part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Bibliography
Flynn, Joyce, and Joyce Occomy Striklin. Frye Street &
Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
“Prologue to a Life”Dorothy West(1929)
A heartfelt story and tragic romance by DOROTHY
WESTthat appeared in the April 1929 issue of the
SATURDAYEVENINGQUILLmagazine.
The protagonists, Lily Bemis and Luke Kane,
embark on a new life when they get married. Lily
came north when the white southern family for
whom she worked moved to Springfield, Mas-
sachusetts. Luke is a longtime resident of the state
but has had no desire to move away from his close-
knit and watchful family in Springfield. Luke falls
in love with Lily; her affection for him is based on
her strong desire to have a child. According to the
narrator, Lucy regards a man as a means to the
ends of her grand reproductive plans: “In her
supreme egoism she believed the male seed would
only generate it,” notes the narrator. “She would
not conceive of [the seed] becoming blood of her
child’s blood, and flesh of her child’s flesh. Men
were chiefly important as providers. She would
have married any healthy man with prospects.”
Lucy gives birth to twin boys, James and John, who
have her “soft yellow skin and fine brown eyes.”
Her devotion to them is absolute and “[t]o her,
they were gods.”
The twins drown together when they fall
through the ice on a pond during the winter. Lily is
devastated and withdraws completely from her
husband and her mother-in-law. “She had given no
thought to death before the death of her twins,”
the narrator reveals. Yet, in the wake of her loss,
“she had thought of her going as only a dreamless
sleeping and a waking with her sons.” Luke does
his best to comfort his wife, and in time she finds
that she is pregnant again. Her attitude toward
childbearing has changed completely, however. She
berates him inhumanely, telling him that this child
is his. “I’ve borne my babies,” she exclaims, “And
I’ve buried them. This is your little black brat,
d’you hear? You can keep it or kill it.” Lily does not
live long after she delivers the child. The unnamed
infant also struggles for life. In a fit of desperation,
Luke pumps her chest and blows air into her lungs.
The baby girl responds, and as she does, he names
her after her mother. “Lily was dead, and Lily was
not dead,” observes the narrator quietly before de-
livering the final philosophical perspectives on the
exhausting events that have unfolded. “A mother
is the creator of Life. And God cannot die.”
West’s story anticipates some of her later short
fiction in which she continues to grapple with
unloving parent-child relationships and the des-
peration to which some women succumb in their
marriages.Provincetown Players
An enterprising and dynamic theater group estab-
lished in 1914 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, by
wealthy and progressive New York intellectuals.434 “Prison Bound, The”