Plumes

   Among the most frequently anthologized African American one-act plays of the 1910s and 1920s, Plumes was written by Georgia Douglas Johnson and won first prize in the 1927 playwrit-ing contest sponsored by the magazine Opportunity, which published it that year. Produced the following season by Harlem Experimental Theatre, the play focuses on a laundress whose 14-year-old daughter lies ill in the next room. The doctor says that an operation might save her, but the woman hesitates because if her daughter dies after she pays for the operation, there would be no money left for a proper funeral with plumes on the horses. While she ponders what to do, the daughter dies.