THE PURPLE FLOWER (4)
By:
December 22, 2025
In Margaret B. Wilkerson’s Foreword to the anthology Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, 1847 to Today, we read that Marita Bonner’s 1928 play The Purple Flower is “an allegory that portrays the final revolution when Blacks forcibly claim equality by overthrowing their oppressors.” We are pleased to serialize this story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
OLD MAN — (walking toward pot slowly) Old Us! Do you hear me? Old Us that are here do you hear me?
ALL THE OLD US — (cry in chorus) Yes, Lord! We hear you! We hear you!
OLD MAN — (crying louder and louder) Old Us! Old Us!! Old Us that are gone, Old Us that are dust do you hear me? (his voice sounds strangely through the valley. Somewhere you think you hear — as if mouthed by ten million mouths through rocks and dust — “Yes! — Lord! — We hear you! We hear you!”)
OLD MAN — And you hear me — give me a handful of dust! Give me a handful of dust! Dig down to the depths of the things you have made! The things you formed with your hands and give me a handful of dust!
(An OLD WOMAN tottering with the weakness of old age crosses the stage and going to the pot, throws a handful of dust in. Just before she sits down again she throws back her head and shakes her cane in the air and laughs so that the entire valley echoes.)
A YOUNG US — What’s the trouble? Choking on the dust?
OLD WOMAN — No child! Rejoicing!
YOUNG US — Rejoicing over a handful of dust?
OLD WOMAN — Yes. A handful of dust! Thanking God I could do something if it was nothing but make a handful of dust!
YOUNG US — Well, dust isn’t much!
OLD MAN — (at the pot) Yes, it isn’t much! You are dust yourself; but so is she. Like everything else, though, dust can be little or much, according to where it is.
(The YOUNG US who spoke subsides. He subsides so completely that he crashes through the Thin-Skin-of-Civilization. Several of his group go too. They were thinking.)
OLD MAN — (at the pot) Bring me books! Bring me books!
YOUNG US — (who threw books down) Here! Take all these! I’ll light the fire with them.
OLD MAN — No, put them in the pot (YOUNG US does so) Bring me gold!
THE MAN OF THE GOLD BAGS — Here take this! It is just as well. Stew it up and make teething rings!! (he pours it into the pot)
OLD MAN — Now bring me blood! Blood from the eyes, the ears, the whole body! Drain it off and bring me blood! (No one speaks or moves) Ah hah, hah! I knew it! Not one of you willing to pour his blood in the pot!
YOUNG US — (facetiously) How you going to pour your own blood in there? You got to be pretty far gone to let your blood run in there. Somebody else would have to do the pouring.
OLD MAN — I mean red blood. Not yellow blood, thank you.
FINEST BLOOD — (suddenly) Take my blood! (he walks toward the pot)
CORNERSTONE — O no! Not my boy! Take me instead!
OLD MAN — Cornerstone we cannot stand without you!
AN OLD WOMAN — What you need blood for? What you doing anyhow? You ain’t told us nothing yet. What’s going on in that pot?
OLD MAN — I’m doing as I was told to do.
A YOUNG US — Who told you to do anything?
OLD MAN — God. I’m His servant.
YOUNG US — (who spoke before) God? I haven’t heard God tell you anything.
OLD MAN — You couldn’t hear. He told it to me alone.
OLD WOMAN — I believe you. Don’t pay any attention to that simpleton! What God told you to do?
OLD MAN — He told me take a handful of dust—dust from which all things came and put it in a hard iron pot. Put it in a hard iron pot. Things shape best in hard molds!! Put in books that Men learn by. Gold that Men live by. Blood that lets Men live.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.