Crumbs From the Table of Joy

The play’s first act begins with the Crump family at their absolute lowest, unmoored and undone by grief with no end in sight. Godfrey’s decision to abruptly move his daughters from Pensacola, Florida, the only home they know, to Brooklyn demonstrates his desperation to separate himself from the relentless mourning and memories. Godfrey’s moves are desperate, as he is accustomed to having control over his life and his family, and his wife’s death demonstrates that the world is unpredictable and chaotic. Godfrey’s appearance and living space are always fastidiously neat, but this contrasts with his emotional state; mourning comes out in unexpected tears and cries that he can’t suppress, even after he relocates his family. This is paralleled by his rash decision to move his family based on a return address—Godfrey is thus characterized by contrasts, someone trying to simultaneously convey stability and control while grasping for meaning and reassurance.

In 1950, Florida was still operating under Jim Crow laws, which meant racist discrimination and segregation were part of everyday life. The doctrine of “separate but equal” manifested stark differences in quality between white schools, facilities, and establishments and Black ones. Writing in the 1990s, Lynn Nottage references the Scottsboro Boys early in Act I to allude to the danger for Black Americans under Jim Crow. This event is in living memory for the Crumps and her audience alike, allowing her to both characterize Godfrey’s mistrust of white women and draw distinctions between New York and the American South. New York had plenty of its own racism in the 1950s, but it was integrated, a marked difference. Adjusting to a different culture raises questions about Blackness, Whiteness, and the American Dream. Ernestine reveals in Scene 1 that she is about to become the first person in the family to graduate from high school, and the potential for her future is different in New York than it was in Florida. Ernestine realizes that Brooklyn, with all its culture shock, might be a worthwhile place to live when she goes to the movies and finds herself sitting between two white girls, all three crying together over the heroine’s romantic plight. Despite the city’s difficulties, it offers new opportunities due to the different racial politics. This is reinforced by Godfrey’s transition in Act I from mistrusting white women to marrying one. In all, the Crumps are in a place where they can interact with white people as equals and individuals for the first time, their interactions not explicitly dictated by racist hierarchies and anti-Black bias.

However, Godfrey’s reasoning for moving his daughters so far from everything they know isn’t the belief that they will have more rights or equal opportunities as a Black family. He is grasping for a lifeline within the messiness of his grief, and he finds Father Divine and the International Peace Mission movement when he orders a calming elixir. Ernestine shares this information directly with the audience, breaking the fourth wall, but she doesn’t say whether the tonic worked. It’s possible he sought out the source of the only thing that provided relief, but the address might also have represented the promise of a new, hopeful life for Godfrey. As Ernestine describes at the beginning of the play, their mother’s death changed everything and everyone around them. People would take their hands and share memories of their mother, an act of sharing mutual grief that is healthy but also painful. By contrast, Godfrey tries to heal his grief through escape, as shown in his initial flight to New York and his subsequent excursion in the New York City subways.

Each of the characters has ways of escaping their pain and Coping through Faith and Fantasies. For Godfrey, a fresh start and a new location has the benefit of taking him away from constant reminders. In their Brooklyn basement apartment, he hangs a photo of his late wife next to a photo of Father Divine, placing them on equal footing in terms of influence over their lives. The abstracted notion of Father Divine becomes a safe replacement for Sandra Crump in Godfrey’s devotion. Through the Mission, Godfrey receives guidelines to live by, which make him feel certain that he is doing the right thing. For every question that isn’t covered by Father Divine’s teachings, Godfrey makes a note so he can ask him when they finally meet. Ernestine and Ermina are not on board with Godfrey’s new religiosity, although they find themselves forced to take part in it. However, they have their own methods of coping and escape. Ermina externalizes her feelings by starting fights with girls who pick on her for wearing the clothes her mother made for her. Ernestine escapes into fantasies like movies, and she wishes she were a movie star so she could live out the romantic fantasies that she sees onscreen. She sees actors wearing perfectly sewn and fitted clothing, their hardships handled in an hour or two by heroic men and beautiful women. Even family conflicts are solved before the final credits roll, and no one suffers any real harm or danger. Godfrey asserts that this is just because they’re white, but Ernestine likes to imagine that her life is more like a movie. This desire is manifested as Ernestine plays with the play’s structure, addressing the audience directly and having the other characters stage her fantasies—contrasted with her clarifications of what actually happened.

When Lily, Ernestine and Ermina’s aunt, shows up at their door with all her belongings in tow, she tosses a wrench into the insulated life that Godfrey is trying to build. She immediately flirts unabashedly with him, revealing that Godfrey used to do more than flirt with her and raising questions as to whether he was unfaithful to his wife. She wants to pick up where they once left off, but she also admits that she can’t hold down a job, asserting that any worthwhile job won’t put up with a headstrong and qualified Black woman. This suggests that Lily has nowhere to go and is too proud to admit that she needs help. While she and Godfrey are foils—their personalities contrasting in almost every way—they share this drive to escape their problems.

As Godfrey’s foil, Lily introduces the theme of The Pain of Change and Revolution. Ernestine is growing up, and Lily helps her with this change and teaches her about womanhood, encouraging her to break free of the Peace Mission’s strict doctrines. Moreover, Lily talks about a larger cultural revolution in which Black Americans will rise up and fight for their liberation and equal rights. She teaches Ernestine, the only one who listens intently to her, how she can be revolutionary in her own small, personal ways, such as dressing better than white women or finding a career that makes her essential to society, like becoming a nurse. With Lily’s influence, Ernestine researches the plight of Black workers and writes a school paper about issues that need fixing. She is surprised to discover that she is in trouble for discussing poor working conditions, which the authorities in her life associate with communism and anti-patriotism. Act I advocates for a balanced political perspective. Lily’s erratic personality prevents the play from simply elevating communism, but Ernestine’s sincerely held beliefs in justice and equality—combined with the historical impact of Marxist thinkers on the Civil Rights movement—validate communist ideas as a part of American history.

Lily’s presence in the apartment confuses Godfrey, creating a tension between a past version of himself that drank and danced and the man he is trying to be by following Father Divine. When she kisses Godfrey, she derails his planned early-morning trip to the Mission with his daughters in girlish white pinafores. He walks out of the apartment to stop himself from giving in and disappears for several days. Simultaneously, a raging storm blows in, symbolizing how the Crump household is precarious, barely being held together in the aftermath of Sandra’s death. In Godfrey’s absence, Lily must take charge of the girls’ safety and well-being. In heels, she braves the tempest to clear debris from the storm drain and save them from flooding, as heroic as anyone in Ernestine’s movies. She also comforts the two girls, who miss their father. The storm also fells a 300-year-old oak tree, which has to be cut to pieces and hauled away. Lily sees this as an omen, and it symbolizes the undoing of familial roots and history.

In the Crumps’ lives, this change comes in the form of a new wife for Godfrey. When Godfrey meets Gerte on the train, he keeps his distance out of respect and his deep-rooted fear of systemic anti-Black power structures that threaten to punish him for even allowing a white woman to speak to him. But when she follows him to the Peace Mission, which is heavily invested in forcing desegregation, Godfrey is influenced to ignore those centuries of history and marry her. When Godfrey brings Gerte home, he tries to soothe his daughters and ease the enormous shock of a new wife by offering them cookies from his pockets. Incidentally, these are the same offerings that win Gerte’s trust and affection, creating another shared link between Black and white people in Act I. At this point, though, only Godfrey and Gerte accept this major life change.