Crumbs From the Table of Joy

The play opens in the fall of 1950. A Black family sits on a bench, their heads bowed. Godfrey Crump, handsome and fastidious, is with his two daughters who have uneven pigtails. Ernestine is 17 and somewhat stout, and Ermina is 15 and thin. To the audience, Ernestine describes their grief over their mother’s recent death, which Godfrey illustrates by sobbing loudly.

The family moved from Pensacola, Florida, to Brooklyn, New York, because Godfrey believes that Father Divine, the leader of the Peace Mission Movement, is located there (based on the return address of a calming elixir he ordered after his wife’s death). While the girls sleep in their shabby basement apartment, Godfrey works the night shift at a bakery. At school, their more cosmopolitan classmates mock their clothes, which were lovingly homemade by their mother, and Ermina fights their bullies. School is tougher here, and Ermina has been held back a grade. Ernestine considered Brooklyn “no place to live” until she found herself sitting between two white girls at the movies (6), and they all wept together at the same parts.

Their mantle bears a portrait of their mother, Sandra Crump, and one of Father Divine.