Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral

Location is important in the novel, signifying opportunity and character. For example, Anthony’s exotic Brazilian background prompts Angela to assume he is passionate and proud, as befits the “Spanish” character (102). Angela herself, in contrast, exudes the naïve character of the relatively sheltered, suburban-raised young woman. Her excoriation of Philadelphia comes from her desire to leave a provincial community and to pass in worldly New York. Philadelphia is contrasted with New York in general, but with Harlem in particular: While Philadelphia is painted as a narrow-minded and drab place to live—“Opal Street, as streets go, is no jewel of the first water” (11)—Harlem is a bustling place, full of color and liveliness.

Angela’s first glimpse of Harlem is a back-handed compliment: She calls it a “frolicking, busy, laughing great city within a greater one” (96). She does recognize, though, that Harlem is different from her experience of Black Philadelphia: “she could now realize that life viewed from the angle of Opal and Jefferson Streets in Philadelphia and that same life viewed from One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue in New York might present bewildering different facets” (97). Elsewhere in New York, Angela does not see life like she witnesses in Harlem, “richer with the difference in quality that there is between velvet and silk” (98). Harlem buzzes with motion and dazzles with color; even Jinny, after she moves there, is “so pretty and so colourful. [She] had always shown a preference for high colours; to-day she was reveling in them” (164).

In contrast, Philadelphia is a place of hypocrisy and limitations: “But Philadelphia with its traditions of liberty and its actual economic and social slavery, its iniquitous school system, its prejudiced theatres, its limited offering of occupation!” (261). Angela decides that she would rather “cast in her lot again with coloured people in New York” (261)—Harlem, that is—than return to the blinkered streets of Philadelphia. In her final formulation of Harlem, after her years of passing have netted her nearly nothing, Angela feels that “it represented […] the last word in racial pride, integrity and even self-sacrifice” (326). As Angela discovers herself, so she understands Harlem.