He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box
Notes
IMAGES
Train Cars
Dark, passing white colored stations.
New York Theatre
Small like old Amato Opera House.
Stage
Opera backdrop.
Backstage
Dressing room.
Table, chair, mirror.
School
Kay enters from beyond; near her is a long, long, staircase, dark.
She is pretty, fragile, pale.
Watches play through an opening that leads to the stage.
Music
The song “See See Rider Blues” runs throughout the play.
It is the motif of this world.
The Ma Rainey version I heard as a child, summers in Georgia.
Place
Montefiore, Georgia.
June 1941.
Outside the town a boarding school for colored.
School play, Paris Massacre, is in progress.
Characters
HARRISON AHERNE
Chris’s father.
KAY
Very pretty, student, 17.
When not in school she lives with her grandmother, a servant for people who run the town’s canning factory.
They live in the center of the colored district in a decent house bought for her by the canning family.
CHRIS
Handsome, 17.
Working in a building adjacent to the school storeroom and office.
Office belongs to Harrison Aherne, white, one of the founders of the school.
Chris is his son.
Chris and Kay have known each other all their lives.
The town has less than six hundred people.
Chris lives with his parents in a house right on the edge of town.
His father, Harrison Aherne, is a landowner and businessman, and architect of the town’s segregation.
Chris’s mother, originally from Oglethorpe, has just died.
People see each other constantly on Main Street.
The people are all somehow connected.
Kay’s father was a white writer of history and mystery. Her mother, who shot herself in the head when Kay was a baby, was colored.
Her name was Mary.
Kay’s father, who lived in nearby Oglethorpe, saw Mary most of the time when she helped her mother and he was a visitor at the canning family, the Walkers.
Kay’s mother, Mary, was 15, striking and quiet.
The school play, Paris Massacre, is in progress.
Kay at the top of the stairwell can see through
to the stage, hear clearly, see vague motion.
Down this long, long dark stairwell is a door.
Kay watches the play.
We hear voices.
On the walls of the school’s corridor are drawings of Dante.
From the stage Paris Massacre:
The children of the boarding school are all colored.
The students in the play are about 12 to 17.
They say the lines accordingly:
Although my downfall be the deepest hellFor this I wake whenFor this I wait that scorns attendance elseFor this my quenchless thirst…whereon I Build
