Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral

Settling into her new life in New York, Angela notices that Anthony Cross seeks her out in class, so she assumes he must harbor affection for her. She cooks him dinner at her new apartment—comfort food from home, including hash, sweet potatoes, and muffins—and they talk and laugh. However, he reminds her too much of the boys back home, so she decides that she won’t indulge his courtship.

At dinner at Paulette’s apartment, Angela encounters quite a different spread: overcooked chops, potatoes, salad, and rolls. Angela thinks it more fitting for a working man than a young woman. Paulette surprises Angela in other ways as well. She boldly states, “[t]here is a great deal of the man about me. […] I see what I want; I use my wiles as a woman to get it, and I employ the qualities of men, tenacity and ruthlessness, to keep it” (105). This is Angela’s first experience with a woman defying traditional gender roles. She wonders “what it would be like to conduct oneself absolutely according to one’s own laws” (107). 

Angela has a rather restrained lunch with Miss Powell, the only Black student in her art class. Because Angela is white Angèle to Miss Powell, the latter is reserved and cautious, Angela thinks, because she won’t let her guard down around white people. There can be no close friendship between the two.

Angela attends a gathering at Martha Burden’s apartment, where she finds a group of apparently open-minded intellectuals, including an attractive young Black woman whom Angela studies closely. The talk of politics and “the burnt-offering of individualism for some dimly glimpsed racial whole” (117) seems shallow to Angela when compared with the lynchings and financial worries that residents of Opal Street in Philadelphia face. Martha introduces Angela to Roger Fielding, who walks her home. A letter has arrived from Virginia, who is coming to New York after being rejected by her childhood crush, Matthew Henson.

Roger asks Angela to dinner. He is overtly flirtatious, kissing her as she drops him off—too disrespectful for Angela, though she is also excited by his advances. She subsequently discovers that he is very wealthy, which captures Angela’s attention: “She saw her life rounding out like a fairy tale” (131). She reckons that, even if she doesn’t love him now, she will come to love him over time. This might be her opportunity to achieve the freedom that comes with whiteness and financial security.

As she muses about her future with Roger, he interrupts their dinner by violently objecting to the presence of Black patrons in the dining room, using his clout to have them ejected and venting to Angela using racial slurs. Angela is sickened by his outburst, but doesn’t reveal her secret. Instead, she feels “triumph,” supposing that “[l]ife could never cheat her as it had cheated that coloured girl this evening […] She was free, free to taste life in all its minutest details” (136). Nevertheless, she determines to end contact with Roger.

Angela briefly welcomes Anthony back into her life, learning that his father was killed in Brazil and thinking him attractive and brave. Yet Anthony has determined to make it as the stereotypical starving artist, and Angela decides she will not be content to struggle in poverty: “she was sick of tragedy, she belonged to a tragic race” (143). Thus, she gives him up.

Roger slowly insinuates himself back into Angela’s life, and she resolves to treat the relationship like a game: She will play hard to get, lure him in until he proposes, and then become financially secure and socially free. When eventually she returns his ardent kisses, she believes that “[s]he herself was power—like the women one reads about, like Cleopatra,—Cleopatra’s African origin intrigued her, it as a fitting comparison” (151). Roger hints that he has something important to ask her when he returns from an imminent business trip.

Angela finds a letter from Virginia on her return home, and she tries to arrange her sister’s visit so that it won’t conflict with Roger’s secret plans—which, of course, she believes entails a marriage proposal.

Angela goes to the train station to meet her sister. To her horror, at the station, Angela also runs into Roger, who has come back early from his trip. She panics, aware of Roger’s racist views: She cannot allow him to know that Virginia is her sister (or even an acquaintance), or he will reject her. Thus, she pretends coldly not to know who her sister is when she approaches Angela. Roger buys it because Virginia greets Angela as “Mrs. Jones,” in homage to a childhood game they used to play. Angela’s secret remains safe.

Still, Angela is upset over the incident and feels a “sick distaste for her actions” (162), yet her plan to marry Roger isn’t disrupted. She hopes to make it up to Jinny, but knows that she has damaged their relationship, perhaps irreparably.

Angela tries to explain the situation to Virginia, who is, of course, despondent over her sister’s hurtful actions. After a lengthy discussion wherein Angela defends her actions—wanting to be free, she reasons, is worth the deception—Virginia finally accepts that she cannot change her sister’s mind. She understands that Angela, with her fairer skin, has different options than Jinny does—though Jinny does not assume those options are better ones.

Virginia is planning to move to New York, where she realizes that she and Angela cannot openly be sisters or even friends; she resolves to carry on with her life, proud of her Blackness and deeply hurt by her sister’s decision. She realizes that Angela will move on without her: “So why shouldn’t you disclaim a living manifestation of that [Black] blood?” (171).