Born in 1898, Marita Bonner’s life and writing career are marked by the imprint of three different cities: Boston, Washington, D.C., and most extensively, Chicago. Rather than focus on the lives of the middle-class Blacks that her own life mirrored, Bonner chose to highlight the lives of the Black working class, leading critics to characterize her work as “proletarian fiction.” The New Negro discourse of the early 1900s from intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke encouraged Black writers to counteract racist thinking and institutions with “racial uplift,” which provided upstanding portraits of Black life. Bonner chose to concentrate on the desperate situations in which the masses of Blacks found themselves. Her writing embodies a keen sensitivity to the experiences of those who transformed their lives with movement from rural, southern locales to northern and western cities during the Great Migration (one of the largest voluntary movements of people in history). Blacks seeking improved employment opportunities and less exposure to racist oppression and violence carved out new lives in northern cities such as Chicago (which was a common destination for Blacks from Mississippi) and western cities such as Los Angeles. While their expectations were sometimes met, most would endure immense environmental and cultural dislocation that caused anxiety, discord, and economic uncertainty. Published in The Crisis magazine (funded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and Opportunity magazine (funded by the National Urban League), Bonner was a strong presence in artistic efforts to document, publicize, and improve the lives of African Americans whose lives were forever altered by this switch from rural to urban life. As an early contributor to the Black Chicago Renaissance, she amplified the struggles of new arrivals to urban worlds that had demanding circumstances and emphasized the power of environmental influence to shape and sometimes determine human potential.
Bonner’s upbringing by her parents, Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne (Noel) Bonner, shielded her from the severe consequences of racism experienced by most of her characters. Benefiting from the economic buffer of a middle-class home, Bonner’s movement from city to city was relatively smooth. Throughout her childhood education in the Boston area, she demonstrated academic excellence and artistic accomplishment as a pianist. Her writing career blossomed during her years at Brookline High School where she contributed regularly to a student magazine. Noticed for her writing skill, she was encouraged to apply to Radcliffe College, where she majored in English and comparative literature (she was fluent in German). Bonner, along with other Black students, was not allowed to live on campus, so she commuted from home. During her college years she was able to secure a position in a prestigious writing seminar with Charles Townsend Copeland and win two Radcliffe song competitions (1918, 1922). Before graduating from college (in 1922) she began a teaching career, which she continued with a position at the Bluefield Colored Institute in Blue-field, Virginia, after obtaining her degree. Bonner’s first nationally published short story, “The Hands,” appeared in Opportunity magazine in 1925; her first nationally published essay, “On Being Black—a Woman—and Colored,” appeared in The Crisis magazine that same year.
These two inaugural publications signal thematic foci that recur in Bonner’s later work. In “The Hands” the narrator develops a brief story about the hands of a fellow bus rider playing a game the narrator calls “Christ-in-all-men.”1 The game inclines the narrator to ennoble and embellish the life of the man based on the appearance of his hands. The sketch the narrator paints is of a hardworking male laborer whose life the narrator anchors in the action of his hands, following him from his youth, adulthood, marriage, fatherhood, and death with actions such as “shoveled,” “patted,” “soothed,” “smoothed,” and “steadied.”2 Along with the focus on a member of the Black working class, the story includes theological references that resurface in Bonner’s writing.
“On Being Black—a Woman—and Colored,” an essay that has received much attention since 1989, takes an autobiographical detour into discussing the lives of the Black working class. Bonner begins this essay with second-person narration broadly describing the idealistic expectations of the young, middle- or upper-class, Black woman who is “covered with sundry Latin phrases”3 after her college graduation. Her all-inclusive hopes for career, home, and husband (foreshadowing the “have-it-all” dilemma identified in later feminist movements) are fueled by a youthful energy. However, the young middle-class Black Everywoman feels compelled to “test” her hopes and dreams of the world in the “ghetto” of a Black community. Ideologies of racial uplift and solidarity circulating at the time from thinkers and activists such as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, and Nannie Helen Burroughs encouraged Blacks of all socioeconomic classes to work together to dismantle institutional racism and to increase Black progress. Along with uneasiness about the potential success of racial solidarity, the “young Colored woman”4 must also confront the ignorance of racism. Caught between the prodigal relationship she has with the masses of Black people because of her relative socioeconomic privilege and her despisement of mainstream society burdened by the legacy of racism and slavery, the persona in Bonner’s essay wonders about the perception of Black women by White society and the impact of racism on those who are discriminated against suggesting that “every part of you becomes bitter.”5 She contemplates the accumulation of wealth this discrimination provides (“a stupendous mass of things”6) and juxtaposes this conspicuous accumulation and consumption with ancient civilizations in Greece and Rome that also had “possessions” and “culture” but lacked “Wisdom.” At this point she personifies “Wisdom” as the twin sister of “Understanding,” saying that they will not aid those who discriminate.7 In closing, she draws on the image of Buddha sitting quietly to console women whom she believes can, after they lend themselves to silence and preparation, “swoop” to their feet and take advantage of better circumstances.8 Bonner’s work from the 1930s and 1940s is set exclusively in Chicago, and she is artistically devoted to the lives of the Black working class. This is foreshadowed in both “The Hands” and “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” in which her own, relatively uncommon and privileged upbringing shows little sustained attention. This essay also features other themes recurring in Bonner’s later work: the questioning of racial categorization, highlighting of class divisions among African Americans (comparing them to “live fish in a basket” with the “apathetic” poor on the bottom and the better off on top eager and striving to get out of the basket entirely), and focusing on the conditions and perspectives of women.9
In the year after her writing debut on the national stage, Bonner had two short stories published in The Crisis. “The Prison-Bound” paints the picture of a couple in an unnamed city who endure lives of utter despair. The plea to “God” at the beginning and end of the story underscores Charlie’s and Maggie’s desperate situation. Their absentee, negligent landlord who lets property fall into disrepair was a common feature in the lives of working class Black migrants who were trapped in slums because of housing discrimination. The environmental stress of living under such conditions exacerbates Charlie and Maggie’s relationship, leaving Maggie to loathe her mate and long for more. The narrator presents stressors affecting both Charlie and Maggie, but the primary focus is on Maggie’s frustration with not only her marital discontent but also the intracultural discrimination she experiences from a “citified” neighbor who calls her “green and countrified.”10 Seemingly without any other recourse, Maggie longs for tomorrow and the narrator closes with a “prayer heard in a country church”: “God, help the prison bound—Them within the four iron walls this evening!”11 Like Bonner’s story, most naturalist literature depicts the environment as a primary factor in determining the success of its characters. However, Bonner suggests the environment does play a crucial role that may be somehow mitigated by the presence of a sympathetic God. At the same time, the parallel she draws between the substandard living conditions in a northern city and prison stands in stark contrast to the claims in Black periodicals of the time such as the Chicago Defender, which encouraged Blacks to abandon unsafe, racist locations in the South for new lives in industrial, northern cities.
Even though Bonner still resided in Washington, D.C. in the 1920s, she employed Chicago as the setting for her other short story published in 1926, “Nothing New.” Although Chicago has been described as one of the most segregated cities in the United States, it appears, initially, as a “melting pot” of cross-cultural promise in Bonner’s description of the multicultural “Frye Street” with its mix of immigrants from Europe and Asia and Black immigrants from the American South. Denny, the son of hardworking, religious parents fresh from their Georgia home, confronts the racial tension that looms around the multicultural community, ultimately killing a White male student that attacks Denny for having a romantic relationship with a White female fellow student. Denny’s actions have immense consequences: he is sentenced to death, and although there is a favorable consensus among the Frye Street neighborhood when evaluating Denny’s parents (they “tried to raise Denny right”), the multicultural promise in the opening of the story is polarized into “White Frye Street” and “Black Frye Street” in the end. Occomy attributes regressive notions about race to both factions. As with “The Prison-Bound,” this story is framed with a theological reference. Here Bonner suggests those on Frye Street missed an opportunity to see “God” in themselves only if they “had looked deeper.”12
A vibrant community of Black authors existed in Washington, D.C., which is the home of Howard University, a historically Black institution where Black theater thrived. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “S Street” literary salon attracted not only Bonner but writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Burrill, and Angelina Grimké as well. Johnson encouraged her to write plays, and Bonner also participated in the theater group the Krigwa Players. Despite their critical acclaim, Occomy’s plays were never produced while she was alive. In fact, her first play is entitled The Pot Maker (A Play to Be Read); in it Elias Jackson has been “called from the cornfields” to serve as a minister. Bonner describes Elias’s wife, Lucinda, and her lover Lew with utter contempt, calling Lew an “over fat, over facetious, over-fair, over-bearing, over pleasant, over-confident creature.”13 The moral hollowness of Lucinda and Lew is apparent in their bold disregard for Elias; they flirt in front of Elias and his parents. The title stems from Elias’s biblically inspired sermon in which he compares God to a pot maker who can repair sinners who have “cracks” in them if they will only ask God to be healed. This sermon’s theme anticipates the action that follows an eruption between Lucinda and Elias: Lew has fallen into a well and is drowning. “Full of mad agony,” Lucinda tries to save Lew, but she too falls in the well. Initially Elias leaves his wife alone to try to save her lover; however, once Lucinda falls in the well, he goes to the well and tries to save her. It would appear that in a morality play such as this, the righteous Elias would save his wife at the play’s close. Instead, Bonner intimates that Elias falls in the well after admitting that “I got a crack in me too!” The open ending leaves the situation unresolved except for a cryptic conclusion that reads, “That’s all there will be. A crack has been healed. A pot has spilled over on the ground. Some wisps have twisted out.” The play’s startling close adds moral complexity to characters that at first seem to be drawn as flat and unlayered.14
Bonner takes her readers from the southern dialect and country setting of The Pot Maker into two different locales in the short stories she has published in 1927, “One Boy’s Story” (published under the pseudonym Joseph Maree Andrew) and “Drab Rambles.” The young boy’s voice that narrates “One Boy’s Story” is unique in Bonner’s stories. Living in an affluent White neighborhood in upstate New York with his single mother, Donald is a believable, young biracial protagonist, who does not understand that the married White doctor who occasionally visits his mother (“Louise Gage”) and him is actually his father. Donald finds great pleasure in a book that Dr. Swynburne gives him which contains Greek mythology, Greek tragedies, and biblical narratives, including the story of David and Goliath. As with The Pot Maker, this reference to biblical literature foreshadows the story’s climax. Distraught about a fight between Dr. Swynburne and his mother, which exposes his true parentage, Donald defends his mother and accidentally kills his father with a slingshot, which was also the biblical David’s weapon. The cataclysmic encounter with Donald and his father is followed by the graphic cutting of Donald’s tongue so he will not reveal his involvement in his father’s death. Donald compares himself with Orestes and Oedipus saying, “I am bearing my Furies and my clipped tongue like a Swynburne and a Gage—’cause I am both of them.”15 A mainstay of several of Bonner’s works, violence underscores the dramatic inequalities many of her characters face and the moral shortcomings of individuals.
“Drab Rambles,” anticipates the predominant focus on Chicago of her later work and provides two portraits of city life through the lens of gender difference. Bonner provides an introduction that works to universalize the experience of her two protagonists by emphasizing the environmental influences on their lives saying, “close all men in a small space, tinge and touch the Space with one blood—you get a check-mated Hell.”16 “The First Portrait” profiles the life of a Black male day laborer who faces discrimination during a hospital visit when an insensitive doctor tells him he must quit his job because of his heart condition and whose alternative solution is a prescription for medicine he cannot afford. The doctor blames the man for staying on his job despite the detriment to his health, and the laborer strikes back with comments that stress the racial discrimination he experiences saying, “I had to dig ditches because I am an ignorant black man. If I was an ignorant white man, I could get easier jobs. I could even have worked in this hospital.”17 “The Second Portrait” profiles the life of a female worker, Madie Frye, with a similar skill level as the male day laborer in the first portrait. Her experience of racial discrimination involves sexual exploitation as well. After a sexual encounter with her employer that leaves her pregnant, she loses her job as a domestic worker. She struggles to find another job as a domestic worker but has a hard time because she cannot afford day care. The child care she does find is questionable—to quiet the child the elderly child-care worker gives the baby paregoric. Fear influences the protagonist’s submission to the sexual exploitation of another boss; jobless and left with another child, the protagonist is distraught and despondent with city life. The apostrophe Bonner uses to conclude these two portraits accentuates the casual disregard some give to workers in these situations. Bonner warns, in the second person narration she so commonly employed, “somewhere in God’s day of measuring full measures overflowing—the blood will flow back to you—and you will care.”18
By far the most critically acclaimed piece of Bonner’s work written in the late 1920s is her experimental, allegorical, and surreal play The Purple Flower, which won the 1927 Crisis prize for “Literary Art and Expression.” The play clearly represents a break with her earlier reliance on naturalism and social realism. Contemporary critics have remarked that the play’s abstract approach to racial conflict and strong division between the multifaceted imagery of “Us” and the “Sundry White Devils” leaves open a broader scope to address other social injustices. For instance, the “Sundry White Devils” are described with soft hair that flows around horns that glow red all the time, and the “Us’s” have a shifting appearance that is sometimes “white as the White Devils, as brown as the earth, (or) as black as the center of a poppy.” At the same time, “they may look as if they were something or nothing.”19 This physical elusiveness makes the play difficult to cast and also gives her message an epic quality that is part of its stellar reputation. The “purple flower” itself is an image that Occomy incorporated in her earlier short story “Nothing New”: the symbolism is similar here in that the flower serves as an image of “Flower-of-Life-at-Its-Fullest.” The privileged White Devils do everything in their power to keep the flower on the hilltop where they live prohibiting the “Us’s” from leaving the valley, climbing the hill, and taking the flower despite the work that the “Us’s” have done to beautify not only their own valley but also the White Devils’s area. This battle is easily applied to the dilemma faced by disenfranchised people in any society who often work hard to obtain a lifestyle of the upper classes but who face serious structural problems that do not reward their work in a manner that would support such goals. Various theories on how to address the problem of racial discrimination circulating at the time ranged from self-imposed exile, accommodation, legal agitation, and economic self-determination. The most surprising departure from the ideologies of the “race men” (and women) of the day is the play’s prediction that the resolution for the battle between the have and have-nots can be found only in blood.
In Bonner’s last published essay, she returns to the question of religion. “The Young Blood Hungers” (1928) is a candid reflection on how much of an earlier conception of God should be inherited by a younger generation, more specifically how much of Christian theology is pertinent to youth. This essay includes an image popularized by W. E. B. DuBois in his book The Souls of Black Folk. In part, DuBois’s “Veil” described the barrier that mainstream White society faced in acknowledging the experiences of Black Americans. Here the veil refers to barriers to intellectual/spiritual curiosities that prohibit young people from important answers about religious understanding. Bonner writes, “The Young Blood knows that growing means a constant tearing down of Illusory Veils that lift themselves thin—filmy—deceptive—between you and truth.”20 Rather than suggest an appropriate manner to obtain these answers, Bonner devotes the essay to documenting this aspect of young people’s lives suggesting that “perhaps … God must be sought in new ways.”21
Bonner’s last published play, Exit, An Illusion (1929) returns to the domain of domestic relationships and the naturalism found in her earlier work. It includes a character common in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance—the biracial, or “mulatto,” person who may appear to be White. Dot is the female member of the couple with the physical ability to “pass” for White. Her jealous lover Buddy is angry because he disapproves of Dot’s plans to go on a date with an old childhood friend named Exit Mann, who is apparently White; his name is more than a flourish. In this naming, Bonner draws the reader’s attention to the actual dilemma faced by Dot: Buddy’s jealously about her date is fueled not only by the fear that Dot has betrayed their romantic bond but also by his recognition that Dot longs to be part of White culture instead of Black culture. Buddy conveys a sense of self-loathing in his threats to Dot. In Buddy’s eyes, Exit Mann is an opportunity for Dot to “exit” Black culture. Bonner frames this play dramatically with an opening and ending scene with much in common. This similarity puts the play’s actions and meaning well beyond Buddy and Dot’s relationship; the commentary extends to the realm of race relations and the sociopolitical ramifications of cultural affiliation.
Bonner would eventually meet her husband William Almy Occomy in Washington, D.C., marrying him in 1930. For several years, she traded her work as a teacher for her work as a mother of their three children: William Almy Jr., Warwick Gale, and Marita Joyce Occomy. She continued to write and used her multicultural Chicago neighborhood as the inspiration for the fictional “Frye Street,” making Chicago the setting of most of her remaining work. In fact, she planned to write an artistic “map” of Chicago called “The Black Map” but never completed the project. Her work was published again in 1933 with an installment of stories in Opportunity called “A Possible Triad on Black Notes” (including “Part One: There Were Three, ” “Part Two: Of Jimmie Harris,” and “Part Three: Three Tales of Living: Corner Store”). “There Were Three” and “Three Tales of Living: Corner Store” are the strongest of the three stories and show Bonner’s maturity as a writer. Beyond the series of simple sentences that summarized the action of her early stories, the longer short stories here unfold their plots more smoothly and develop their characters more thoroughly. “There Were Three” returns to a prevalent concern—the economic and psychological well-being of single mothers and their children. Lucille is a White-looking mother with two children who, unbeknown to Little Lou and Robbie, works as a sex worker in a hotel at night so that she can support her family. Feeling the need to support the family economically as well, Robbie obtains a job as a bellboy at the same hotel without his mother’s knowledge. Peril is the result of the family secret-keeping after Robbie is called to a room where he discovers his mother and one of her “johns.” Once the White “john” discovers that Lucille is indeed the mother of Robbie and that she is Black, he strikes Robbie. Robbie, near a window, falls to his death. In one of the dramatic conclusions characteristic of Bonner’s work, Lucille resides in an asylum and the whereabouts of Little Lou are undetermined. The family in “The Corner Store” benefits from greater economic stability, and yet they face conflict born out of the cultural tension of migration and racial difference. Making a departure from her other work, Occomy uses three German Jews as her central characters and illustrates her fluency in German to convey the speech of the recent immigrants to Frye Street. The action of the story pivots on a mother-daughter conflict that pits Esther and Meta against one another: Esther, the mother, yearning for the stone homes and cultural familiarity of her Jewish ghetto in Germany; Meta, the daughter, buoyed by the multicultural community and freedom from German anti-Semitism she finds in Frye Street.
A Black family in conflict is the subject of Bonner’s next published story, “Tin Can” (1934). Opportunity awarded her with the 1933 fiction prize for this story, and as a testament to the merit of her writing during this time, she was the runner-up in the contest as well. Pa is depressed and withdrawn from parenting while Ma’s efforts to take an active role in raising their two boys is thwarted by long work hours, a street culture that cultivates delinquency, and a truncated turn to church culture. Bonner makes a scathing commentary on other adults in positions of leadership who may be able to help parents and children in need in her depiction of the Black principal at Jimmie Joe’s school who is simply called the “Black Bass Drum.” Rather than address any of the community problems that surface in the school: teenage pregnancy, academic underachievement, violent gangs, and “the spread of social diseases,” the Black Bass Drum is enthralled with his own accomplishments. Bonner reveals high expectations of the Black middle class; perhaps she expected them to act as she did and mute the anomaly of her own achievements and lifestyle to broadcast the dire conditions of the Black poor. Her employment of violence in this and other stories stresses the urgency of alleviating the poverty and racism that so many of her working-class characters endured: Jimmie Joe is sentenced to death for his murder of a romantic rival. Caught in her grief, Ma faints on a sidewalk. The misinterpretation of her actions by a patrol wagon driver who asks of a cop, “Where the devil do you ’spose these nigger women go to get drunk so early in the morning?” represents the stereotypical attitudes poor Black people face from those charged to help the public.22 Continuing a period of high productivity, Bonner takes up the perilous end result of romantic rivalry again in her 1936 story “A Sealed Pod.” Frye Street has many interracial relationships that make cross-cultural attractions clear; however, the economic instability of many characters and the impact of racism magnifies the consequences of romantic/sexual competition and companionship. Frye Street has the presence of a character in Bonner’s Chicago-based stories. Her urban environmental consciousness recognizes the extreme impact poor living conditions can have on individuals and communities and serves as an artful reminder of human frailty.
Bonner was not only an author whose social realism spotlighted the lives of city residents but also the lives of women, anticipating the renaissance of Black women’s writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Her treatment of female characters is complex and evenhanded. While she describes frequently the gendered aspects of society that made being female a disadvantage, she also creates Black women characters who are fully human, with a range of attributes that make their behavior no better or worse than anyone else’s. The 1938 stories present Black women with clear faults: “Black Fronts” first presents a pretentious Black couple who use a lavish lifestyle as a front for their economic desperation and moral emptiness. The second front is a playfully written interchange between a housewife and her maid. The audience initially reads a monologue from the perspective of the maid who believes she can steal from her employer because of the employer’s relative wealth. The next monologue takes the audience through the perspective of a pampered housewife whose overallegiance to politeness prevents her from firing the thieving maid immediately. Written under the pseudonym Joyce N. Reed, “Hate Is Nothing” addresses the serious topic of colorism within Black communities. As a dark-skinned woman, Bonner applied her personal experience of color discrimination (she faced at the hands of light-skinned women in Chicago’s Black middle-class communities) to her depiction of a mother-in-law “most heavily cursed by the old inferiority hangover left from slave days.”
The institution of slavery exacted immense damage on the Black family. Bonner’s 1939 stories (“The Makin’s,” “The Whipping,” and “Hongry Fire”) suggest that the Black family still faces vulnerability well after slavery has been ended. Their lives on Frye Street, far away from plantations in the South, have still not yielded the “promised land” millions of Blacks sought during the Great Migration. The inability of the urban environment to encourage progress is perhaps best symbolized in “The Makin’s” by David’s futile attempt to get a dime from his mother and father to fund his school project planting seeds. Instead, his mother and father only fund David’s errands: placing a bet in the underground lottery and buying cigarettes. David’s parents are oblivious to the hope their son’s project represents, and their addictive behaviors serve as coping mechanisms for their lives of misery and diminished vision.
Despite Bonner’s sober view of life in the city, she does not embrace a pastoral view of rural life. “Patch Quilt,” written in 1940, returns Bonner’s reader to the South and depicts the rapid disintegration of preparations for celebration into preparation for revenge. Here a female character reacts violently to adultery and forever alters the lives of those involved. “One True Love” (1941) is the final story Bonner published during her lifetime. Here the central romantic relationship fares better than the doomed love triangles in other stories, but Nora, the protagonist, still encounters racism and economic burdens that derail her attempts to be a lawyer.
Although she maintained a fondness for the craft in which she demonstrated so much talent and dedication, Bonner stopped writing in 1941. Interestingly, considering the prominence of theological subject matter and biblical reference in her writing, she and her husband joined the First Church of Christian Scientist the same year. However, there is no critical consensus about a correlation between the end of her published work and the beginning of her membership in this congregation. After her youngest child was close to school age, Bonner resumed her teaching career in Chicago, sometimes teaching students with special needs. She continued teaching until the late 1960s. In 1971 an apartment fire contributed to her death; she was rushed to the hospital but died after she experienced a slight recovery.
A notebook with several stories unpublished during Bonner’s life was found after her death. The seriousness with which Bonner took her artistic endeavors is apparent in the marginal critiques she made of the stories. Six of these stories were included in a 1987 collection of her work, Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. The Black female protagonist and permutations of gender take center stage in most of these stories (with some set on Frye Street), but they also include the familiar terrain of class and race issues. The warped aspirations of women in a Black middle-class family anchors “On the Altar.” “High Stepper” chronicles the life of a woman who gradually uncovers the courage to express her pain and anger through a wide range of narrative techniques, with stream of consciousness and interior monologues among others. A woman spoiled by her parents in childhood meets with a rude awakening during her marriage in “Stones for Bread.” “Reap It As You Sow It” advocates the biblical dictum of “You shall reap as you sow” through the story of a couple’s choices that come back to haunt them. Finally, “Light in Dark Places” depicts the importance of a tenacious, crafty, and blind grandmother as a much needed help to a naive teenage girl. These unpublished works highlight the lives of Black women with just portrayals that give depth to the characters and light to their circumstances.
While she lived in three distinct urban centers, Bonner’s most consistent muse and the setting for the finest writing of her substantial and well-regarded career was Chicago. The Chicago Renaissance benefited from her ability to convey her characters’ humanity even when they faced conditions that could reduce them to faceless statistics. The fictional Frye Street bubbles with the multicultural challenges of contemporary life across the globe, which demands movement and cross-cultural encounters of innumerable kinds. Against the problems and promise of the multiethnic Frye Street, Bonner drew her readers’ attention to the structural conditions that made class and gender important elements of her characters’ lives as well as race.
1. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, eds. Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, 60.
2. Ibid., 60–63.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. Ibid., 5.
5. Ibid., 6.
6. Ibid., 6.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Ibid., 8.
9. Ibid., 4.
10. Ibid., 67.
11. Ibid., 68.
12. Ibid., 76.
13. Ibid., 18.
14. Ibid., 29.
15. Ibid., 91.
16. Ibid., 92.
17. Ibid., 92.
18. Ibid., 101.
19. Ibid., 30.
20. Ibid., 10.
21. Ibid., 13.
22. Ibid., 139.
Berg, Allison and Meredith Taylor. “Enacting Difference: Marita Bonner’s Purple Flower and the Ambiguities of Race.” African American Review 32.3 (1998): 469–80.
Flynn, Joyce. “Marita Bonner Occomy.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 1987.
Flynn, Joyce and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, eds. Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
Johnson, Georgia Douglas. “Review of Autumn Love-Cycle.” Opportunity 7 (April 1929): 130.
Musser, Judith. “African-American Women and Education: Marita Bonner’s Response to the ‘Talented Tenth.’” Studies in Short Fiction 34.1 (1997): 73–86.
———. “‘The Blood Will Flow Back to You:’ The Reactionary Proletarian Fiction of
Marita Bonner.” Canadian Review of American Studies 32.1 (2002): 53–80.
[Occomy] Bonner, Marita. The Purple Flower. Black Theater USA, edited by James Hatch and Ted Shine. New York: Free Press, 1974, 202–7.
———. “The Whipping.” Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers 1930– 40, edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1987, 70–78.———. The Purple Flower and Exit, An Illusion. Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950., edited by Kathy Perkins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 191–99, 200–205.
———. “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored.” Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, edited by Mary Helen Washington. New York: Anchor Press, 1987.
———. “The Hands—A Story.” Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories, edited by Clarence Major. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, 30–33.
———. “One Boy’s Story,” “Drab Rambles,” and “Nothing New.” The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women, edited by Marcy Knopf. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993, 95–123.
———. “The Hands—A Story.” Opportunity 3 (August 1925): 235–37.
———. “On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored.” The Crisis 31 (December 1925): 63–65.
———. “The Prison-Bound.” The Crisis 32 (September 1926): 225–26.
———. “Nothing New.” The Crisis 33 (November 1926): 17–20.
———. The Pot Maker (A Play to Be Read). Opportunity 5 (February 1927): 43–46.
———. “One Boy’s Story,” as Joseph Maree Andrew. The Crisis 34 (November 1927): 297–99, 316–20.
———. “Drab Rambles.” The Crisis 34 (December 1927): 335–36, 354–56.
———. The Purple Flower. The Crisis 35 (January 1928).
———. “The Young Blood Hungers.” The Crisis, 35 (May 1928): 151, 172.
———. Exit, An Illusion. The Crisis 36 (October 1929): 335–336, 352.
———. “A Possible Triad on Black Notes, Part One: There Were Three.” Opportunity 11 (July 1933): 205–7.
———. “A Possible Triad on Black Notes, Part Two: Of Jimmie Harris.” Opportunity 11 (August 1933): 242–44.
———. “A Possible Triad on Black Notes, Part Three: Three Tales of Living: Corner Store.” Opportunity 11 (September 1933): 269–71.
———. “Tin Can.” Opportunity 12 (July 1934): 202–5; 12 (August 1934): 236–40.
———. “A Sealed Pod.” Opportunity 14 (March 1936): 88–91.
———. “Black Fronts.” Opportunity 16 (July 1938): 210–14.
———. “Hate is Nothing,” as Joyce N. Reed. The Crisis 45 (December 1938): 388–90, 394, 403–4.
———. “The Makin’s.” Opportunity 17 (January 1939): 18–21.
———. “The Whipping.” The Crisis 46 (June 1939): 172–74.
———. “Hongry Fire.” The Crisis 46 (December 1939): 360–62, 376–77.
———. “Patch Quilt.” The Crisis 47 (March 1940): 71–72, 92.
———. “One True Love.” The Crisis 48 (February 1941): 46–47, 58–59.
Roses, Lorraine Elena and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. “Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mother’s Gardens.” Black American Literature Forum 21.1–2 (1987): 165–83.
Spahr, Heather E. “Marita Bonner (1898–1971).” African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. 30–35.
A collection of Marita Bonner’s manuscripts and correspondence is at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.