Plum Bun

Angela Murray grows up in a cultured Black middle-class home on Opal Street, Philadelphia, with her darker-skinned sister Virginia and parents who have taught both girls pride — and, in Angela's case, the knowledge that her light skin lets her pass. After her parents die, Angela leaves Philadelphia for New York, renames her life, enrolls in art school, and lives entirely as white, seeking the romance, wealth, and artistic freedom she believes Blackness denies her. She becomes engaged in a world of Greenwich Village artists and wealthy suitors, most destructively the racist playboy Roger, and is forced into choices — including publicly ignoring her own sister at a railway station — that reveal the price of her bargain. When her identity is finally declared rather than discovered, she turns toward work, honest friendship, and Paris. Subtitled A Novel Without a Moral, Fauset's second novel is a Harlem Renaissance Bildungsroman on passing, colorism, gender, and art.

Author: Jessie Redmon Fauset · Original publisher: Elkin Mathews & Marrot Limited (London), 1928