Overview

The scene is a summer colony in the south, and the two people we meet here out of season are fugitives from the world, searching for a haven. He is an educated black youth on the lam, caught in a circle of hostile whites who could, in a moment, spot him as a northern agitator. She is a simple, unschooled white girl of the area who has gotten herself in trouble and, despised at home, has run away to have her baby. They stumble upon one another, hiding out in the same cottage, trespassers; and the hostility between them is immediate and inbred. The miracle of the play is that each of them comes to realize that he needs the other; that black and white hostility is artificial; and that affection and friendship is the natural way through the throes of life. Each sacrifices something for the other, and in the climactic scene comes both birth and death, and the dirty fist of a mindless society.