which serves as a bedroom for WALTER and his wife, RUTH.
Time: Sometime between World War II and the present.
Place: Chicago’s Southside.
At Rise: It is morning dark in the living room, TRAVIS is asleep on the
make-down bed at center. An alarm clock sounds from within the bedroom
at right, and presently RUTH enters from that room and closes the door
behind her. She crosses sleepily toward the window. As she passes her
sleeping son she reaches down and shakes him a little. At the window she
raises the shade and a dusky Southside morning light comes in feebly. She
fills a pot with water and puts it on to boil. She calls to the boy, between
yawns, in a slightly muffled voice.
RUTH is about thirty. We can see that she was a pretty girl, even
exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she
expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face. In a
few years, before thirty-five even, she will be known among her people as a
“settled woman.”
She crosses to her son and gives him a good, final, rousing shake.
RUTH Come on now, boy, it’s seven thirty! (Her son sits up at last, in
a stupor of sleepiness) I say hurry up, Travis! You ain’t the only
person in the world got to use a bathroom! (The child, a sturdy,
handsome little boy of ten or eleven, drags himself out of the bed and
almost blindly takes his towels and “today’s clothes” from drawers
and a closet and goes out to the bathroom, which is in an outside hall
and which is shared by another family or families on the same floor,
RUTH crosses to the bedroom door at right and opens it and calls in to
her husband) Walter Lee! … It’s after seven thirty! Lemme see you
do some waking up in there now! (She waits) You better get up
from there, man! It’s after seven thirty I tell you. (She waits again)
All right, you just go ahead and lay there and next thing you
know Travis be finished and Mr. Johnson’ll be in there and you’ll
be fussing and cussing round here like a madman! And be late
too! (She waits, at the end of patience) Walter Lee—it’s time for
you to GET UP!
(She waits another second and then starts to go into the bedroom,
