Plot
The time is the late nineteenth century. Captain Andy Hawks is a former riverboat owner with a shrewish wife, Parthy Ann, and a ten-year-old daughter, Magnolia. He buys the new show boat Cotton Blossom. Among the actors are Julie Dozier and her husband Steve Baker, and Ellie Chipley and her husband, affectionately known as "Schultzy". Other members of the crew are Pete, the engineer of the towboat Mollie Able, which propels the show boat; Frank the utility man, and Windy McClain, the pilot.
Steve and Julie are close, and Julie becomes Magnolia's best friend, showing motherly affection toward her. For a time, all is well, but soon Pete begins making unwanted advances toward Julie. He gets into a fist fight with Steve, is soundly beaten, and swears revenge. He implies knowing some dark secret concerning Julie. When the troupe arrives at Lemoyne, Mississippi, Pete steals Julie's picture from the box office and takes it to the local sheriff. Julie claims she does not feel well enough to perform, and Parthy observes that Julie fell sick the year before in the same town. When they hear what Pete has done, Steve takes out a pocket knife, makes a cut on Julie's hand, and sucks blood from it.
The sheriff arrives and announces that there is a miscegenation case on board: since Julie is black and Steve is white, their marriage is illegal. Julie admits that she is half-black. Ellie, who has been very close to Julie, becomes upset at the revelation and hysterically denounces her friend. Steve says he has "negro blood" in him, and the rest of the company backs him up. The sheriff, not realizing that Steve's claim is based only on his having sucked some blood from Julie's hand, recites as Mississippi law that "one drop of Negro blood makes you a Negro in these parts." Although still suspicious, he is convinced by Windy, a boyhood friend, that he cannot arrest the couple, and leaves. He tells Steve and Julie to leave the boat, which they do, after Julie sorrowfully says goodbye to the girl Magnolia.
Years later we return to the boat, where Magnolia is now eighteen and the newest leading lady. She has no leading man. After Gaylord Ravenal, a handsome riverboat gambler, is hired, he and Magnolia promptly fall in love and elope.
Months later, Magnolia has had a baby daughter, whom she names Kim (because she was born at the moment when the Cotton Blossom was at the convergence on the Mississippi of the states of Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri). Shortly after, Captain Andy falls overboard during a storm and drowns. Rather than live with the stern Parthy, Magnolia and Ravenal leave for Chicago with Kim. In the big city, the couple is alternately rich and poor, depending on Ravenal's gambling winnings (he does not try to find regular work, and cheats on Magnolia with prostitutes). Finally, after about ten years, Parthy announces she is coming to visit; the destitute Ravenal, desperate for money, borrows some from Hetty Chilson, the local whorehouse madam. He returns to Magnolia at their boarding house but is drunk. As he sleeps off his stupor, she returns the money to Hetty, and discovers the madam's secretary is Julie Dozier. Julie is devastated that Magnolia has found her working in the whorehouse. (The fate of Steve goes unmentioned in the novel.)
When Magnolia returns to the boarding house, she finds Ravenal gone, leaving nothing but a farewell note. She never sees him again. She goes out to get work and is hired at a local nightclub called Joppers.
The story moves forward to 1926, when show boats are becoming scarce on the Mississippi River. Kim has married and become a successful actress on Broadway in New York City. Her father Ravenal has been dead for several years. One night, Magnolia receives a telegram announcing the death of her mother Parthy, from whom she has been long estranged. She returns to the show boat, which she decides to keep and manage, rather than to scrap. She gives all of her inheritance from Parthy, a fortune, to her daughter Kim. Joining Magnolia is Ellie, a widow since her husband Schultzy has died.
Read more about this topic: Show Boat (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)