Plot
Rena (Shingzie Howard) is a young woman of mixed race. Although she is romantically pursued by an upwardly mobile African American named Frank (C.D. Griffith), Rena does not decide in his favor. Her appearance allows her to pass for white, as she is of majority European ancestry, although she has grown up in the black community.
She meets and falls in love with George Tryon, a young white aristocrat (Lawrence Chenault). But as their relationship deepens, Rena believes she has to acknowledge her African ancestry. She leaves John and returns to Frank, yet her decision creates great inner turmoil. As she accepts Frank as her life partner, she confesses: “Frank, I am miserable.”
Read more about this topic: The House Behind The Cedars
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)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“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)