miareadthis - 811
"Your caption is too long."
Hello again - and so soon! Special shout out to my ten subscribers. Thank you all for meeting me here. Alas, it seems, I have hit the word count limit on Instagram yet again. What that limit is, however, remains to be seen. So, without further ado, please find below my mostly copy+pasted copy from my original @miareadthis instagram caption for my latest read: Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset!
Discovering and falling in love with Jessie Redmon Fauset’s work has been such an uplifting surprise on my 2025 bingo card ☺️ And all because of a Sinners inspired @allwaysblack reading list too 😆 👻 🙌🏾 Unlikely origin story aside, Fauset’s characters continue to hit so close to home despite the near 100 year gap in time and space. Too — it’s both comforting and alarming that the same conversations about race and class within our race are the same conversations we’re still having today.
The inciting circumstance (for its an incident oft repeated) in Plum Bun stems from the shock, surprise, and hurt of protagonist Angela Murray’s white friend and schoolmate Mary when she discovers Angela is not quite what she seems — a coloured girl. I both cackled and bristled at the memory I too had with a classmate in elementary school when she discovered I wasn’t what she thought. Like Angela, having never thought to lead with the disclosure of race amongst peers, I was left confused and hurt when suddenly my friend of many years’ face scrunched up in confusion. But unlike Angela it was the ‘90s and all I had to do was give a small 🤷🏽♀️ and we went about our play. But oh how things have not changed!
Plum Bun follows Angela Murray, and her sister Jinny, who leave the comforts of Black middle class Philadelphia to try their luck in 1920s NYC. Only, frustrated by the limitations of ‘being coloured,’ and because she can, Angela decides to pass, assume a new identity in the West Village, and sets her aims at becoming a successful painter while her younger sister Jinny settles in Harlem. Both are swept up in the social consciousness of the era and while both sisters struggle to remain apart, forced by Angela’s choices in living, both soon realize that there’s more to life, love, friendship and the question of happiness than that of the color line and all it entails.
True to its tagline — A Novel Without Moral — Fauset never passes moral judgment on Angela or her aspirations of a life free from the confines of being Black in America. While I was frustrated by Angela’s sometimes lack of emotional intelligence, in regards to her sister Jinny and her own dignity, I breathed a HEAVY sigh of relief when all came together in the end. Surprisingly, and quite modernly, the ending to Angela’s story (or perhaps, arguably, the beginning of her next chapter) was giving Jenny Han’s own out-of-book episode thirteen ending in The Summer I Turned Pretty. Let’s just say Fauset and Han love a good surprise-hunk-on-your-Parisian-doorstep-a-la-Christmas trope.
Favorite quotes below via me still trying to learn the ins and outs of this thing called Canva —
You can read Glory Edim’s full introduction/forward over on Lit Hub here (linked).
Now that I’ve read There is Confusion and Plum Bun by thee Jessie Redmon Fauset, I have a natural itch to hunt down and find The Chinaberry Tree. I hope The Modern Library chooses to reissue this Fauset novel as well, but until then, I do see that it’s avail at my local public library. However, after perusing Modern Library’s Tourchbearers list for more Fauset, I was happy to discover and stumble upon Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque And Other Stories… adds to cart.
One Last Thought…
What is a plum bun?! Seriously. Never was it mentioned in the text. Only as a rhyme of some kind before the book’s list of chapters —
To Market, to Market / To buy a Plum Bun / Home again, Home again / Market is done.
After some light googling apparently it’s a puff pastry akin to an English Chelsea Roll or an American Cinnamon Roll… insinuating, per this wiki, that Angela is a hot piece of sweet a$$. Cue Destiny’s Child’s Bootylicious! And yes, now I’ve certainly lost the plot. Perhaps one day I’ll happen upon an English Professor specializing in early Harlem Renaissance lit who’ll be able to shed some light on the ‘plum bun’ pastry of it all. But until then…
—
As always, thank you for reading and stay safe and sane out there!
miareadthis