Langston Hughess play Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, opens on Colonel Thomas Norwood's Georgia plantation.

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Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South,  opens on Colonel Thomas Norwood's Georgia plantation.  We learn his wife has died, and Norwood lives on the plantation with Cora, his black housewife, and their mulatto children.  Several of their children are light skinned enough to pass as white.  In fact, his oldest girls are going to school to learn typing although Norwood thinks they are learning cooking and sewing.  They are secretly preparing for more pleasant and lucrative lives as educated light-skinned negroes who can pass as white than intending to admit their entire heritage.  However, Robert, one of Norwood's mulatto sons, begins thinking of himself as "Mr. Norwood" and more important than he should during this time period.  He is causing problems at the post office and calling himself Norwood's son in public, causing problems for Norwood and for all the slaves on the plantation.

In Act 2, scene 1 Robert has taken his sister Sallie to the train to go to school.  Norwood has asked Cora to send Robert to him when he returns.  Cora gets Robert to agree with anything Norwood says to him, which Robert says he will unless Norwood tries to beat him.  When they meet, Norwood tells Robert that he will address him as an African American should.  Robert says he is Norwood's son, and Norwood says Robert has no father.  The two fight, and Robert strangles Norwood to death.  Cora tells Robert to run to the swamps, and as he exits, he runs into two white men who are coming to see Norwood.  They give chase. Cora, meanwhile, continues to talk to Norwood as if he were living.  She tells him to get up off the floor and stop pretending to be dead.  It is clear that she has lost her mind.

In Act 2, scene 2,  With Norwood dead, the slaves realize that they are free since there are no other white masters on the plantation.  Everyone but Cora runs off.  The undertaker shows interest in Cora, but understands that she is now crazy, so he leaves without her.  Robert returns from the swamp with only one bullet left in his gun. He has saved it for himself, and shoots himself before the white men can come back and hang him for murdering Norwood.

The social climate of this play is characteristic of the American rural South . References to Eleanor Roosevelt, Civil Rights and Slavery-time Uncle Tom and the Germans allude to the complex postwar social climate in the play. The plantation owner is white, his mistress is black, and their mixed-race children are treated better than the black workers (e.g. education and mobility) but not as full equals of the whites (e.g. the whole plot revolves around Robert's refusal to "stay in his place").

Cora and Colonel Norwood are the first characters to appear on stage in Hughes’s play. The colonel calls for Cora, she responds to his call formally, ‘‘Yes, sir, Colonel Tom,’’ and so the audience concludes that Cora is the colonel’s housekeeper. Yet over the course of their conversation about Cora’s child Sallie (who needs to be taken to the train station), the audience learns the complicated truth of the couple’s relation. Sallie is the colonel’s child also, as is Cora’s son Bert who will drive Sallie to the station. The central revelation and first shock of the play are thus delivered. The colonel and Cora are akin to husband and wife; yet Cora must behave in public as if she were his employee, displaying submission, deference, and calling him ‘‘sir.’’

The opening events of the play present Colonel Norwood as a hypocritical, conflicted, but fairly typical southern white with firm racist beliefs, a view that is confirmed when a new character, Higgins, is introduced. Higgins, a local politician, is an old friend of the colonel who comes visiting to report on Bert, who caused a scene at the town’s post office that morning. Higgins comes to warn Norwood that Robert’s actions might lead to his death. Higgins also criticizes Norwood’s relationship with Cora, saying that it is okay to have sex with her, but that living with her like he has been is a scandal. Unlike Norwood, Higgins rules over his African American workers with an iron fist.

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Robert Lewis is the youngest mulatto son of Cora Lewis and Colonel Thomas Norwood; his actions cause the conflict in the play and lead to the murder of Norwood and Robert’s own suicide. Since he was a boy, Robert, who Cora calls ‘‘Bert,’’ has shared both the physical characteristics and the headstrong ways of his father, Norwood. As a child, Robert is Norwood’s favorite mulatto child, until Robert calls him his father in front of an important group of white people. Norwood beats the young Robert, a beating that he never forgets. Norwood also sends Robert away to school for ...

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