For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf

for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf opens with harsh music. Seven women in various colors run out on stage. They freeze in various postures of anguish. The lady in brown speaks first. She questions her own sanity and muses about her place in the world as a Black woman. Her words also paint a picture of a ghostly specter, a tuneless song, and a dance without music. The lady in brown implores the audience to give Black girls and Black women their voices back. Each woman introduces herself by telling her location in the United States. After the lady in brown speaks the poem’s final words, the women break into childhood playground songs and a game of tag. The singing gives way to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets,” an upbeat Motown hit. The women dance along to begin “graduation nite.”

The lady in yellow recounts the night that she graduated. It’s an exhilarating tale, featuring house parties, the childhood friends, and the schoolmates who make up the young woman’s world. She recounts joyrides in cars and having sex for the first time at the end of the night in the back of a Buick. In the end, she and the women on stage sing along to “Stay,” a love song by R&B vocal quintet The Dells. All of them share in the lady in yellow’s joy, except the lady in blue, who is incredulous and a little disturbed. She prompts a conversation where the women share their own youthful experiences at house parties and how they did (or didn’t) dance or have sex at a young age. The lady in blue shares a different experience in “now i love somebody more than.” She identifies herself as a Black woman that people thought was Puerto Rican, so she embraced and kept up that image. She visited dance halls and competitions around New York City, where she danced mambo, bomba, and merengue. An inciting incident made her turn her attention to jazz music, and soon, the lady in blue learns that she loves African American jazz music even more than she loves mambo, bomba, and merengue.

Without transition, the lady in red delivers the poem “no assistance,” which is a note from a jilted lover who realizes that she loved her beau at the expense of loving herself. She has decided to end this behavior, leaving a plant on his doorstep with a note attached. “Che Che Cole,” a song by Willie Colón serves as the transition to the ensemble poem “i am a poet who.” It features images of dancing and mangoes, and the speaker declares that she has come to share words via both poems and dancing.

A sudden change in the light makes the women freeze again as if they’ve been slapped. The lady in red, lady in blue, and lady in purple deliver another ensemble poem called “latent rapists.” The women explain the prevailing views on the nature of rape, parroting the counterarguments that women often hear, like “had you been drinkin?” and “you must have wanted it” (17). They explain that people’s assumptions make it difficult for women to find justice against the accused rapist when he’s a man that she knows. With another harsh light that hits the women like a slap, the poem “abortion cycle #1” begins. In this monologue poem, the lady in blue narrates the thoughts a woman has during and after an abortion that she didn’t tell anyone she was having. She employs nightmarish images of dead mice falling from her mouth and metal horses gnawing at her womb. She quietly exits the stage, and soft music plays.

Slowly, it sounds like the stage has become a cabaret, and people yell for Sechita. The poem “sechita” features the lady in purple as the speaker and the lady in green as the dancer. Sechita is an exotic dancer in a “creole carnival” (23-24) who feels oppressed by the smallness and the dirtiness of her surroundings in the backwoods of Mississippi. The speaker describes her as a goddess of creativity and memory living in a harsh environment who creates grander illusions than her surroundings would ever allow. During a silent transition, the lady in brown enters to perform the poem “toussaint.” Speaking in a young girl’s voice, the speaker recalls the summer she falls in love with Toussaint L’Ouverture, makes him her invisible friend, and conspires to run away to Haiti. In the end, she meets a real-life boy named Toussaint Jones.

The lady in brown exits quietly, and the lady in red enters to deliver “one” as a solo performance. She tells a story about a stunningly beautiful woman adorned with flowers who pretends she doesn’t notice the men she tries to lure. The woman has sex with the men as a display of her power over them. Afterward, she writes about the encounter in her diary, and she cries herself to sleep. At the end of the performance, the lady in red quietly exits.

The lady in blue enters and performs “i used to live in the world.” The speaker describes the limitations and the increasingly disturbing world she encounters in Harlem, NY, which contrasts with the vast openness she left behind in California. Harlem is a harsh, dirty place where she often faces street harassment, fears violence, and yearns for a safer environment for herself and women like her. As she describes this world, the ladies in orange, purple, blue, and yellow return to act out the scene. At the end of the performance, they all freeze for a few beats, then they move into place for “pyramid.” The lady in purple delivers the monologue while the other women perform as three women who share everything, including their love for a man who tries to take advantage of that love and ends up hurting all three of them. They find solace in their friendship with one another, which remains unbroken.

In another transition featuring harsh sounds, the women dance as if they are catching a disease from one another. After they freeze, the “no more love poems” suite begins. The suite consists of four poems, each performed by a different woman (the lady in orange, the lady in purple, the lady in blue, and the lady in yellow). Each poem depicts a woman in different stages of overcoming grief after heartbreak. They move from anger to begging, to defensiveness and denial, to accepting what has happened, and, finally, to hope for the future. The suite ends with the women dancing, singing, and chanting, “my love is too ____ to have thrown back on my face,” where the blank could be filled with “beautiful,” “sanctified,” “magic,” and more (46-47).

The next poem, “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff,” continues the empowering tone of the previous piece. The lady in green delivers a monologue explaining how she’s reclaiming all that makes her unique and wonderful after a breakup. In the end, the women have a humorous conversation about the kinds of apologies that they’ve received from men who’ve betrayed their love and trust. The conversation serves as a transition to the poem “sorry.” The lady in blue delivers a monologue in which she describes all of the apologies that she has heard and how they just don’t cut it. This poem features a similar subject, tone, and style to “no assistance.”

With a silent transition, the lady in red delivers the narrative piece “a nite with beau willie brown.” The poem tells the story of a young woman named Crystal whose relationship with Beau Willie Brown began when she was only 13. Beau Willie returns from fighting in the Vietnam War with severe PTSD, which he numbs with alcohol and drugs. After having two of his children, Crystal leaves him and files a restraining order because he tries to kill her and the children. Beau Willie stalks Crystal and breaks into her home while the children are there. He threatens her and holds the children captive, saying he won’t give them back until she agrees to marry him. Crystal tries reasoning with him, and Beau Willie drops the children out of the window of her fifth-floor apartment. The stage falls silent for several moments.

The women take their places to perform the ensemble piece called “a laying on of hands.” In a callback to the opening piece, the lady in red describes seeing the specter of a woman who resembled herself, a woman who needs healing. She takes a journey that ends when she “[finds] God in [herself,] and [loves] her” (63).