For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (Characters)

Characters

Lady in Blue

The lady in blue in “now i love somebody more than” says she is racially mixed (her daddy thought he was puerto rican), she speaks a little Spanish, and she loves to dance “mamba bomba merengue.” She ran away at age sixteen to meet willie colon at a dance marathon, and when he didn’t show up, she realized she loved him more than music. The lady in blue also relates the poem “abortion cycle #1” which portrays a young woman undergoing the brutality of abortion alone because “nobody knew.” Her third piece, “i used to live in the world,” describes the claustrophobia-inducing prison space of “six blocks” of Harlem, where a pretty girl risks being raped. Partway through the poem the lady in blue becomes a stalking man following the lady in orange. Finally she narrates “sorry,” a poem that expresses feeling fed up with men’s meaningless apologies.

Lady in Brown

The performers in for colored girls. . . are not unique characters but take on various black female identities in the separate poems. However, the lady in brown begins and ends the play, and, being clothed in the one color not present in a rainbow, she stands out among the others. The lady in brown participates in a few of the poems and relates the poem “toussaint.” Because she is dressed in brown, she may represent the black female “everywoman.”

Lady in Green

The lady in green dances the poem “sechita” while the lady in purple narrates it. Sechita psychologically turns the tables on her situation and rises above the dirty carnival of Natchez, Mississippi, by making her face “immobile,” “like neferetiti” and becoming an Egyptian goddess “conjurin the spirit” of the men who throw coins between her legs instead of allowing herself to be possessed by them. She also relates the angry poem “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff,” in which a woman realizes that by fastening her attention on a man, she allowed herself to be left “danglin on a string of personal carelessness” and she wants back her “calloused feet & quik language” and her “whimsical kiss”; her “stuff.”

Lady in Orange

The lady in orange plays the stalked woman in “i used to live in the world.” In another poem she defines herself as someone other than a “colored girl an evil woman a bitch a nag” only to discover that doing so leaves her no identity at all. She laments over “bein sorry & colored at the same time/it’s so redundant in the modern world.”

Lady in Purple

The lady in purple begins as one of the anonymous group of women, then steps forward to tell the story of Sechita (danced by the lady in green) and later tells of a trio of friends courted by one man in “pyramid.” In “no more love poems #2” she says “lemme love you just like i am/a colored girl/i’m finally bein’ real/no longer symmetrical and impervious to pain,” marking a move toward acceptance of black female identity as it is and not as an unachievable ideal.

Lady in Red

The lady in red narrates the poem “one” about “the passion flower of southwest los angeles,” a “hot” woman,“a deliberate coquette” who allows men to love and bed her, then evicts them before dawn, writes about the adventure in her diary, and cries herself to sleep. She also narrates the painful story of Crystal in “a nite with beau willie brown,” whose two children Willie drops out of a fifth-floor window when she whispers too quietly that she will, after all, marry him.

Lady in Yellow

The lady in yellow relates the poem “graduation nite” and in another poem says “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical; dilemma / i havent conquered yet,” a statement that sums up the central problem of the choreopoem. Like the other performers, lady in yellow is not a fully developed character but one voice of many in the collective experience of black women portrayed by Shange.

Media Adaptations

• for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf was produced on June 14, 1983, by Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse, starring Patti LaBelle as the lady in brown, with music arranged by Baikida Carroll. LaBelle brings a decidedly gospel rendering of the music to the play. Shange discusses the adaptation process in TV Guide, February 20, 1982, pp. 14-15.
• The original sound recording of the Broadway production of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf was recorded by Buddah Records, catalog number BDS 95007-OC, 1976.
• Offended by the negative image of black males they saw in Shange’s work, a group of prison inmates created a parody entitled For Colored Guys Who Have Gone beyond Suicide and Found No Rainbow: A Choreopoem/Drama. The authors are James Able, Harrison Bennet, Harry McClelland, John Mingo, Roland Roberston, and Baari Shabazz; all male prisoners who constituted the Writers Club at the Maryland House of Correction for Men in Jessup, Maryland, 1986. The inmates’ play borders on misogyny in its allegation that the problems faced by black men result from the inability of black women to sympathize with the men’s struggle to survive in a racist sociopolitical system.