outbursts have driven her away. Ella cannot bear having another white person in the house, and since she hates African Americans, Jim remains the only one to care for her. Hattie warns him that he cannot attend to both his wife and his legal studies, but he rejects the warning.

As the play’s final scene reveals, Hattie was right. Jim returns from the post office with a letter announcing that he has again failed to pass the examination. Ella rejoices; she had planned to kill Jim if he had succeeded. She tells Jim that she has feigned madness and kept him awake at night tending to her to prevent his concentrating on his work. His love for her is so strong that he forgives her, and when she asks him to pretend that they are children and play with her, he replies in the last speech of the work, “Honey, Honey, I’ll play right up to the gates of Heaven with you!”

In All God’s Chillun Got Wings, music plays an important part. At the beginning of each of the first three scenes, O’Neill uses a pair of songs to contrast the black world with the white. Thus, as the play opens, the chorus of “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” comes from the white street, while from the black side one hears “I Guess I’ll Have to Telegraph My Baby.” The livelier rhythm of the latter reflects the life-loving spirit that O’Neill ascribes to African Americans, who participate unrestrainedly in nature, whereas the whites are inhibited.

Songs, together with other sounds, also help date events for the audience. “I Guess I’ll Have to Telegraph My Baby” dates from 1898. The next scene, supposed to occur nine years later, ends with the tune of “Bonbon Buddy,” composed in 1907, and the pair of songs that opens the third scene, “When I Lost You” and “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee,” first performed in 1912, confirms that five more years have passed. To reinforce this sense of time’s passing, O’Neill indicates how street sounds change. At first, one hears the steam engines of the trains and the hoofbeats of horses. By the second scene, the noises have become “rhythmically mechanical” because electricity has been introduced.

Sounds not only date the action and highlight racial differences but also reveal the deepening gloom of the play. The first two scenes begin with laughter and sprightly singing. By the third scene, the laughter has gone; the music “wails” and turns “maudlin.” The song from the white street, “When I Lost You,” adds to the melancholy mood: It is Irving Berlin’s lament for his first wife, who died of typhoid fever shortly after they were married. Only one song introduces the last scene of the first act, and it concludes “with a brooding, earthbound sorrow,” to be followed by the harsh clang of the church bell, more fitting for a funeral than for the marriage that has just occurred.

Even these sounds are absent from the second act, which uses setting to establish mood. In moving from the outside world of the first act to the confined apartment of the second, O’Neill shows that Jim and Ella are trapped. In each of the last three scenes, the space becomes more restricted, so that by the end of the play “the ceiling . . . barely clears the people’s heads” and the walls are pressing in on the characters.

Two objects play a particularly significant role in this room: a Congo mask that Hattie gave to Jim for a wedding present and the picture of Jim’s father. The latter depicts an elderly man who is “dressed in outlandish lodge regalia . . . with medals, sashes, a cocked hat with frills. . . .” Like Jim, the older Harris has adopted the stereotype whites seek to impose on him, covering his natural shrewdness in demeaning attire. The mask, on the other hand, expresses black pride. Even though Ella calls it “ugly . . . and stupid,” her very reaction reveals her recognition of its power. It embodies the essence of blackness that she hates, so she responds to it as she responds to Jim. At the end of the play she stabs the mask; she would have stabbed Jim had he passed his examination, because as much as part of her wants Jim to succeed, she finally cannot accept his equality with her. If he were to prove himself as smart as whites, she would have to kill him. The mask, a proud assertion of Jim’s African heritage, must be destroyed.

Like its donor, Hattie, the mask offers Jim an alternative to his father’s, and his own, acceptance of white values. He could recognize his own worth and not feel compelled to prove himself. Instead, he abandons the mask when he goes to France, for, as he tells Joe, he sees himself as “a nigger.”