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.