WHEN THE DEVILS BE CALLIN': A play about slave life on a Georgia Plantation just prior to the Civil War
Stephen Peace
eBook
The play is set in 1839 on White Plains Plantation in Georgia. Lottie Jenkins, a white trash cracker girl has evidently killed her family in order to be able to move to her cousin’s plantation. Her cousin has married, Seth, the young owner of the plantation. Lottie shows up at the plantation cookhouse with her white cracker attitude and promptly offends Sophie, the cook, and Aunt Ella, the slave house servant / washwoman. Lottie calls them niggers and orders them around like field-hand slaves. Aunt Ella and Sophie aren’t used to being treated quite so badly. Lottie is only sixteen years old.Seth, the master of the plantation, is having an affair with Sophie, the cookhouse slave. On the first day Lottie arrives at the plantation Seth sees her taking her very first tub bath. Seth watches her as she brazenly invites him to help her wash. Aunt Ella, the slave washwoman, is also a “root doctor” (Voodoo) and tries to put a spell on the young Lottie. Aunt Ella’s mother, who was once the cook, but was hung for poisoning the old plantation owner’s wife and children, is now a ghost that tries to gain redemption by helping Aunte Ella and Sophie in their struggles with Lottie. Her mother’s ghost tells Aunt Ella that the young Lottie has made a deal with the devil.