Old Story Time

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The Plot of Trevor Rhone’s Old Story Time Trevor Rhone’s play Old Story Time portrays a Jamaican storytelling situation in two acts with one and six scenes, respectively. Pa Ben, who is the narrator as well as a character in the play, tells the story of the Tomlinson family. Using flashbacks, Rhone stages events in a time span of around thirty years, beginning with Len Tomlinson’s boyhood. Miss Aggy, Len’s mother, puts him through school with rigid pressure and is obsessed with the idea that he should marry Margaret, the minister’s light-skinned daughter, in order to advance his social status. While abroad on a scholarship, Len keeps only scarce contact with his mother. When she finally learns that he has married Lois, a black woman, she is absolutely infuriated and convinced that Lois could have worked this only with a spell. Len returns home as a successful banker and sets out to ruin the business of George McFarlane, a light-skinned upper-class former schoolmate now involved in dubious financial dealings. When Miss Aggy speaks up on behalf of George, whose family she still holds in high regard, this results in a serious confrontation between mother and son. Miss Aggy again blames Lois for using magic to alienate her son from her and decides to employ a fatal obeah spell against her daughter-in-law. The climactic final scene of the play reveals the real reason for Len’s hatred against George: in school Len had once written a love letter to Margaret, which she and her boyfriend George considered an impudence of a “black, ugly, little big-lipped” (83) boy. They set Len up to be thrashed and utterly humiliated by George and his friends. Miss Aggy also learns that it was Lois’s family who took care of Len right after this traumatic experience, which finally makes her accept her son’s wife and realize her own wrongs. In a happy ending, “Len’s family comes
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