Goat Alley: A Tragedy of Negro Life

A stage drama set in a dilapidated Washington slum follows Lucy Belle, a young Black woman whose attempts to preserve moral integrity are eroded by poverty, loneliness, ignorance, and social pressure. Intimate domestic scenes portray neighbors and kin whose needs and failures compound one another, and the plot traces a series of compromised choices and unwanted liaisons born of desperation. As calamity accumulates, Lucy Belle kills the child who she perceives as an obstacle to hope and soon dies herself; the work frames these outcomes as tragic inevitabilities rooted in harsh social conditions and the struggle for ordinary moral order.