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3rd
& 4th 12th |
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The time
is 1905, the place New York City, where Esther, lives in a boarding
house for women and sews intimate apparel for clients who range from
wealthy white patrons to prostitutes. She has managed to stuff a goodly
sum of money into her quilt over the years. One by one, the other denizens
of the boarding house marry and move away, but Esther remains, lonely
longing for a husband. Her plan is to find the right man and use the
money she’s saved to open a beauty parlor where black women will
be treated as royally as the white women she sews for. By way of a mutual
acquaintance, she begins to receive beautiful letters from a lonesome
Caribbean man named George who is working on the Panama Canal. Being
illiterate, Esther has one of her patrons respond to the letters, and
over time the correspondence becomes increasingly intimate until George
persuades her that they should marry, sight unseen. Meanwhile, Esther’s
heart seems to lie with the Hasidic shopkeeper from whom she buys cloth,
and his heart with her, but the impossibility of the match is obvious
to them both. When George, arrives in New York, however, he turns out
not to be the man his letters painted him to be, and he absconds with
Esther’s savings, frittering it away on whores and liquor. Deeply
wounded by the betrayal, but somehow unbroken, Esther returns to the
boarding house determined to use her gifted hands and her sewing machine
to refashion her dreams and make them anew from the whole cloth of her
life’s experiences.
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