The Old Settler

In World War II Harlem, New York, a young male boarder enters the lives of a fifty-five-year-old spinster (or as they were called in those days—an Old Settler), and her sister in order to help with the rent. The boarder, whose name is Husband, has come to Harlem from South Carolina to search for his girlfriend, Lou Bessie Preston.

There is an ominous cloud of tension that hangs over the sisters’ relationship. The temperature rises when one of the sisters, Elizabeth, and Husband take to liking each other. Quilly, the other sister, who doesn’t like Husband living with them in the first place, surely doesn’t approve of their “carrying on,” especially since Elizabeth is old enough to be Husband’s mother.

It is this “carrying on” that exposes a deep, thirty-year-old wound which until now only had a bandage.