A great pleasure in reading The Wedding Band by Alice Childress is it’s use of dramatic irony, the foreshadowing and conscious effort placed in scenes to reference what would have already been experienced by the audience and will be by the characters. My journey through this irony began with Childress’s reference to the flu pandemic that was swallowing Charleston in 1918; reading a play set during a pandemic, living through one as well sparked thoughts of New Historicism, and my own sort of dramatic irony. Research of 1918 led me to stories of contagion and death in a segregated city under Jim Crow laws. What little treatment could be given hardly ever reached black communities, in a time and place where there was already such a clear demarcation of opportunity, add quarantine and you have a city socially and racially distancing itself to an alarming degree. When I read the play script, I was momentarily disappointed, there was not much of Charleston to be found, any southern city could have been substituted seemingly. We have got some interesting play on dramatic irony here, for a story of how an interracial relationship would have suffered under Jim Crow laws there is a limited slice of interracial interactions. There is Herman, his mother, and sister, then Julia accompanied my neighbors and landlady; strange how small of a cast this was, and yet in the context of a segregated, quarantining pandemic perhaps it not as strange since there would have limited groups gathering regardless of race. Within our class discussion Childress’s use of symbolism became a topic, Hermon catches the flu and becomes delirious with fever and while his temperature rises his internalized racism does as well. Hermon’s fever ravings reveal an underling pathology waiting for a weakened mind and body to spring forth; this is what happens as he quotes John C. Calhoun’s reprehensible speech, this is what happens in 1919 during the Red Summer, and unbeknownst to Childress tragedy and sickness would happen again in 2020. This is dramatic irony and the symbolism it can employ; it is almost playing a morbid joke on audiences who know that by the end of Wedding Band things will only get worse, and that it would be until Loving vs Virginia in 1967 that laws barring interracial marriage would begin to fall around the country. As modern readers we have our own cynical dramatic irony, another pandemic, another summer filled with brutal murder and injustice, and more problems that never seem to be solved.