My Own Terms Book

Guitarist Jim Weston and dancer Dave Carter have been best friends as long as they can remember and they make a living entertaining white audiences in the area around Eatonville, Florida. The flirtatious Daisy Taylor comes between them, leading Jim to clobber Dave over the head with a mule bone, knocking him out. A trial splits the town between Methodists, Jim's church, and Baptists, Dave's, and leads to the denouement among the three.

Over this skeletal plot, Harlem Renaissance giants Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes fleshed out a colorful script of dialect, in the process ending their friendship over authorship and control issues. A production by the Gilpin Players in Cleveland in 1931 was called off over the conflict and it was never performed until a 1991 Broadway production, which received mixed reviews.

The Kindle edition I started with didn't include Act Three, but I read it from a Project Gutenberg online edition. Neither included the trial referenced in the Wikipedia plot summary, so I suspect there's another edition out there.