REALISM AND THE FOLK
_Sociological Realism._--T. S. Stribling’s _Birthright_ (1922) brought
something new in the treatment of Negro life. The novel looks back
in its problem and its preaching, and has its share of superstitions
about “race” such as that Negroes howl their agony aloud and white men
bottle up their grief, and that “to a white man absolute idleness is
impossible ... he must ... do something to burn up the accumulating
sugar in his muscles.” Peter Siner is not completely credible: a
Harvard graduate, he comes back South talking like a dictionary, urging
“autonomous development” of his people, and yet he is easily swindled
by a white banker. His marriage to Cissie, light-fingered and ruined
by a white lout, is strained, to say the least. His opposite, Tump
Pack, is caricatured. But Stribling does protest against the southern
belief that all Negroes are carefree and happy. His description of
Negro lodges, funerals, and workaday life are authentic. Most important
of all, _Birthright_ places the Negro at the center of the picture,
attempts to show the influence of environment upon character, is
ironic at the vaunted southern understanding of Negroes, and attacks
injustice. The following description is quite different from the
pastoral shabbiness that delighted Ruth McEnery Stuart, E. K. Means,
and Paul Laurence Dunbar:
On the edge of Hooker’s Bend, drawn in a rough semi-circle around the
Big Hill, lies Niggertown.... The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles,
some propped with poles.... Up and down its streets flows the slow
negro life of the village.... The public well itself lies at the
southern end of this miserable street, just at the point where the
drainage of the Big Hill collects.... [To this hole in soft clay,
where occasionally pigs fall in and drown] come the unhurried colored
women, who throw in their buckets, and with dexterity that comes with
long practice draw them out full of water.... The inhabitants of
Niggertown suffer from divers diseases; they develop strange ailments
that no amount of physicking will overcome.... About once a year
the state health officer visits Hooker’s Bend and forces the white
soda-water dispensers on the other side of the hill to sterilize their
glasses in the name of the sovereign State of Tennessee.
_Nigger_ by Clement Wood (1922) compresses a very great deal into its
less than three hundred pages. This, too, is a sociological novel,
picturing a Negro family from its origins in slavery to modern life
in Birmingham. After freedom, Jake’s burden of debt on his little
place grows heavier each year. Forced to flee when white hoodlums run
rampant on a periodic lynch-fest, Jake takes his seven grandchildren
to Birmingham, to realize the “emancipation” he has heard of so often.
But one son, Pink, dies in France, a hero; another, Louis, decorated
in France for bravery is shot down by the law; Tom, embittered and
violent, becomes a criminal, and Dave’s love of learning is dulled
by the steel mills. The daughters fare no better. The characters are
completely convincing: the trustful Jake is balanced by Jim Gaines who
kills a white man to defend his daughter. Reverend Elisha Kirkman--“who
had seen slavery ... was weazened and sharp-tongued and wise; black
and white feared the sting that hung in his words”--is new in books
about Negroes, but is not, because of that, unconvincing. Even the
“bad Negroes” are not Dixon’s brutes; having seen lynchings and the
flagrant hypocrisy of the law, they are desperadoes through complete
cynicism. Wood presents his characters with great knowledge and
sympathy; the little family’s anguished but doomed efforts to get along
are tragically moving. There is humor in the book, but it is mainly
grim. Louis, called upon by white examiners to recite the Constitution
before he can vote, orates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The examiner
is amazed and half apologetic: “I’m damned. I didn’ think you knew it
... I didn’ think any nigger knew it.”
_White and Black_ (1922) by H. A. Shands gives a realistic picture of
Texas plantation life, where instead of kindly whites and affectionate
uncles and mammies, there are landlords struggling to get money, and
Negroes at work in the Johnson and Bermuda grass trying to get a bare
living. Joe Williams, an aspiring Negro share-cropper tries to bring
up his daughters decently and is almost frenzied when Ella is seduced
by the planter’s son. Ulysses Mulberry who “ain’t done a thing except
lay around ever since he’s been back and has been runnin’ me down to
the niggers and stirrin’ em up about the low wages paid on the farm,
and jes’ playin’ the big Ike gen’r’lly,” is lynched for outraging a
poor-white girl, in a scene powerfully presented. Richard Sanders, the
preacher, starts as a new character, forward-looking and thoughtful,
if over-academic in his language, but ends up typically, finding
his Bathsheba in a fast woman who affects penitence. The revived Ku
Klux Klan is shown punishing Henry Thompson, a white man who openly
acknowledges his Negro children, although its ranks are filled with
men having clandestine affairs with Negro women. Shands has gleams
of irony, but he does not let his sympathies develop to fullness,
and his book therefore lacks drive. Dorothy Scarborough’s _In The
Land of Cotton_ (1923) also deals with Texas, containing snapshots of
Negro life and some fine folk-songs, presented with the sympathetic
approach of a folk-lorist. The picture is generally pastoral. Realistic
pictures of Negroes in turpentine camps help to redeem Vara Majette’s
_White Blood_ (1924), but the melodrama of the swamp octoroon is still
traditional and unconvincing.
_South Carolina Folk._ The work of Ambrose Gonzales, begun at the end
of the last century but mainly accomplished in the nineteen-twenties,
is an example of southern anecdotage. Gonzales writes as two people:
one, intent upon pugnaciously defending the lost cause, and the other,
keenly interested in the little dramas of the Gullah folk of South
Carolina. _The Black Border_ (1922) contains a passage on Thomas
Nelson Page’s failure to deal fully with Negro life, but this book
and _The Captain_ (1924) are merely extensions of works like Page’s
_Pastime Stories_ and go in no new directions. The hunting and fishing,
the marital irregularities, the hog and chicken stealing of the
black-border Negroes are told with gusto, but hardships and tragedies
are glossed over. Gonzales gets closest to realism in his care for the
language. He has studied the Gullah dialect with so much zeal that the
reader’s task is uneasy. _With Aesop Along The Black Border_ is a sly,
witty rendition of the old fables into the odd speech; the following
concludes “The Fox And The Grapes”:
Bumbye ’e git up en’ ’e walk off, en’ ’e walk berry sedate. Attuwhile
’e biggin fuh grin. ’E suck ’e teet, en’ ’e say to ’eself, ’e say,
“Me yent hab time fuh w’ary me bone en’ t’ing fuh jump attuh no sour
grape lukkuh dem. Soon es Uh smell’ ’um Uh know dem _done_ fuh sour!
No, suh! Ef Uh haffuh chaw t’ing lukkuh dat, Uh gwine hunt green
possimun....” Buh Fox smaa’t!
At the same time that Gonzales was publishing, DuBose Heyward,
sensitive and sympathetic, was taking notes upon Negro life in
Charleston to appear as _Porgy_ (1925). This novel is rightly
influential. In a poem at the outset Heyward pleads for “great hearts
to understand.” His characterization is admirable; he knows a great
deal, and he sees the pity as well as the laughter. His hero is Porgy,
a crippled beggar, whose love for Crown’s Bess regenerates her. The
setting, Catfish Row, a squalid tenement; the saucer-burial scene, the
spirituals and the folk-speech, the steamboat picnic, the furtive fear
of the “white” law are conveyed with brilliant poetic realism. One of
the best bits of writing is the description of the September storm when
Catfish Row sends out its doomed riders to the sea. The finale of the
novel, presenting a Negro as _tragic hero_ is worth quoting:
The keen autumn sun flooded boldly through the entrance and bathed the
drooping form of the goat, the ridiculous wagon, and the bent form of
the man in hard satirical radiance. In its revealing light, Maria saw
that Porgy was an old man. The early tension that had characterized
him, the mellow mood that he had known for one eventful summer, both
had gone; and in their place she saw a face that sagged wearily....
She looked until she could bear the sight no longer; then she stumbled
into her shop and closed the door, leaving Porgy and the goat alone in
an irony of morning sunlight.
The same willingness to see Negroes as heroic is also in _Mamba’s
Daughters_ (1925). “Libel on the South--nothing less than plain
libel.... Who, in pity’s name, from a section which is famous for its
aristocracy, elected to go and hunt up Negroes to be sung about?”
are the words of one of the novel’s patrician ladies. Heyward so
elects, giving us a heart-warming chronicle of two women, Mamba
and Hagar, whose selfless devotion to Lissa transcends the usual
characterization of Negroes. Mamba is the untraditional mammy: sly,
ironic and ambitious for her own. Hagar, an illiterate and grotesque
Amazon, attains nobility in her fierce laboring and fighting for her
daughter. Lissa, who owes her career as a singer to Mamba’s generalship
and Hagar’s sacrifices, does not reach the stature of these, but
is nevertheless a new figure in the gallery of Negro characters.
Heyward’s setting--Catfish Row, the phosphate mines, upper Negro
circles striving for gentility, are conveyed with authenticity, if
not finality. Despite a few incidents of exaggerated humor, such as
Mamba’s appropriating the Judge’s false teeth, the tone is serious.
The exploitation in the mines and the travesty of justice meted out to
the Negro are dispassionately noted. Heyward’s “The Half-Pint Flask”
(1927), one of America’s best stories of terror, is skillfully set
against a background of Gullah superstitions, authentically handled.
Another South Carolinian, Julia Peterkin, is like DuBose Heyward in her
intimacy with her material, and her dealing with Negroes as foreground
_characters_ and not as background _types_. Only occasionally do white
people enter her narratives: here are Negroes seen in terms of their
own quite important lives. Mrs. Peterkin, who is the mistress of a
plantation like the “Blue Brook Plantation” of her fiction, insists
about her Negro characters: “I like them. They are my friends, and I
have learned so much from them.” _Green Thursday_ (1924) bore witness
to the liking for these people. It is a simple and touching group of
connected short stories. Kildee, the central figure, with his growing
love for Missie; Rose, cross in her perplexity, but human; Maum Hannah
who burned the new house of the “po’ buckra” who was dispossessing her,
all are pictured with tenderness and insight. Folk-beliefs and ways
are set down without condescension; the speech is Gullah, but modified
from Gonzales’ phonetic transcriptions; and the description of natural
scenery is done with beauty and originality. _Green Thursday_ is, all
in all, a minor classic.
_Black April_ (1927) differs. Here the colors are stronger. Although
the upbringing of the boy Breeze has the simplicity and poetry of
_Green Thursday_, the other half of the novel is at times violently
primitive. In spite of the church, Blue Brook Plantation is amoral.
The foreman, Black April, is a great man for working and fighting, and
a greater for love affairs, his “outside” children far outnumbering
what he calls his “yard children.” The book furnishes a storehouse of
folk-lore; long catalogues of signs and folk-cures alternating with
scenes of hunting, fishing, fighting, conversion, and love-making. For
all of its horror Black April’s death scene approaches the heroic.
Dying after his feet have rotted off from gangrene, he forces out these
words:
“Bury me in a man-size box--You un’erstan?... I--been--six
feet--fo’--Uncle--six feet--fo’!” The blaze in his eyes fell back,
cold, dim. A long shudder swept over him. The tide had turned.
_Scarlet Sister Mary_ (1928) won for Mrs. Peterkin the Pulitzer
Prize. There is no denying the grasp of her material nor the power of
certain scenes in this work and the succeeding _Bright Skin_ (1932),
but something just as noticeable is the increasing accent upon exotic
primitivity. Sister Mary, abandoned by July, who is wild and footloose,
becomes the scarlet woman of the quarters, having love-affairs and
love-children with startling regularity. Mary’s pagan freedom endears
her to Mrs. Peterkin, who deplores Puritan hypocrisy. Nevertheless the
book has lapses into condescension; “Unex” for “unexpected” is one
of the children’s names, and Mary has twins the same night that her
unmarried daughter bears her child in a woodshed. This is belaboring
with a vengeance. _Bright Skin_ is not so concerned with the plantation
birth-rate as with the death-rate, which is very high from violent
causes. A quiet death in bed seems as unusual for these folk as for
the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Mrs. Peterkin is much less sympathetic to
Cricket, “the bright-skin,” and to bizarre Harlem, than to Blue, the
pure type Negro, and primitive Blue Brook.
What these two books leave suspect _Roll Jordan, Roll_ (1933) brings
out into the open. Acclaimed by her publishers as the “outstanding
chronicler of the American black man’s life,” Mrs. Peterkin in this
book advances trite generalizations that go back to _Swallow Barn_,
contradicts her own evidence, and is more concerned with apologetics
for white southerners than with revelations of Negro character. The
picture she gives is one of Arcadian simplicity and happiness, away
from the evils of industrialism. Negroes are superior to whites:
“Better to be poor and black and contented with whatever God sends than
to be vast-rich and restless.” Since Negro school-children will come
into their legacy of “ancient earthly wisdom” it is no tragedy that
Negro schools are open only from harvest to planting time. Poverty,
ignorance, disease and exploitation are lightly touched upon or omitted.
Plantation days may be hard sometimes if _the moon gets contrary_....
Their stories and songs teach the children to look for victory from
the disadvantages _to which life has sentenced them_, when death takes
their souls to heaven. (Italics mine.)
The Negro’s fear of the chain-gang is airily waved away: “Courtesy and
kindliness are the law of the land.” It does Mrs. Peterkin disservice
to consider her _the_ interpreter of _the Negro_. She is, instead,
a plantation mistress who sees with sympathy and intimacy a few
characters in a restricted segment of South Carolina, from a highly
specialized point of view.
The recorder of another section of South Carolina, not so far off, has
a different tale to tell. A slim volume called _Congaree Sketches_
(1927) was immediately recognized as one of the most faithful
representations of Negro folk life. The author, E. C. L. Adams, a
physician of Columbia, S. C., kept out of the scene, and allowed his
Negro characters to speak for themselves. The result was neither
sentimentality nor clowning. In a poetic dialect, Tad and Scipio and
other spokesmen built up a most convincing picture of Negro life
and character “down in de big swamps, down in de land of mosquito,
down on de Congaree.” There are folk-tales, sermons and prayers, but
chiefly stories in dialogue dealing with dances, hot suppers, wakes,
bootlegging, church services, farming, and the chain gang. The tone
varies from rich comedy, such as that of the Hopkins Negro who throws
heaven into an uproar, and of Ole Sister who does the same for hell,
down to the restrained but powerful satires of southern justice:
“After while ole man Hall walk up to Noah an’ bus’ him over de head
wid er axe halve and beat him up ... an’ Jedge Foolbird axe ole man
Hall what de nigger do ... an’ ole man Hall say ‘He ain’t do nuthin’,
but he look like he goin’ say sumpin,’ and Jedge Foolbird fined Noah
one hunnerd dollars.”
Voice: “What did he do wid ole man Hall?”
Perk: “He fine him fi’ dollars....”
Dr. Adams’ second book, _Nigger to Nigger_, is fuller and even more
forceful. The title suggests the method. Here Negroes are assumed to
be talking to themselves, without any eavesdroppers, although the
author reveals that he has listened closely, and has been privileged
with confidences. As a result the humor is true folk humor, and the
bitterness at social injustice is undiluted. There is fine laughter in
“The Telephone Call,” but most of the tales are tragic. “Fifteen Years”
is the Negroes’ brooding summary of the “Ben Bess Case” where a Negro,
envied by white neighbors, was framed on a rape charge. “A Damn Nigger”
is one of the harshest stories to come out of the new realism.
Jake was a nigger. De judge were a kind judge--a good man--wuh ain’
b’lieve in too severe punishment for white folks when a nigger is
kilt, ain’ matter wha’ kind er white folks--And de solicitor wha’
prosecute an’ see dat de criminal git he full jues is a merciful man.
An’ he got great ideas er bein’ light in punishment of dem white mens.
Some of the sketches deal with slavery, in a manner far removed from
the plantation tradition. The unusual chorus of Tad and Scipio and
their fellows reveals that though they may be unlettered, they are
cynical realists, and are certainly not being fooled. When Reverend
Hickman urges Christian forbearance he is met with taunts:
Dere ain’ no use. De courts er dis land is not for niggers. Ain’
nothin’ but for’em but a gun an’ a knife in a white man’s hand, an’
den de grave, an’ sorrow an’ tear for he people. De Bible say, “De
Lord watcheth de fall of every sparrow,” an’ I says: “Why ain’t He
take He eye off sparrow an’ luh ’em rest some time on bigger game?”
_Nigger to Nigger_ gets more of the true picture of Negro life in the
South than do most other books combined. And the picture, for all of
Dr. Adams’ mastering of humor, is not a pleasant one to linger over.
Acquainted with Gullah Negroes and dialect from their earliest days,
Samuel Gaillard Stoney and Gertrude Mathews Shelby have retold in
_Black Genesis_ (1930) the charming fables of guileful Br’ Rabbit
and foiled Br’ Wolf, short-tempered Br’ Wasp, Br’ Alligator, Br’
Frog, Br’ Partridge and Sis’ Nanny Goat, together with free biblical
reinterpretations of the creation of the world, of Adam, Eve, Cain
and Abel, and the beginning of the race problem. In one of the best
stories, Br’ Rabbit pesters God for a longer tail; God assigns him
difficult tasks to get rid of him. Smart and cocky, Br’ Rabbit turns
up again with his tasks completed, surprising and throwing God out of
patience:
’Bout dat time, God in de Big House look out de window to see how dat
t’under an’ lightnin’ he send fix dat bowdacious Br’ Rabbit, so he
won’t be pesterin’ roun’ no mo’. An’ he see a little somet’ing jis’
a-skeedaddlin’ down de Abenue.... He lean out de window, an’ he put he
two hands to be mout’, an he holler: “Ah-hah! Ah-hah!! AH-HAH!! You so
_drat_ smart! Well, GIT A LONG TAIL YO’SELF!”
_Folk of the Deep South._ R. Emmet Kennedy speaks of the Louisiana
Negroes he knows so well as “unlettered folk who have not lost the
gracious charm of being natural: wonderfully gifted and fairly tingling
with poetic tendencies.” His enthusiasm accounts for good essays upon
their music and their patois. But _Black Cameos_ (1924), Kennedy’s
first book, is more marked by picturesque dialect and songs than by
penetration into character. _Mellows_, a collection of folk “melodies”
includes charming vignettes of life along the dusty roads of the delta.
In _Gritny People_ (1927) Kennedy goes deeper. His aim is to portray
a community opposite New Orleans. The plan is an old one: people of
different types gather at old Aunt Susan Smiley’s cook-shop, and
tell their stories, or are told about. A cross section of rural life
results: there is tragedy as well as comedy, and the life-story of
Gussie is especially moving. _Red Bean Row_ (1929) is an episodic
novel; Kennedy’s abilities, like those of earlier local colorists, seem
best fitted for the short story. The narrative is partly a satire of
a philandering elder, and a traditional story of old Gramma Veenia’s
devotion to a weakling white man of “quality.” Kennedy faithfully
conveys a way of life. Here and there he shows the injustices of the
section; the fire company is indifferent to the burning Negro shanty,
and one woman speaks almost like Dr. Adams’ Tad: “But white folks has
a seecut way of handlin’ the law to suit their own mind, and a poor
simple nigger has to take just what comes along.” All in all, however,
_Red Bean Row_ does not match _Gritny People_.
With a Negro for a nurse and Negroes for playmates, having paid
devoted attention to Negroes in the fields, in the levee camps, on
the river, in church, at picnics and funerals, Roark Bradford is,
as his publishers state, amply qualified to write about the Negro.
Their further assertion (duplicate of her publishers’ claim for Mrs.
Peterkin) “that Roark Bradford is perhaps better fitted to write of the
southern Negro than anyone in the United States” is hardly attested
by his work. In a foreword to “_Ol’ Man Adam An’ His Chillun_” (1928)
Bradford repeats the platitudes about Negro character that have
been used to sanction injustice since proslavery days. There is no
indication from later books that Bradford has changed: his Negroes are
nothing but easy-come, easy-go children, creatures of laughter and of
song. What other observers have recorded, Bradford, for all his wide
experience, has not yet seen.
_Ol’ Man Adam An’ His Chillun_ is rip-roaring burlesque, a book of tall
tales told by an imaginative humorist in the fine tradition of Mark
Twain. A mythical preacher of the old school brings Biblical stories
down from heaven to the realistic setting of the delta:
Well, a long time ago things was diffrunt. Hit wa’nt nothin’ on de
yearth ’cause hit wa’nt no yearth. And hit wa’nt nothin’ nowheres and
ev’day was Sunday. Wid de Lawd r’ared back preachin’ all day long ev’y
day. ’Ceptin’ on Sadday, and den ev’ybody went to de fish fry.... So
one day ev’ybody was out to de fish fry, eatin’ fish and biled custard
and carryin’ on, to all at once de Lawd swallowed some biled custard
which didn’t suit his tase....
For all the truth to idiom, this is obviously not Negro religion. The
difference between the personified God in the spirituals, and God with
a fedora upon his head and a ten-cent segar in his mouth should be
apparent to anyone in the least familiar with Negro believers and their
dread of sacrilege. _The Green Pastures_, suggested by _Ol’ Man Adam
An’ His Chillun_, did something toward getting reverence and awe back
into the material, but here it is pure farce. _King David_ _and the
Philistine Boys_ (1930) repeats this formula, with flagging powers.
_This Side of Jordan_ (1929) is naturalistic local color. Elder Videll,
muddy-colored like the river (Bradford does not like mulattoes), is a
lustful villain. He is killed by Scrap in a scene that sheds more light
on Bradford than on Negro character: “The blade of a razor flashed
through the air.... _Her Negro blood sent it unerringly between two
ribs. Her Indian blood sent it back for an unnecessary second and third
slash._” One surmises that her refusal to be chilled with horror might
be attributed to her Esquimo blood. _John Henry_ (1932), for all of its
amusing folk-speech and lore, belittles the hero. He is changed, not
for the better, from a steel driving railroad man to a cotton-toting
roustabout, from a great working class hero to a woman’s fool. Bradford
has taken undue liberties with folk stuff of dignity and power. The
best of Bradford’s many short stories have been collected in _Let the
Band Play Dixie_ (1935). Some, like “Child of God” have ingenuity
and tenderness, others are first-rate folklore and mulelore, and
some show exotics in honkey-tonks going native with a vengeance. The
characterization is conventional; for all of his comic genius, Bradford
too often merely brings the plantation tradition up to date.
In 1928, Howard Odum, one of America’s leading sociologists, turned
to fiction. Dr. Odum had already interpreted the Negro in his
collaboration with Guy Johnson on _The Negro and His Songs_ and _Negro
Workaday Songs_. _Rainbow Round My Shoulder_ is an attempt to render
fiction sociological. The hero, Left Wing Gordon, is a garrulous
roustabout, rambling from job to job, and from one teasing brown to
another. Left Wing Gordon tells us of his boyhood, his work-life, his
love-life, his “jamborees.” Vividly written passages interpret the
experiences. There is no gainsaying the thorough grasp of the material,
nor the picaresque fascination of its handling. The book is so crammed
with folk-sayings and blues, however, that it seems “made-up,” and both
story and hero get lost. Nevertheless, _Rainbow Round My Shoulder_ is
a valuable case study, done without flattery or concern for delicate
feelings, white or black, humorous without being minstrel, tragic
without being sentimentalized. And Left Wing Gordon is one of the best
folk-characters of recent realism.
_Wings On My Feet_ (1929) takes Left Wing overseas in the World War. It
is told in the same racy idiom, as authentic as thorough investigation
can make it. One of the few treatments of the Negro in the war, it is
valuable for what it shows of a stevedore’s reaction to Armageddon. It
is a compound of humor, pathos, and tragedy.
Me an’ war same thing. Want me to fight; I been doing it all my
life.... White buddies mighty funny, too, sometimes. Sometimes we
sorry for ’em, sometimes we jes’ have to laugh at ’em. Sometimes
we don’t keer if some white boys, meaner’n devil, have hard time,
Lawd, we don’t keer, Lawd we don’t keer. Been treatin’ us wrong,
been hard on colored soldiers. White man been fightin’ colored man.
Now fightin’ selves.... Boys laugh at’ em cause didn’t want salute
officers. Colored soldiers salutin’ all time.... Maybe war got him,
didn’t get me. He’s big captain an’ I’m high private in rear rank, but
I gets there just the same.... Buddy so worried in mind. Germans got
him, blowed him clean to pieces. Wa’n’t necessary for him to go but
nobody couldn’t tell him nothin’. He wus gonna save little child. And
so he gave his life for little French child. Made me sad an’ I kept
hollerin’, “Say, Buddy, is you hurt, is you killed?” Knowed he wus but
jes’ kept hollerin to him....
_Cold Blue Moon_ (1931) is the last and least of this trilogy dealing
with Left Wing Gordon. In this book the hero is among the stable boys
in a shed, telling ghost stories. When his turn comes, he launches,
great tale-teller that he is, into a series of legends on the Old
South. Some of them dispute the plantation tradition, but in the main
they run true to what Odum has called the Grandeur that Was, and the
Glory that Was Not. Left Wing is not at his best in these: he is too
far from the center of the picture.
One of the best twentieth century examples of the Uncle Remus tradition
is John B. Sales’ _The Tree Named John_ (1929), a collection of
Mississippi folk-lore in authentic dialect. Aunt Betsey plants an elm
tree--a quick budder, a fast grower and tough--as a name tree for the
grandchild of Ole Miss. Then she presides over his upbringing, giving
him lessons in folk-cures, nature study and in “spe’ence” (“whut you
gits w’en you won’t larn by lis’enin to whut de old folks tells you”).
She and Aunt Polly and Uncle Alvord tell him tales of animals of old
days. One story, “Ghos’es,” is a bitter story of a master who was kind
until he got drunk, when he became vicious. But _The Tree Named John_
stresses the affection between the white family and its servants, and
“the better and gentler side of the Negro ... a phase of Negro life
which is fast being swallowed up in the ‘Harlem movement.’”
In his _Juneteenth_ (1932), J. Mason Brewer is likewise concerned
“about how unrepresentative of his people in the South and Southwest
the loudly-heralded Negro literature of Harlem is--how false both in
psychology and language.” It is not clear why one should expect the
treatment of Harlem to be representative of Brazos Bottom. One of
the first collections of old-time tales by a Negro, _Juneteenth_ is
generally amusing. In a few tales the tables are turned on old “Massa,”
but there are none so harsh as Sales’ “Ghos’es” or the memories of
slavery found in E. C. L. Adams. A few good additions to the Brer
Rabbit cycle, and some interesting folk-tales called “White Man’s
Nigger: I,” “White Man’s Nigger: II,” “The Tale of the Stud Nigger” and
“Railroad Bill” are included in Carl Carmer’s _Stars Fell on Alabama_
(1934) which, true to its title, concentrates upon the strange and
mysterious. Vincent McHugh’s _Caleb Catlum’s America_ (1937) brings
Uncle Remus and John Henry together with American folk-heroes in a fine
yarn.
_Summary._ Whether sociological realism or folklore or partaking
of both, the books considered in this chapter have been marked by
a close and often sympathetic study of the Negro. Even in the case
of Bradford’s comics and Julia Peterkin’s exotics, authenticity has
been carefully sought. This regard for realism, even when incomplete,
has meant the discarding of traditional estimates. Occasionally as
in Wood and Heyward, and especially in Adams, concern for complete
truth has resulted in the recording of tragedies which no Negro folk
group, however isolated, has been so fortunate as to escape. With new
information and insight these authors have brought the Negro into the
mainstream of American realism.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Trace the growing criticism of the South in this chapter. What is
significant about this?
2. How does the place of the Negro in the picture in this chapter,
differ from his place in the work of Kennedy, Page, Harris, Cable and
Twain?
3. Compare Harris and Adams in their treatment of the folk.
4. Which authors seem closest to the plantation tradition?
5. Read Bradford’s “Foreword” to _Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun_ and
relate to Thomas Nelson Page.
6. Compare the authors of folk-realism with the apologists of the
preceding chapter.