SOUTHERN REALISM
_Mystics and Poets._ In his _Notebook_ (1926) Sherwood Anderson
tells of a Mississippian who showed the ear of a lynched Negro as a
symbol of “white superiority.” Anderson seldom mentions such gruesome
facts of Negro experience; like Van Vechten and Julia Peterkin he is
attracted to the Negro’s elemental exoticism. In “I Want To Know Why,”
the white hero is drawn to Negro jockeys, cooks and stable boys; in
_Dark Laughter_ (1925) Anderson himself is fascinated by the Negro’s
superiority to dull, standardized whites.
Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers laughing. A
slow dance is going on.... A brown woman having thirteen children--a
different man for every child--going to church too, singing, dancing,
broad shoulders, broad hips, soft eyes, a soft laughing voice....
Negroes singing had sometimes a way of getting at the ultimate truth
of things.
This chorus of happy sensualists mocking repressed whites may explain
“ultimate truth” to Anderson, but a great deal of truth about their
lives escapes his penetrating interest. Harassed by Puritanism and
industrialism, Anderson has found elements that bring him peace, rather
than interpretation of a people.
Waldo Frank looks upon _Holiday_ (1923) as his story of “one of the
greatest of American dramas--the struggle in the South between the
white race and the black ... _each of which ... needs what the other
possesses_.” Like his fellow mystic Anderson, Frank sees Niggertown
to be full of warm song and happy, ironic laughter, free from the
strain of money-making, repressed White-town. But he likewise sees
insult, exploitation and struggle. “Chokin’ is de black man’s life,”
says one old woman, who knows the South too well. The passive cruelty
of White Nazareth is introduced when a Negro deckhand drowns and no
one makes an effort to save him. We see the active cruelty when John
Cloud, ambitious and manly young Negro, and Virginia, “weary of her
whiteness,” of being incessantly sheltered, step out from the pattern.
In a spell of drought and revivals, John and Virginia meet by accident
in the woods above Nazareth. Though “boss-girl” and “servant-man,”
they have been drawn from mutual respect into desire. When Virginia
returns to Nazareth, the meeting is misunderstood, and the men, already
whipped up by religious hysteria, quickly form a mob. Shocked from her
dream of escape, Virginia sinks back into southern conventionality and
half-remorseful inertia, and does not speak. At dusk, John is burned in
the Square of Nazareth.
Frank sees that White-town, assuring itself that the “nigger will stay
in his place,” is still forever suspicious of “the muttering, the
stirring.” More boldly than others, Frank reveals what he considers the
deepest cause of much of the fear:
‘Good mo’nin ... I have been walkin’ by yo’ side all of this street.
An’ yo’ didn’t see me.’ He gives these words with a prophetic dryness.
John feels the ominous threat.... ‘_I’ve watched you, nigger_,’ they
say, ‘_I’ve watched you lookin’ at my daughter. How dare you look at
my daughter? Nigger, that look in yo’ eyes means murder in our land.
How dare you nigger, look so hard at my daughter that you forget to
salute the white man at yo’ side?_’
When Virginia, who knows how free her brother is with Negro women,
laughs at the “fanatical obsessions” of her men-folk, she adds flame to
the tinder. Symbolic and difficult, _Holiday_ is still a true, powerful
and different version of race relations in the South. In _The Death and
Birth of David Markand_ (1933), however, the brief treatment of the
Negro falls below the penetration of _Holiday_.
Deriving in part from Anderson and Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer’s _Cane_
(1923) has much greater intimacy with Negro life, dealing equally well
with the black belt of Georgia and bourgeois Washington. Toomer is
master of fluid, evocative prose; some of his stories are prose-poems.
The sun is hammered to a band of gold. Pine-needles, like mazda,
are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the
falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a
sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up.... Curls up and
spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along
the eastern valley. A black boy ... you are the most sleepiest man I
ever seed, Sleeping Beauty ... cradled on a gray mule, guided by the
hollow sound of cowbells, heads for them through a rusty cotton field.
His faithfully portrayed Georgia landscape Toomer has peopled with
faithfully drawn characters, such as Fern, the shiftless, ignorant
beauty of the Georgia Pike, and Becky, a white outcast, who bears two
Negro children. “Blood Burning Moon” tells of the rivalry between a
Negro and a white man for a Negro girl, that ends in a murder and a
lynching. Not propaganda in the manner of the apologists, it is tragic
realism at its best.
Neither debunking Negro society nor glorifying it, Toomer pictures
Washington with the thoroughness of one who knew it from the inside.
The futile, and in the story of “Avey,” the drably tragic revolt
against the smugness of a rising middle-class, are brilliantly set
before us. Toomer was sharply criticized by Negroes for his “betrayal”;
his insight and tenderness seemed to escape them. “Kabnis” is a long,
occasionally obscure story of a northern Negro teaching school in
Georgia. No one has done so well as Toomer the hypocritical school
principal, a petty, puritanical tyrant who truckles to the whites.
Laymon, a preacher-teacher who “knows more than would be good for
anyone other than a silent man”; Halsey, a self-assured, courageous
artisan; and Kabnis, a weakling idealist driven to cynicism and
dissipation until he discovers, mystically, the strength of his people,
are similarly well drawn. Toomer reveals in “Kabnis” an insight
that makes his failure to write a novel about Negro life one of the
undoubted losses of contemporary literature.
In another brilliant first book, _Tropic Death_ (1926), Eric Walrond is
as conversant with his native West Indian life as Toomer was with that
of Georgia. Like Toomer he stressed the tragedy and pain in his milieu
rather than the joy-of-living stressed by the Harlem school. Gifted
with a power of description, Walrond gives us, for the first time, a
vivid sense of Negro life in the tropics below the Gulf stream.
All of the stories deal with death, which to these peasants, sailors
and workers does not come easily, but violently, often horribly. One
child, in the droughts, eats marl; her stomach distended like “a
wind-filling balloon.” Another dies, poisoned by _obeah_. Two “wharf
rats” who dive for the coins flung by bored tourists are killed by
a shark. The approach is unapologetically naturalistic; life in the
tropics is not pleasant to Walrond, and he has not idealized it. He
seems completely familiar with the divers West Indian dialects and with
his characters’ ways of life, whether they are underpaid workers on the
Big Ditch, or truck gardeners in Barbadoes, or waiters and cooks on
the old vessels that plow the Spanish Main. “Subjection” tells of the
murder of a Negro laborer by a marine, for interference when the marine
was beating a sick worker on a road-gang. With the exception of this
story, Walrond writes little of social protest. He is sardonically
aware of the way imperialism is made to work, but his chief purpose
is to make the reader “see,” to give him sense impression of a
unique, interesting world. The prose of _Tropic Death_ is sometimes
overwritten, sometimes too oblique for clarity. But it revealed
uncommon powers that, regrettably, Walrond has not used further.
Langston Hughes’ first novel, _Not Without Laughter_ (1930), one of the
best by a Negro author, is set in a small Kansas town, a transplanted
bit of the South. Sandy’s mother, Annjee, works in the white-folks’
kitchen and his grandmother, Aunt Hager, takes in washing so that Sandy
shall have his chance, in spite of his irresponsible father, Jimboy. A
life poor in the world’s goods is shown to be “not without laughter”:
there are great colored tent meetings, carnivals, barbecues, dances,
and guitar concerts by the beloved vagabond Jimboy. At their best,
however, these enjoyments are poor reliefs from the day’s hard work for
the white-folks. Prejudice lies all around Sandy; going to the carnival
on Children’s Day, he is ordered away with “I told you little darkies
this wasn’t your party.” For Sandy’s pretty, joyful Aunt Harriet, there
was nothing in Stanton after awhile but street-walking to the great
grief of old, tired Aunt Hager. Excepting Aunt Tempy, who is sharply
satirized as a high-toned striver, all of the characters are treated
with sympathy. Here, done with poetic realism, is a good novel of
boyhood.
_God Sends Sunday_ (1931), the first novel of another Negro poet, Arna
Bontemps, deals with sporting life at the turn of the century. Born
on a Red River plantation, little Augie, a lover of horses, becomes
a famous jockey in such racing towns as San Antonio, New Orleans,
Louisville, and St. Louis. At the height of his fame he was “a treat to
casual eyes.”
“I’se gonna git me a two-gallon high-roller hat dat won’t do. Gonna
git me a box-back coat an’ a milk white ves’ wid red roses painted on
it.”... His high-roller had twenty naked women worked in the eyelets
in the crown. His shirts had two-inch candy stripes of purple, pink,
green or orange.... His shoes had mirrors in the toes and dove-colored
uppers with large pearl buttons....
Women flocked to him, especially Della and Florence, whom he loved
“worse than a horse loves corn.” But his luck turns, and Lil Augie says:
I ain’t nobody. I ain’t nuthin. I’s jes a po picked sparrow. I ain’t
big as a dime, an’ I don’t worth a nickel.
With all his bravado and vanity, Lil Augie is courageous as a bantam,
always ready “to try anybody one barrel.” _God Sends Sunday_ is not
pretentious, but it is a well-done portrait of a winning character.
_Against Southern Charm._ Three of the most intelligent women of the
southern literary renaissance have had their say about the South’s
vaunted charm. In Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ _My Heart and My Flesh_
(1927) the heroine discovers that she is half-sister to Stiggins, a
Negro stable boy, who is the half-witted butt of the town, and to two
Negro women. Frustrated and desperate, she turns more and more to
furtive companionship with her sullen half-sisters. The incidental
Negroes who work in boarding house kitchens, or take in washing, or do
the heavy manual labor of the Kentucky town are far from the quaintly
funny folk of Irvin Cobb and Ruth McEnery Stuart.
A roughly similar situation appears in Isa Glenn’s _A Short History of
Julia_ (1928), an incisive attack upon the upper caste South. While
Julia is being brought up as a hot-house plant, her servant Cynthia
has a full and loose love-life. Both end up unhappily, with nothing
to look forward to. Patty, one of the most believable mammies in
fiction, brings up her white charges most decorously, but neglects
her attractive and rebellious daughter. Chivalry is summed up by
Negro characters as “white women jes’ lying and lying to theirselves.”
The aristocratic men-folk, old topers, who, untrue to one “southern
tradition,” often get drunk, declaim that “a pure and virtuous lady is
the finest work of the Almighty.” But they keep Negro mistresses, and,
in their dotage, unlike the earlier gentlemen, “forget to cover up.”
Emily Clark’s _Stuffed Peacocks_ (1927) is affectionately ironic toward
the F. F. V’s. In “Chocolate Sponge,” a servant calmly states that
she is a lady, because her grandfather was Colonel Ashton Wycherly.
Since Negroes did not usually mention such facts, she is “frightfully
uncomfortable to have around.” In spite of the mask of servility, which
the cleverest house-servants “are careful never to let slip,” there are
others who produce discomfort. Mammy Sally
had been separated, as a young woman, from her first husband, whom she
loved, and transplanted in another country.... Her ancient eyes were
inscrutable and not altogether pleasant when she was questioned about
it.
Similarly aloof, unconventional and forbidding are two other mammies,
who disdain both Negro hilarity and white sentimentality. In “Fast
Color,” a Negro butler, almost a “stage darky,” kept his thoughts
carefully guarded. Knowing Negro servants in “their dining-room work,
the most gracious form of labor,” Miss Clark likewise knows that “their
swiftest and simplest ways to impromptu gratuities” are not their only
ways.
_Regionalism._ Less ambitious than the mystics and less probing than
the critics of southern caste, a number of regionalists have followed
the lead of DuBose Heyward, Howard Odum and Julia Peterkin. Nearly a
decade ago a southern critic wrote that “the southerner has had to
turn to the Negro when he wanted to paint life as it is”; and although
less pertinent today, this partly explains the rush to describe the
Negro. Many had new stories to tell, and they told them honestly and
sincerely; many others offered twice-told tales. Their coverage of the
South is widespread, and to follow them from Virginia to Louisiana is
as good a plan as any.
Pernet Patterson’s _The Road to Canaan_ (1931), a collection of eight
stories, deals with Negro life in Richmond and the nearby country.
Some are farcical, as the story where a visiting anthropologist,
seeking to measure heads, spreads terror; some are pathetic. “Conjur”
is a good tale of black magic; “Shoofly,” one the best, re-creates
life in a tobacco factory; and “Buttin’ Blood” tells convincingly of
the friendship of white and Negro boys. With no social protest and
more than a trace of condescension, often engineered to end happily,
Patterson’s stories still show understanding.
Paul Green’s few sketches of Negroes in _Wide Fields_ (1928) do not
have the power of his plays of Negro life, but they are sympathetic and
true. There is bitterness in the stories of Arthur Loring, humble and
hardworking “synonym for what the white folks thought Negroes ought
to be,” and of Lalie Fowler, the mother of a child by a white farmer.
Hardworking tenant farmers, “flash” sports and bad men are convincingly
shown in this book as well as in Green’s novel _The Body of This Earth_
(1935). It is significant that Green made over a story of poor-whites
into a Negro farce, _The Man Who Died At Twelve O’clock_, with hardly
any changes in idiom, characterization, and incident. A different
Carolina locale and type of life are in R. H. Harriss’ _The Foxes_
(1936), a good hunting novel which includes well described Negro
stable-boys, dog trainers, and old servants.
_South Carolina._ A new locale of South Carolina and a new type of
people are discovered in _Po’ Buckra_ (1930) by Gertrude Shelby
and Samuel Stoney, the authors of _Black Genesis_. In a community
of quality white folks, “crackers,” Negroes and “Brass-Ankles,”
Barty attempts to rise out of the last despised group, a mixture of
Portuguese-Indian-Negro and American white stocks. But suspicion and
gossip dog him about, and he becomes a drunkard and murderer. Minor
Negro characters are well handled.
But where the authors of _Po’ Buckra_ stand on their own feet, Mrs.
L. M. Alexander in _Candy_ (1934) seems to lean heavily upon Julia
Peterkin. Trouble visits only rarely the love-free, carefree pagans
of Mimosa Hill Plantation, and then it is such trouble as jealousy.
_Candy_ won a ten thousand dollar prize. _Don’t You Weep, Don’t You
Moan_ (1935) did not win a literary prize, but it did win for its
author, Richard Coleman, the distinction (bandied about by so many
publishers) of being one who in a single book presented “the true
Southern Negro.” Needless to say Coleman approves the old dogmas such
as “A nigger ... like de cotton fiel’ bettuh den any othuh place in de
worl’ ...” and omits from his novel of exotic primitives any mention of
insult and injustice.
_Florida._ Unlike Mrs. Alexander and Coleman, Zora Neale Hurston has no
need to rely upon either DuBose Heyward or Julia Peterkin. Her short
stories “Drenched With Light,” “Spunk” and “The Gilded Six Bits” showed
a command of folklore and idiom excelled by no earlier Negro novelist.
_Jonah’s Gourd Vine_ (1934) recounts the rise of handsome, stalwart
John Buddy from plowboy to moderator of the Baptists of Florida. But
his flair for preaching and praying is exceeded by his weakness for
women; even when he is married to the devoted Lucy who is “pretty as a
speckled pup,” he still cannot hold his straying feet. His fall is as
abrupt as his rise. Loosely constructed, the novel presents authentic
scenes of timber camps, railroad gangs with the “hammer-muscling men,
the liars, fighters, bluffers and lovers,” and the all-colored towns of
Florida. The folk-speech is richly, almost too consistently, poetic.
The characters are less developed than the setting; and the life they
live is self-contained and untroubled. Nevertheless, _Jonah’s Gourd
Vine_ contains the stuff of life, well observed and rendered.
A trained anthropologist as well as a native of Florida, Zora Neale
Hurston has made in _Mules and Men_ (1935) the first substantial
collection of folk-tales by a Negro scholar. Zestful towards her
material, and completely unashamed of it, she ingratiated herself with
the tellers of tall tales in turpentine camps, or on store porches, and
with the preachers of tall sermons in backwoods churches. Whether of
the folk hero John, or of Brer Dog, Brer Snail, and Brer Gator, or of
more contemporary people and activity, Miss Hurston’s “big old lies”
are a delight to read. Miss Hurston writes:
The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming
acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people
and do not say to our questioner: ‘Get out of here!’ We smile and tell
him or her something that satisfies the white person, because, caring
so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.... ‘He can
read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.’
Unfortunately, _Mules and Men_ does not uncover so much that white
collectors have been unable to get. The tales ring genuine, but there
seem to be omissions. The picture is too pastoral, with only a bit of
grumbling about hard work, or a few slave anecdotes that turn the
tables on old marster. The bitterness that E. C. L. Adams recorded in
_Nigger to Nigger_ is not to be found in _Mules and Men_.
Miss Hurston’s second novel, _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ (1937)
is informed and sympathetic. After unfortunate marriages--the first
husband, a grubbing farmer, looked like “some old skull-head in de
graveyard,” and the second was intent only upon being the “big voice”
in Eatonville--Janie Sparks is whirled into an idyllic marriage with
high-spirited Tea Cake. There are good sketches of the all-colored town
where comic-serious debates and tall tales are told on the mayor’s
store porch. But the love story and the poetic folk-speech are the
chief interests. The people, “ugly from ignorance and broken from being
poor,” who swarm upon the “muck” for short-time jobs, do not get much
attention. Life in the all-colored town is fairly easy, with enough
money and work to go around. Here and there social protest is evident:
in the aftermath of the hurricane the conscripted grave-diggers are
ordered to make sure of the race of the victims, since the whites are
to get pine coffins, and the Negroes, quick lime.
They’s mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment. Look
lak they think God don’t know nothin’ ’bout de Jim Crow law.
The pine barrens and the swamps of Florida are the setting of Edwin
Granberry’s _Strangers and Lovers_ (1928) in which the mutual hostility
of the Negroes and “crackers,” the brutality and the violence are
skillfully detailed. In Theodore Pratt’s _Big Blow_ (1936) a poor white
girl who lives by herself in the waste-land is protected by Clay, a
giant Negro. When a “cracker” forces his attention upon her, Clay saves
the girl, apologetically but firmly. The “cracker” is astounded that
Clay has “put hand to a white man.” Clay is strung up by a mob, and it
is only by the greatest luck that he is saved.
_Georgia._ In _Glory_ (1932), Nan Bagby Stephens, dealing with Negro
life in a small southern Georgia town, is as intimate as Julia Peterkin
with Negro speech and folkways. But her people, not the unmoral pagans
of Blue Brook plantation, are earnest, self-reliant workers, in whose
lives the church plays a very important part. The new minister, though
not an Elmer Gantry, brings grief to the community by seducing Leah,
one of the finest girls of his congregation. Roseanne, her sister, in
a melodramatic scene confronts him with news of the girl’s death, and
revenge is swift. Although the seduction scenes are unconvincing, the
setting and characters are well drawn. Roseanne, shrewd about human
nature until hypnotized by the preacher, is like Heyward’s Mamba and
Hughes’ Aunt Hager, laboring and sacrificing so that the young will
have a chance. Other characters are interesting: the railroad men,
the charcoal peddler, the hair-dresser who says, “I puts ’em in and I
takes ’em out,” meaning that she marcels on one side of the railroad
tracks and straightens hair on the other. And the Ladies Aid Society,
pathetically caring for their little church and worshipful of the
preacher, is much more representative of Negro religion than the usual
scenes of revival frenzy.
_Death Is A Little Man_ (1936) by Minnie Hite Moody likewise deals
with a hard-working, sacrificial heroine of strict morality who,
living in the Atlanta Bottoms, has more than her share of trials and
tribulations. The overfrequent violence becomes melodramatic, much that
affects the life of the Bottoms is left out, and Fate is blamed too
often. But the insight into character, the true local color and the
skillful prose, entirely in the cadence and idiom of southern Negro
speech, bear witness to an informed and sympathetic observer.
_The Black Belt._ _Earth Born_ by Howard Snyder (1929) records the
superstitions, songs, dances and church services of tenant farmers
in the cotton belt. Parson Robinson, the Negro plantation owner, the
wanton Malindy, her lover Big Jim Mississippi, and the violence and
loose love making of an isolated community, are in the tradition of
Julia Peterkin. So is _Ollie Miss_ (1935) by George Wylie Henderson,
the first Negro novelist to deal with sharecroppers. But the heroine,
whether working her crop like a man, or restlessly hankering after the
old days with her lover, or planning a farm for herself and her child,
is well drawn, and the novel is a work of faithful realism.
Reuben Davis’ _Butcher Bird_ (1936), another story of Negro
sharecroppers, likewise centers attention upon a woman, “a butcher bird
... one of these here womens that gobbles up all the mens she can,
then sticks the rest of them around on thorn trees and barb wire till
she gets hongry again.” This wanton brings trouble to the hard-working
hero until his quiet dependability makes a new woman of her and she
sacrifices her life for his. Written out of considerable knowledge of
folk-life, _Butcher Bird_ excels local color like _Earth Born_ by its
sympathetic characterization.
George Lee’s _River George_ (1936) is less concerned with free
love affairs that end in violence, and more with the troubles of
sharecropping life disclosed by recent studies. In the first part,
as good a picture of sharecropping as any Negro author has achieved,
George is a good worker, but since he is educated, knows when he is
cheated, and teaches organization, he is a “bad Negro.” He becomes
worse when the Negro paramour of a white man falls in love with him.
Forced to run away to Memphis after shooting the white man, he becomes
the legendary man of the river, told of in the author’s earlier _Beale
Street_. Unreasonably, he returns to his native section and is lynched
upon arrival. The second part of the book contains too much, but the
first is truthful and therefore bitter. Its grimness stands in no need
of the final less credible lynching.
_The Delta._ Evans Wall writes in _The No-Nation Girl_ (1929) of
Précieuse, the daughter of a white swamp-dweller and a Negro woman.
It is the conventional story of the mulatto, who “had no right to be
born,” falling in love with a white “outsider” and when abandoned,
drowning herself in Suicide Basin, convenient for “no-nation girls.”
The primitive goings-on are often halted for dogmas about the mulatto.
Whenever she is decent, it is because of the inheritance from her
father, who was a degraded outcast. But in moments of passion, her
mother’s inheritance rules:
The girl’s half-heritage of savagery rose in a flood that washed
away all trace of her father’s people except the supersensitiveness
imparted by her taut nerves. She must dance or scream to relieve the
rising torrent of response to the wild, monotonous rhythm.
In _Love Fetish_ (1933) Wall deals with a “no-nation boy” in similar
fashion.
_Gulf Stream_ (1930) by Marie Stanley has more sympathy for the Creole
heroine, but drives home the same thesis--that you “can’t hide from God
and Affaca.” Adele, with “cream-ivory, magnolia petal skin” is easily
seduced by a white man to whose home she delivers laundry. When her
child is born, she refuses to look at it, fearing it will be black.
Years later when she discovers that her daughter is milky-white, she
becomes a devoted mother. The daughter, broadened by education, becomes
engaged to a dark Negro. Adele cannot endure this, and walks into the
bay to commit suicide, but love for her daughter makes her renounce
the usual gesture of the tragic octoroon. Mille Fleurs Island, below
Mobile, the home of mulatto Creoles of wealth and culture, is new to
fiction, as is Adele’s final tirade against the father of her child.
But there is also much of the usual trite generalizing about the
tragedy of mixed blood.
_Louisiana._ Barry Benefield’s _Short Turns_ (1926) includes two
stories of Negro life. In “Ole Mistis” Old Jeff, one of the many
“slaves of legal documents and ruthless legal machinery,” loses his
crops and farm, and would have lost his horse, “Ole Mistis,” but for
a landlord’s last-minute kindheartedness. “Sugar Pie” tells of the
terror in a northern Louisiana town when Negroes are burned out, tarred
and feathered, and hanged upon telegraph poles. Sugar Pie leaves the
hate-ridden town, carrying the corpse of her nearly white baby. _Green
Margins_ by E. P. O’Donnell (1936) is a poetic book of the life in
the delta below New Orleans, the melting pot of Slavonian, Filipino,
French, Italian, Cajan and Negro fishermen, trappers and smugglers.
Outstanding among the strange characters are the mulatto girl, Unga
January, and Bonus, a mad Negro murderer. O’Donnell’s short stories
about Negro life such as “Jesus Knew” are informed, bitter realism.
Elma Godchaux’ _Stubborn Roots_ (1936) has a weird Negro character in
Zero, who, although he insists upon wearing woman’s clothing, is the
dynamic foreman on a sugar cane plantation. The respect and liking
between Zero and the planter is persuasively conveyed. Other Negroes
are convincingly shown at their work of planting and grinding cane
and repairing the Mississippi levees. The same fidelity is in Miss
Godchaux’ “The Horn That Called Bambine” and “Chains,” which contain
sympathetic characterizations of Negro life along the river, with
recognition of the brutality.
Lyle Saxon has brought to his novel _Children of Strangers_ (1937)
the skill and authority of his studies of New Orleans. Contrary to
the usual procedure, the Negroes are treated with seriousness, and
the patronizing whites who see Negroes “as the happiest people in the
world” are ridiculed. Famie, the beautiful descendant of the free
mulattoes who once, cultured and wealthy, owned vast plantations on
Cane River, is the tragic heroine. After a traditional love affair with
a white outlaw, Famie devotes herself to her child. Poverty-stricken,
she sells some of the ancient heirlooms, then she becomes a servant for
whites. These are violations of the caste-tabus, whereas having a child
by a white man was not. When, in her loneliness, she turns to black
people, and finally accepts the attention of Henry Tyler, she cuts the
last family tie. _Children of Strangers_ reveals a little known locale
and people, the last of a
delicate race of Latins which had lived too near the sun.... The very
old were curiously erect, their shoulders back, their chins up. They
were sad, but they had dignity.... The boys and girls were handsome,
their skins cream-colored or light tan....
Almost as interesting as Famie is Henry Tyler, a “shut mouth
nigger--studying to himself all the time, wanting to learn to read
letters.” The only socially conscious character in the book says to
Henry:
It has always been like this in the South ... white men leaning on
black men ... from the beginning. We made slaves of you.... You made
us rich.... In rising, we pushed you further away from us.... Black
men began to think, to move about, to go away.... That is why I
couldn’t get you out of my mind as I watched you sweating in the field
working for something that can never be yours because I have taken it
from you.
Short story writers have industriously added to this new regionalism,
in such numbers that even mention of their names is impracticable.
Wilbur Daniel Steele, however, should be mentioned for his grasp of
folklore and types apparent in such stories as “Sooth” and “Conjure.”
Other stories of distinction are James Boyd’s “Bloodhound,” Vernon
Sherwin’s “Nigger-Lover,” from the many good stories of Negro life
published in _Story Magazine_, and Louis Paul’s “No More Trouble For
Jedwick.” The liberal and radical magazines are publishing informed and
sincere fiction of Negro life. _The Crisis_ and _Opportunity_, Negro
magazines, have published many good interpretations “from the inside.”
Skill and penetration mark such stories as “Symphonesque” by Arthur
Huff Fauset, “The Flyer” by Cecil Blue, “Swamp Moccasin” and “Fog” by
John F. Matheus, and the work of Henry Jones.
An admittedly inadequate word might be included here on children’s
books. In a long line from _Little Black Sambo_ to the newest _Ezekiel_
by Elvira Garner (1937) Negro children have generally been written
of in the same terms as their mothers and fathers, as quaint, living
jokes, designed to make white children laugh. Against this tradition of
comic condescension, Eva Knox Evans, in _Araminta_ (1935) and _Jerome
Anthony_ (1936), has written with sincere and informed sympathy. The
same qualities are in the children’s stories of Arna Bontemps, one
of the most versatile Negro authors, who collaborated with Langston
Hughes on _Popo and Fifina_ (1933) a story of Haitian children, and has
written _You Can’t Pet A Possum_ (1936) and _Sad Faced Boy_ (1937).
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How does Sherwood Anderson resemble Julia Peterkin and Van Vechten?
2. Account for the growing revolt on the part of southern women against
the tradition of “southern charm.”
3. What is regionalism? How does it differ from local color?
4. What states seem to be as yet uncovered by regionalists?
5. Compare the work of the regionalists with the plantation tradition.
6. What authors include pictures of southern injustice?
7. In what respects are _The No-Nation Girl_, _Gulf Stream_ and
_Children of Strangers_ similar?