NEW ROADS
_The Pattern of Violence._ Although we have seen that such authors
as Wood, Heyward, Adams and Frank revealed southern injustice to
the Negro, it has remained for a later group of writers to register
the fullest social protest. They know the land of the jasmines and
myrtles; but they know a great deal more about it than those gentle
symbols. Aware that one southern tradition--that of violence--is as
long-standing as any, they have added darker color to the picture of
the regionalists and folk-lorists, who often in their search for the
peculiar and amusing, overlooked harsh and socially significant facts.
They record what, according to the formula of taboos and restrictions,
should be unmentioned. In spite of the chorus of comfortable and
ostrich-like people who insist that in their state “the problem has
been solved,” they reveal a widespread pattern of violence.
_Sweet Man_ (1930) by Gilmore Millen tells of John Henry, the son of a
white plantation agent who could not let Negro women alone. John Henry
launches out as a “sweet man,” attractive to women, on the plantations
and in Memphis, and finally becomes the paramour of a wealthy white
woman in California. When, unbalanced by jealousy, she tries to frame
him for rape, he kills her, then himself. The early chapters give a
good, naturalistic picture of plantation life; the last chapters, even
though sensational, are convincing.
_Amber Satyr_ by Roy Flannagan (1932) is similar in some respects.
Luther, strong and handsome, of Negro-Indian stock, has caution enough
to resist the open advances of the love-sick farm wife for whom he
works. But through her brazenness, the affair is discovered, and Luther
is killed by her two brothers-in-law. The newspaper report is the usual
one: Luther was killed by an unknown mob. In ironic contrast, one of
Luther’s murderers is the father of a child by Luther’s daughter,
and at the time of the tragedy a special session of the Virginia
legislature is considering the “racial-integrity” bill. _Amber Satyr_
is shot through with sardonic humor, but its chief impact is tragic.
Less spectacular, Welbourn Kelley’s _Inchin’ Along_ (1932) deals
with Dink Britt, whose enterprise and endurance make him a dangerous
example to the croppers, white and black, who must be kept brow-beaten
and shiftless. A marked man, he narrowly escapes being lynched.
_Inchin’ Along_ has some traditional and silly comments about racial
characteristics, but the sympathy for the plugging hero and the picture
of the hard lot of the tenant farmer, show Kelly to be clear-eyed and
courageous.
Robert Rylee is well informed about life in delta Mississippi, and
deeply concerned with its injustice. In _Deep Dark River_ (1935) Mose
Southwick, a share-cropper, protests against his wife’s carryings-on
with the plantation manager. In self defense Mose kills a bad Negro,
hired to kill him. When Mose is captured and framed, a liberal white
woman lawyer takes his case, but cannot defeat the concerted line-up.
Mose is dependable, sober, self-contained, with grim, double-edged
humor, and burdened by the miseries of his people even more than
by his own. So Mose must be put out of the way. _Deep Dark River_
is unconvincing where Rylee makes his hero a symbol of Christian
resignation and attachment to the soil, and is conventional in such
statements as “Mose had the mystic singing and intuitiveness of
the black race and the intelligence of the white race.” The white
characters here are less intelligent than stupid and vicious. Although
humane, Rylee does not idealize the Negro; he includes sketches of
Negro highjackers, bootleggers, easy women, and toadies for white
folks. His second novel _St. George of Weldon_ (1937) is a character
study of a sensitive southern youth, and the harsh treatment of the
Negro is an important element in his education.
In _Death in The Deep South_ (1936) by Ward Greene, a novel of southern
injustice, the use of the third degree to exact confessions from
Negroes is powerfully depicted. Theodore Strauss’ _Night At Hogwallow_
(1937) is a hair-raising narrative. A Negro laborer is falsely accused
of rape. This results in a battle between a northern road crew and the
aroused southern townsmen, a beating by the Klan, the burning of the
Negro section, and a gruesome lynching. It is a dark melodrama, as life
in towns like Hogwallow too often is.
Jim Tully’s _Circus Parade_ (1927) tells the story of “Whiteface,” a
Negro who rose from stake-driver to clown, and who was burned at the
stake by a mob on the rampage because a Negro had stepped in front
of a white woman in the ticket line. “A Negro Girl” is likewise grim
naturalism; the girl, caught sneaking into the circus, is assaulted
by the circus roughnecks. In _Violence, A Story of Today’s South_ by
Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1928) a Negro boy, in terror of
exposure after a love affair, kills a white girl. He is saved from a
lynching mob, but is electrocuted. In contrast, a philandering white
minister who commits murder is freed.
_Exceptional Negroes._ Sinclair Lewis was one of the first to
break with the preconceptions of the Negro held by Main Street. In
_Arrowsmith_ (1925) he includes a capable Negro scientist who, though
a minor character, stands out from the ruck of the petty, grasping
victims of Lewis’ satire. In _Work of Art_ (1934) the attractive,
intelligent and bookish Tansy Quill illustrates the “common tragedy of
the superior Negro ... laden with all the complexities of twentieth
century America heaped upon the dark burden lugged up from old Africa’s
abyss.” Her suicide is conventional, but it gives Lewis a chance to
satirize authors who, from a casual acquaintance with a hotel maid,
build up masterpieces about Negro psychology and the voodoo of the
swamps.
_Come In At The Door_ (1934) by William March is merciless in its
exposure of certain elements of southern life, and original in its
treatment of Negro characters. A Negro woman, Mitty, bears six children
to the “aristocrat” Robert Hurry, who, gone to seed, is now going
with the wind in the waste land of the delta country. Mitty is wily
but superstitious, loyal but self-centered, kindhearted but capable
of fierce hate. The traditional Aunt Hatty and Jim are well observed.
Most striking of the Negro characters is Baptiste, an educated Creole,
a vagabond philosopher, whose tragedy is to haunt forever the southern
boy whom he tutored.
The portrait of Baptiste indicates that as southern realists look
more closely at life, they too become aware of exceptional Negroes.
T. S. Stribling has complained that “White educated Southerners are
completely cut off from black educated Southerners by the inherited
attitudes of master and slave, and the one really does not know the
other exists.” Lack of contact and ignorance still handicap honest
realists, but their attempt at a complete cast of characters is
noteworthy.
To James Saxon Childers, “White men and black men have long ago walked
out of their color and are only men.” _A Novel About A White Man and
A Black Man In The Deep South_ (1936) deals with Gordon Nicholson, a
white man, and Dave Parker, a Negro, educated at the same northern
school. When Dave, a talented musician, visits his friend, the southern
town is alarmed, since Gordon has a sister Anne. Dave is accused of
a crime for which there is not a shred of evidence. He is acquitted,
but Anne’s end is tragic, merely because Dave visits her brother.
Irritated by northern interference as much as by southern injustice,
Childers believes that the “problem” will gradually be solved by men of
good will. His Negro characters, like most of the educated Negroes in
propaganda novels, are nearly faultless. The novel is unusual in its
sympathy, but it is jumbled, coincidental and not always plausible.
One of the South’s most promising novelists, Hamilton Basso included
recognizable Negro characters in _Relics and Angels_ (1929). _Cinnamon
Seed_ (1934) shows deeper understanding of Negroes, both in slavery
and in the present; Horace, the old family servant; Sam, ambitious,
resentful and therefore doomed, and Lance who rises to be a world
famous “trombone player in a band” are especially well done. In
_Courthouse Square_ (1936) which deals mainly with the plight of a
justice-loving liberal in a southern town, Basso’s pictures of Negro
life are even more authentic and sympathetic. Of Niggertown, which the
Negroes called High Rent, he writes:
Poverty ran through the section like a plague, hunger was a
frequent visitor or permanent boarder in almost every house, but
the inhabitants of High Rent, merging a simple philosophy with the
terrible patience of the poor, complained but little and trusted in
the humanity of a singularly inhumane and white-faced God for eventual
succor and release.
An unusual character is Alcide Fauget, who is “like the reverend and
respected head of a tribe: banker, counsellor, physician, friend.” So
fair that he had attended a white southern medical school, he serves
the darker half of his people. Neither obsequious nor arrogant, he goes
his own way. But when he wishes to buy an old house, falling to rack
and ruin, for a much-needed Negro hospital, he has stepped over his
bounds, and is driven away by a mob of his inferiors. An intelligent,
humane realist, Basso has unobtrusively but memorably conveyed the
tragedy of Negro life in the South.
_The “Multiple” Novel_: Many writers have attempted to give
cross-sections of the life of southern towns by using many characters
on all levels. Margaret Sperry’s _Portrait of Eden_ (1934) shows a
Florida town which, after the boom, sinks back into lethargy and
intolerance. The Negroes are generally shown as exotic primitives,
especially at their shouting services in “The Church of Jesus Colored.”
But the picture has social understanding as well:
Aunt Melissie danced, tangling her feet in a bitter tune against all
the days she’d spent serving white folks, walking their ways, and all
her children born to do bidding to white men. She danced and fell
reeling at last, her shoes flung to the darkness....
Outstanding is the educated Negro, John Marquis, a native of the
section, who, hated by whites and double-crossed by Negroes, wants to
start a school for Negro children. He is lynched, and a white liberal,
his best friend, is murdered. _Portrait of Eden_ has some exaggeration,
but what it records is not too spectacular in a state where the Klan
still rides.
Less directly intent upon revealing intolerance and injustice than
Basso and Miss Sperry, other novelists still include these since they
wish truthful pictures. _Siesta_, by Berry Fleming (1935), is one
of the finest examples. Cotton brokers, cotton farmers, plaintively
wasting “aristocrats,” society folk and crackers, in “Georgetown,”
Alabama, in the long drought of summer, are unforgettably set before
us. Negro characters, an important part of the town’s life, are as
authentically handled. Laney Shields, ambitious and decent, is trapped
in a sordid love affair with the young white doctor for whom she is
office girl. A little boy’s going after the laundry becomes a dangerous
odyssey in the bullying town. Mattie Small, the “obsteprician”; a famed
faith-healing Bishop and his blind stooge, are similarly well drawn.
In _Siesta_ the best talkers refer to the Negro’s tragic mask, and say
that southern whites can know of the Negro only what he wants them to
know. This is wise: Fleming’s recognition of the tragic mask helps him
to get beneath it.
_South_, by Frederick Wight (1935) attempts a panoramic view of a South
Carolina city. Negro characters are only slightly sketched domestics or
levee workers. Mob terror threatens the Negro section at one point, but
is averted when the victim is discovered to be a light-colored Negro
woman. The manufacturing town of “Tuttle,” North Carolina, comes to
life in _Where the Weak Grow Strong_ by Eugene Armfield (1936). Negro
characters are drawn with attention to truth more than to tradition. A
servant asking for her six weeks back pay of twelve dollars, is called
an “ungrateful nigger” and is ordered from the house.
Miss Evelyn, you ain’t got no call to talk to me like that. I only ast
you for what I worked for. I may be a nigger like you says. The Lord
made me the color I is. But I ain’t never done nobody out of the money
that’s coming to them.
A white mother resents the reserving of the carnival merry-go-round for
Negroes, during the supper hour for the whites: “They ought not let
them do it.” A love affair between a Negro man and a white woman is
told with quiet, tragic realism.
_Incidental Characters, But Real._ In George Milburn’s sharply observed
_Oklahoma Town_ (1930), “The Nigger-Lover” tells of a lawyer who earned
his nickname by urging Negroes to vote, who violated taboos such as
handing a Negro boy a glass of water from a soda fountain, and who
is among the first victims in a race riot. In “The Nigger Doctor”
the educated physician makes the town uneasy by his quietly defiant
manner and his scientific skill. _No More Trumpets_ (1933) contains a
story “white Meat” in which a boarding house keeper gets her greatest
delight in baiting Negroes and describing a lynching she saw as a girl.
Deserted by her resentful daughters, she reveals that their father had
Negro blood. In Milburn’s novel _Catalogue_, the lynching of a Negro is
shown to be one of the holiday excitements for Oklahoma yokels.
James T. Farrell, in his trilogy _Studs Lonigan_ (1935), has old man
Lonigan commenting on Amos and Andy:
You would have laughed yourself sick at them. They’re so much like
darkies. Not the fresh northern niggers, but the genuine real southern
darkies, the good niggers ... with long names and honors, just like in
real life.... Golly, Bill, they sure are a card.
In bitter contrast, however, Farrell shows the anger of the Chicago
Irish to the encroaching black belt. Studs Lonigan believes that “they
ought to hang every nigger in the city to telephone poles.” Fellow
victims of poverty, the Negroes and Irish have fierce street fights of
which the riot of 1919 was a natural climax, although Farrell describes
the present as similarly explosive. Except in a few stories, Farrell
does not present individual Negroes, but he has given powerful and
grimly true pictures of northern prejudice, which seems to be little
different from the lynch-spirit of the South.
William Faulkner’s _Sartoris_ (1929) has many minor but ably
individualized Negro characters. Uncle Simon’s dismaying first
automobile ride, and his difficulties as treasurer of the church
board--“he jes put de money out, sort of,”--are well described. Simon
rebukes his son Caspy, who, home from the World War is bragging too
much: “What us niggers want ter be free fer, anyhow. Ain’t we got ez
many white folks now ez we kin suppo’t?” The servants of the tragic
family in Faulkner’s _The Sound and The Fury_ (1920)--Aunt Dilsey,
hobbling about her kitchen, impudent and bullying, with her temper
worn short by the bickering and turmoil, Uncle Job, and Luster, who is
guardian to Benjy, the idiot of the family--are likewise convincing.
The Negroes are generally described from the point of view of their
harassed white folks:
Like I say the only place for them is in the field, where they’d have
to work from sunup to sundown.... They got so they can outguess you
about work before your very eyes.... Shirking and giving you a little
more lip and a little more lip until some day you have to lay them out
with a scantling or something....
The Negroes themselves are an unflattering chorus in this drama of the
fall of a family. One of them expresses their surliness: “I works to
suit de man whut pays me Sat’day night. When I does dat, it don’t leave
me a whole lot of time to please other folks.” Insolent just up to the
breaking point, contradicting their white-folks without apologies,
these servants are miles away from the plantation tradition menials. If
familiarity has not bred contempt, it has at least bred rough irony in
place of worship.
_These Thirteen_ (1931) contains “That Evening Sun,” one of the best
of Negro stories. A Negro woman is shown waiting in dread suspense,
certain that her husband is going to kill her. Nancy is truculent and
cynical about humanity whether white or black. Her husband is likewise
desperate:
I can’t hang around white man’s kitchen. But white man can hang around
mine. White man can come in my house, but I can’t stop him. When white
man wants to come in my house, I ain’t got no house. I can’t stop him,
but he can’t kick me outen it. He can’t do that.
“Dry September” is a powerful lynching story, but the stress is less
upon the victim than upon the psychology of the mob, especially of the
leader. No one knows whether the assault happened or was imagined, but
the mob gets its man.
In _Sanctuary_ (1929) the incidental picture of a jailed Negro murderer
is striking:
He would lean in the window in the evening and sing. After supper
a few Negroes gathered along the fence below--natty, shoddy suits
and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to shoulder--and in chorus with
the murderer, they sang ... “Fo days mo! Den dey ghy ’stroy de bes’
ba’ytone singer in Nawth Mississippi!”
_Light in August_ (1932) has as its most interesting character Joe
Christmas. A foundling, the son of a white mother and a Negro father,
he is raised by his fanatical grandfather. Taken for white until
the mystery of his birth is cleared up, he is silent, friendless
and proud. After he murders a sex-obsessed Yankee woman, a relic of
Reconstruction, he is pursued and killed. Although one character
imputes his tragedy to the warfare in him of white and black, there is
sufficient reason to see him as a victim of a hostile environment. He
is more complex than Faulkner’s other Negroes, fully characterized, and
one of Faulkner’s most memorable creations.
Faulkner is a naturalist, and sees humanity in a harsh light. Like the
weak, mean, and degenerate white characters whom he has set before
us, his Negro characters are shown unflatteringly. House-servants
and farmers, loose women and murderers; whether in rocking ecstasy
in church, or getting the third degree from a sheriff, or fearing to
help out in an accident--“White folks be sayin’ we done it”--they are
all equally convincing. Faulkner records Negro speech with complete
accuracy, but more important, he gets into character with the uncanny
penetration that makes him one of the most significant of the new
novelists. His Negroes are a long way from happy-go-lucky comics. If
they agree in anything, it is in their surly understanding of the
bitter life that they are doomed to live in a backward, hate-ridden
South. He does not write social protest, but he is fiercely intent upon
the truth, and the truth that he sees is tragic.
In _Tobacco Road_, after a Negro has been run down by the crazy-driving
of a poor-white, Jeeter philosophizes: “Wal, niggers will get kilt.”
The same callousness is depicted in Caldwell’s first book, _American
Earth_ (1931). “Saturday Afternoon” tells of a mob’s filling a
Negro “so full of lead that his body sagged from his neck where the
trace-chain held him up.” The Negro was too smart a farmer. “Savannah
River Payday” is even more gruesome. A Negro sawmill hand, killed in
an accident, is being carried to the town’s undertaker. The drunk
“crackers” driving the car hammer out his gold teeth and fight over
them. Arriving in town, they go into a pool room and forget all about
the corpse. _We Are The Living_ (1933) contains Negro cotton-pickers,
and servants whose attractiveness is a household problem. The stories
are frequently humorous but the laughter of the Negroes is ironic at
perplexed and inept “superiors.”
“Candy Man Beechum” in _Kneel To The Rising Sun_ (1935) is about a
travelling boy with flapping feet, who, on his way to see his gal, is
shot down for nothing by a white policeman. “Blue Boy” is the ugly
anecdote of a Negro idiot whose grotesque tricks entertain a group
of satiated “high class ladies and gentlemen.” “Kneel To The Rising
Sun”, probably Caldwell’s greatest short story, portrays the misery of
short-rationed sharecroppers, the sadism of ignorant, bored landlords,
the crushing force of an unjust system. Lonnie, a white man, made a
whining coward by years of share-cropping slavery, betrays Clem, who
has befriended him, to their mutual enemy the landlord, and his mob of
lynchers. Clem is a doggedly courageous Negro, willing to take only so
much before rebelling.
All Arch asked ... was for Clem Henry to overstep his place just one
little half inch, or to talk back to him with just one little short
word, and he would do the rest. Everybody knew what Arch meant by
that, especially if Clem did not turn and run. And Clem had not been
known to run from anybody, after fifteen years in the country.
Caldwell is convinced that “much of the matter about the southern
Negro and the southern white man has been a garbled mixture of romance
and mis-statement,” and the authoritative fiction he writes about his
native sharecropping country bears this out.
_Proletarian Realism._ Caldwell’s “Kneel To The Rising Sun” represents
one of the most important trends in contemporary fiction. The Negro
is at last being discovered as part of the working class. Radical
novelists now stress the exploitation of the Negro masses, and urge
that it is only by the solidarity of all workers that a new social
order can be achieved. In spite of the overstress of propaganda,
these writers contribute a great deal to realism. Seeing many of
the so-called Negro characteristics as class disabilities, aware of
much that is common in the lives of the poor, they have been able
to get close to their characters, without condescension and without
idealizing. They start from the basic beliefs that the Negro has been
a great factor in building up America, that he has been miserably
underpaid, that he is growing steadily more conscious of, and restive
under exploitation, and that he can get nowhere without the white
worker, nor the white worker without him. These are all truths that
have long needed to be told. By themselves, they do not guarantee
good fiction, but they cannot be neglected without falsity to Negro
experience, and the contemporary American scene.
Scott Nearing’s _Free-Born_ (1932), “unpublishable by any commercial
concern,” is as well documented as his _Black America_, a sociological
exposé of exploitation and persecution. The title is ironic: the
“freeborn” Negroes are landless sharecroppers, kept from “jumping
contracts” by a patrol system. One southern judge threatens to adjourn
court and “attend to the matter himself” if there are not enough
“he-Americans” to do a job of lynching. Jim, the hero, sees the burning
of the Rosenwald school and the lynching of his mother and father
(one of the most gruesome ever recorded in fiction and taken from
actuality). His sweetheart is raped and murdered. In Chicago he is
caught up in the race-riot. Embittered and desperate, he is taught by
a communist that “t’aint cause you’se black that you’se exploited,”
and that only by fighting shoulder to shoulder with white workers will
there ever be a “free world under working class control.” Rebuffed by
labor leaders, Jim nevertheless sticks to his new-found cause. Jailed
for leading a strike, he dedicates himself to black and white slaves
“who never were freed ... who keep your high and mighty world a-goin’.”
_Free-Born_ crowds too much upon the shoulders of its young hero, and
is unconvincing in such details as Jim’s continued dialect after he has
read Upton Sinclair, Marx and Lenin. But it is significant as the first
revolutionary novel of Negro life.
_Georgia Nigger_ (1932) is another exposure, attacking the
convict-lease system and the chain-gang, with thorough documentation
based upon visits, prison records and photographs. Spivak describes
such devices of punishment as the iron collar, spikes, double-shackles,
the stocks, the whipping post, the Georgia rack, where convicts are
tortured by stretching, and the “sweat-box, a coffin of thick wood
standing upright.” The convicts who rot their lives away in the filthy
cages may be robbers and killers, or they may just as often be like
David, a mere lad, picked up on petty charges to do the county’s hard
work. Arrested in a round-up because Mr. Deering, in cahoots with the
sheriff, has a lot of cotton to be picked, David is “redeemed” by the
planter. Escaping from Deering’s armed camp, where Negroes who die from
overwork are weighted and buried in the swamp, David is rearrested as a
vagrant, and this time chooses the chain gang in preference to peonage,
exchanging hell for hell. Throughout _Georgia Nigger_ the Negro is
shown to be a catspaw; vicious and murderous guards, landlords and
sheriffs nullify the half-hearted interference of the better-disposed
whites. But it contains more than the shocking; the heartbreaking
struggle of David’s family against poverty is conveyed with deep
feeling.
In Myra Page’s _Gathering Storm_ (1932) the hill-people who have
become underpaid, hungry “lint-heads,” doomed to shameful living, and
the Negroes whose wretchedness is even greater, come together because
of common suffering. Marge, a child of hill-people, reaches out to
Negro workers “across the miles”, denounces the old way of hatred
and bitterness, and urges the new way of solidarity. She and a Negro
organizer are forerunners of the “gathering storm.” Like _Free-Born_ in
many respects, covering too much ground, _Gathering Storm_ is even more
of a thesis novel. But Miss Page’s sympathy with her Negro characters
goes deep.
Dealing with a similar setting, _Call Home The Heart_ contains but
few scenes involving Negroes. Ishma, a mountain woman, saves a Negro
organizer from a lynch mob but is revolted by close contact with
Negroes: “Mountain people are always white.” A matured radical,
recognizing the strength of her long-bred prejudice, patiently tries
to persuade her that unless the workers of both races stand together,
they will continue to be clubbed, driven and starved. Miss Burke’s
_A Stone Came Rolling_ (1935) contains more about the Negro. The
“kindliness” of the past is satirized in an excellent description of a
slave-trading. The present is desperate: a Negro woman says: “I ain’t
had what you could call work in six months--not a tap at a snake.” An
educated Negro, brought in as a safe speaker at a political rally,
waits until white hearers have left, and then attacks the conservative
speechmakers and urges Negroes to organize. Unemployed whites and
Negroes march together, singing militant words to hymn tunes. In such
a crisis, the city fathers, churchmen, and sheriff must have a victim.
Stomp Nelson, a tireless, fearless, Negro organizer is selected, but
by a ruse, his white comrades of the Unemployed Council save him from
the mob. Negro characters are not major actors, but the Negro is shown
as an important participant in the stirring of southern labor. The use
of race prejudice by the overlords to prevent workers’ solidarity is
clearly indicated.
In _Now In November_ (1934) and _Winter Orchard_ (1935) Josephine
Johnson occasionally describes the harshness of Negro life. Her
_Jordanstown_ (1937) records a fight for better living conditions for
the jobless and the underpaid in a small midwestern town. Anna Mosely,
“a tall, mammoth Negress ... too articulate and brooding for her own
people, too proud to be popular with employers ... alien in the bitter
gifts of intelligence and race” is an interesting person, whether in
her married life with Ham, or talking in meetings, or writing the song
for the disinherited, or leading the march, or lying unconquered in
jail, or inspiring the young white leaders: “Not till we do something
all together ... we won’t change mo’ than a stitch in the world.”
The bitterness and understanding of Grace Lumpkin’s “White Man” (1927),
the story of a Negro girl seduced by her employer, reappears with
added power in _A Sign For Cain_ (1935). A small southern community
is well realized: the well meaning but weak liberals, resenting any
interference with their “contented nigras”; the respectable judge
(bought and paid for); the bootlegging and pandering leader of the
American Legion who is the defender of law and order; the white men
with their Negro women; the high-school boys ripe for violence; and
the sheriff who keeps the Negroes “scared to raise their voices too
high.” Nevertheless, when Denis, a young organizer returns home, he
finds allies ready to join his struggle for justice. Denis is slowly
but surely bringing about the union of underpaid white and black
workers, when a few leaflets are lost, and traitors sell him out.
Framed for the murder of a wealthy white woman, Denis is shot by the
real murderer, who fears investigation by the northern lawyers. Denis
is quiet but strong, humble only before the great work he has set
himself to do; in jail, attacked by the deputies, he cries out “I’ve
got no rights as a citizen. Then I stand on my rights as a man.” Other
Negroes are well done: Mum Nancy, whose long years of meekness bring
a sorry inheritance; Selah, the bound-out slavey, awaking to courage
and hatred; Brother Shadrack Morton whose sermon on submissiveness
in lynch-time is drowned out by groans, and Ficents, easy-going, but
insisting “I got some fight in me yet; if there’s something to fight
for.” Most interesting after Denis is old Ed Clarke, whose memory of
his lynched father is still burning, a hard worker, unlearned but
manly, leaving one master because he could do with “less kindness
and more cash,” and contemptuous of “white-folks’ niggers.” The old
plantation record furnishes ironic asides: one entry reads, “Sold Negro
$1,200. Beautiful day”; another reads, “Candies for little Negroes ...
25 cents worth.”
_Negro Novelists On New Roads._ Except for a few cartoons, such as
_Two Black Crows in the A.E.F._, the Negro in the World War has been
scarcely mentioned. Victor Daly’s _Not Only War_ (1932) “dedicated
to the army of disillusioned,” attempts to do justice to the record
of Negro troops. There is less about warfare, however, than about
the workings of race prejudice. A southern white officer, who has
carried on a flirtation with a Negro girl in the states, “breaks” a
Negro non-commissioned officer for visiting a French girl. In a big
drive the white officer is wounded; the Negro soldier tries to save
his life. They are found the next morning, “face downward, their arms
about each other.” Coincidences are too much relied upon, and the novel
follows the apologist pattern, but the aim to deal seriously with what
has been caricatured is noteworthy. _Greater Need Below_ (1936) by
O’Wendell Shaw deals with the life of a southern Negro college, but
the characters are too idealized, and the plot is forced. The subject
deserves a better novel.
Langston Hughes, in _The Ways of White Folks_ (1934), his first
collection of short stories, shows far superior artistry. All of the
stories deal with manifestations of white prejudice. Hughes states
that by white folks he really means “some white folks,” but the stories
which turn the tables of caricature and contempt often seem inclusive.
“Slave On the Block” and “The Blues I’m Playing” satirize the people
“who went in for Negroes--a race that was too charming and naive and
lovely for words.” “A Good Job Gone” shows the break-up of a wealthy
white man who, fascinated by a golden-brown wanton, is jilted for a
Negro elevator boy. “Rejuvenation Through Joy” farcically tells of a
colony of effete whites who listen to lectures by a Negro, passing
for white, who preaches the occult value of primitive rhythm. “Cora,”
one of the most successful stories, attacks small town puritanism. In
“Home” a world renowned artist returns home to be lynched as an “uppity
nigger.” In “Father and Son,” from which the play _Mulatto_ was taken,
the son of Colonel Norwood and his housekeeper, determined not to be “a
white folks’ nigger,” chokes his father to death after a quarrel and is
lynched. In this not always convincing story, Hughes looks forward to
the time when
the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will
be broken, and men, all of a sudden, will shake hands, black men and
white men, like steel meeting steel.
Hughes does not often strike this radical note in _The Ways of White
Folks_; most of his stories protest jim-crow insults and injustice. In
“Professor,” one of his latest stories, he attacks the compromising
race “leader.” Hughes’ stories exist largely for the theses, but they
are skillfully done, realistic in detail and bitingly ironic.
One of the most promising explorations of a new road is Richard
Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” which appeared in _The New Caravan_
(1936). The portrait of the gang of Negro boys in the South is done
with robust understanding. Swimming in a pool posted “No Trespassing,”
which meant “No dogs and niggers allowed,” the boys are caught by a
white man. In a fight after one of the boys has been shot, Big Boy gets
possession of the man’s rifle, and when the white man lunges for it,
Big Boy shoots him. His pal, Bobo, is caught and lynched. The terror of
the community before Big Boy is spirited away is graphically conveyed.
“Big Boy Leaves Home” is well informed realism, rendered with power and
originality.
Without the distinction of Wright’s technique, Waters Edward Turpin’s
_These Low Grounds_ (1937) is still extremely promising. For the first
time a Negro novelist tells the story of four generations of Negroes.
Thoroughly conversant with the life of the farmers and crabbers and
oyster shuckers of the Eastern Shore, Turpin has had the courage to
handle this life without idealization, without shame, but with full
sympathy. The story has its bitterness and sharp protest. Poverty
is omnipresent, and oppression. The town of Shrewsbury is really
Salisbury, ill-famed because of a recent lynching, and Turpin describes
this tragedy. His characters, for all of their illiteracy and squalor,
have dogged courage. Less successful in his hasty sketches of the life
of better off Negroes in the big cities, Turpin’s novel still belongs
with the best novels by Negro authors.
_Summary._ If many of the foregoing books have contained lynchings,
this may partly be explained as a natural reaction to books that have
stressed the contented, comical or quaintly picturesque Negro in a
sunny South which “understands him.” It is important that American
novelists are revealing the tragic in Negro experience. This has been
present from the earliest, and honest observers know that it has been
met with fortitude and struggle. Some novelists have recorded the
brutality and shame as part of a tragic America; others show the Negro
resisting heroically; and still others, hoping for social justice, are
urging solidarity of all of the oppressed. They indicate a new and
momentous trend in modern literature. It is a trend that makes the
way easier for Negro novelists who, coming of age in technique and
understanding, will find an audience ready for the important stories
that still must be told.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What subjects tabooed in the South are treated in the novels of this
chapter?
2. Why is it natural to expect that many southern novels would stress
violence?
3. What is the advantage of the “multiple novel” in setting forth a
community’s life?
4. List the “exceptional” negroes in the books of this chapter.
5. What differentiates the radical novelists from the realists who show
the pattern of violence?
6. Compare the newer realists among Negroes with the apologist and the
Harlem school.