CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER VIII

REALISM AND THE FOLK

Sociological Realism.—T. S. Stribling’sBirthright(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,Birthrightplaces 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.

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.

Niggerby 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 ishumor 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’sIn 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 toredeem Vara Majette’sWhite 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 andThe Captain(1924) are merely extensions of works like Page’sPastime Storiesand 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 Borderis 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 demdonefuh sour! No, suh! Ef Uh haffuh chaw t’ing lukkuh dat, Uh gwine hunt green possimun....” Buh Fox smaa’t!

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 demdonefuh 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 asPorgy(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 astragic herois 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 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 inMamba’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 foregroundcharactersand not as backgroundtypes. 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 Thursdayis, 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 ofGreen 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.

“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 succeedingBright 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 Skinis 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 suspectRoll 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 toSwallow 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 ifthe moon gets contrary.... Their stories and songs teach the children to look for victory from the disadvantagesto which life has sentenced them, when death takes their souls to heaven. (Italics mine.)

Plantation days may be hard sometimes ifthe moon gets contrary.... Their stories and songs teach the children to look for victory from the disadvantagesto 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 hertheinterpreter ofthe 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 calledCongaree 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 speakfor 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....”

“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.

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?”

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 Niggergets 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 inBlack 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 sodratsmart! Well, GIT A LONG TAIL YO’SELF!”

’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 sodratsmart! 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. ButBlack 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.

InGritny 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 Rowdoes not matchGritny 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 hispublishers 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 Chillunis 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....

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 byOl’ Man Adam An’ His Chillun, did something toward getting reverence and awe back into the material, but here it is pure farce.King Davidand 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 inLet 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 onThe Negro and His SongsandNegro Workaday Songs.Rainbow Round My Shoulderis 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.” Vividlywritten 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 Shoulderis 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....

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 hascalled 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. ButThe Tree Named Johnstresses 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 hisJuneteenth(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,Juneteenthis 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” areincluded in Carl Carmer’sStars Fell on Alabama(1934) which, true to its title, concentrates upon the strange and mysterious. Vincent McHugh’sCaleb 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” toOl’ Man Adam and His Chillunand relate to Thomas Nelson Page.

6. Compare the authors of folk-realism with the apologists of the preceding chapter.

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