CHAPTER X

SOUTHERN REALISM

Mystics and Poets.In hisNotebook(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; inDark 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 uponHoliday(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,Holidayis still a true, powerful and different version of race relations in the South. InThe Death and Birth of David Markand(1933),however, the brief treatment of the Negro falls below the penetration ofHoliday.

Deriving in part from Anderson and Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer’sCane(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-teacherwho “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 byobeah. 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. Heis 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 ofTropic Deathis 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 Sundayis 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’sA 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 andrebellious 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’sStuffed 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 southernerhas 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’sThe 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 inWide 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 novelThe 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 includeswell 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 inPo’ Buckra(1930) by Gertrude Shelby and Samuel Stoney, the authors ofBlack 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 ofPo’ Buckrastand on their own feet, Mrs. L. M. Alexander inCandy(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.Candywon 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 andpraying 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 Vinecontains the stuff of life, well observed and rendered.

A trained anthropologist as well as a native of Florida, Zora Neale Hurston has made inMules 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 Mendoes 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 anecdotesthat turn the tables on old marster. The bitterness that E. C. L. Adams recorded inNigger to Niggeris not to be found inMules 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’sStrangers and Lovers(1928) in which the mutual hostility of the Negroes and “crackers,” the brutality and the violence are skillfully detailed. In Theodore Pratt’sBig 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.InGlory(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 southernNegro speech, bear witness to an informed and sympathetic observer.

The Black Belt.Earth Bornby 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 isOllie 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 Birdexcels local color likeEarth Bornby its sympathetic characterization.

George Lee’sRiver 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 shootingthe white man, he becomes the legendary man of the river, told of in the author’s earlierBeale 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 inThe 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.

InLove 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 thebay 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’sShort 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 Marginsby 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 characterizationsof Negro life along the river, with recognition of the brutality.

Lyle Saxon has brought to his novelChildren 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 Strangersreveals 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 folkloreand 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 inStory 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 CrisisandOpportunity, 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 fromLittle Black Samboto the newestEzekielby 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, inAraminta(1935) andJerome 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 onPopo and Fifina(1933) a story of Haitian children, and has writtenYou Can’t Pet A Possum(1936) andSad 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 areThe No-Nation Girl,Gulf StreamandChildren of Strangerssimilar?

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