CHAPTER XI

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 Satyrby Roy Flannagan (1932) is similar in some respects. Luther, strong and handsome, ofNegro-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 Satyris shot through with sardonic humor, but its chief impact is tragic.

Less spectacular, Welbourn Kelley’sInchin’ 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’ Alonghas 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. InDeep 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 Riveris unconvincing where Rylee makes his hero a symbol of Christian resignation and attachment to the soil, and is conventionalin 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 novelSt. 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.

InDeath 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’sCircus 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. InViolence, A Story of Today’s Southby 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. InArrowsmith(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. InWork 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 inRelics 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. InCourthouse 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 trustedin 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’sPortrait 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 Edenhas 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. InSiestathe 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 inWhere the Weak Grow Strongby 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 supperhour 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 observedOklahoma 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 novelCatalogue, the lynching of a Negro is shown to be one of the holiday excitements for Oklahoma yokels.

James T. Farrell, in his trilogyStuds 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 powerfuland grimly true pictures of northern prejudice, which seems to be little different from the lynch-spirit of the South.

William Faulkner’sSartoris(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’sThe 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 Negrowoman 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.

InSanctuary(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-servantsand 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.

InTobacco 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” inKneel 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 anecdoteof 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 hasbeen 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’sFree-Born(1932), “unpublishable by any commercial concern,” is as well documented as hisBlack 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-Borncrowds 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. ThroughoutGeorgia Niggerthe 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’sGathering 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.” LikeFree-Bornin many respects, covering too much ground,Gathering Stormis even more of a thesisnovel. But Miss Page’s sympathy with her Negro characters goes deep.

Dealing with a similar setting,Call Home The Heartcontains 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’sA 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.

InNow In November(1934) andWinter Orchard(1935) Josephine Johnson occasionally describes the harshness of Negro life. HerJordanstown(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 ... tooarticulate 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 inA 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 Mortonwhose 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 asTwo Black Crows in the A.E.F., the Negro in the World War has been scarcely mentioned. Victor Daly’sNot 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, inThe Ways of White Folks(1934), his first collection of short stories, shows far superior artistry. All of the stories deal with manifestationsof 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 playMulattowas 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 inThe 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 inThe New Caravan(1936). The portrait of the gang of Negro boys in the South is donewith 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’sThese 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 haverecorded 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.

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