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 in Mamba’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 foreground characters and not as background types. 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 Thursday is, 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 of Green 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.
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 succeeding Bright 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 Skin is 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 suspect Roll 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 to Swallow 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 if the moon gets contrary.... Their stories and songs teach the children to look for victory from the disadvantages to 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 her the interpreter of the 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 called Congaree 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 speak for 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: