The Negro in American fiction

by Sterling A. Brown

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. But Black 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.

In Gritny 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 Row does not match Gritny 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 his publishers 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 Chillun is 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....

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 by Ol’ Man Adam An’ His Chillun, did something toward getting reverence and awe back into the material, but here it is pure farce. King David and 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 in Let 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 on The Negro and His Songs and Negro Workaday Songs. Rainbow Round My Shoulder is 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.” Vividly written 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 Shoulder is 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....