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 has called 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. But The Tree Named John stresses 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 his Juneteenth (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, Juneteenth is 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” are included in Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama (1934) which, true to its title, concentrates upon the strange and mysterious. Vincent McHugh’s Caleb 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” to Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun and relate to Thomas Nelson Page.