1. What earlier fiction dealt with the Negro in northern cities?
2. How is the Van Vechten tradition similar to the plantation tradition?
3. List the authors who consider the Negro to be a “creature of joy.”
4. Why have the novels of “bourgeois realism” been called “prospectuses to sell the white world the idea of a Negro middle class?”
5. Why are the opposing attitudes to “passing” examples of race flattery?
6. What northern cities with large Negro populations are as yet untreated by novelists?
7. What is race-chauvinism? Point out examples in the fiction discussed.
CHAPTER X
SOUTHERN REALISM
Mystics and Poets. In his Notebook (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; in Dark Laughter (1925) Anderson himself is fascinated by the Negro’s superiority to dull, standardized whites.