In another brilliant first book, Tropic Death (1926), Eric Walrond is as conversant with his native West Indian life as Toomer was with that of Georgia. Like Toomer he stressed the tragedy and pain in his milieu rather than the joy-of-living stressed by the Harlem school. Gifted with a power of description, Walrond gives us, for the first time, a vivid sense of Negro life in the tropics below the Gulf stream.
All of the stories deal with death, which to these peasants, sailors and workers does not come easily, but violently, often horribly. One child, in the droughts, eats marl; her stomach distended like “a wind-filling balloon.” Another dies, poisoned by obeah. Two “wharf rats” who dive for the coins flung by bored tourists are killed by a shark. The approach is unapologetically naturalistic; life in the tropics is not pleasant to Walrond, and he has not idealized it. He seems completely familiar with the divers West Indian dialects and with his characters’ ways of life, whether they are underpaid workers on the Big Ditch, or truck gardeners in Barbadoes, or waiters and cooks on the old vessels that plow the Spanish Main. “Subjection” tells of the murder of a Negro laborer by a marine, for interference when the marine was beating a sick worker on a road-gang. With the exception of this story, Walrond writes little of social protest. He is sardonically aware of the way imperialism is made to work, but his chief purpose is to make the reader “see,” to give him sense impression of a unique, interesting world. The prose of Tropic Death is sometimes overwritten, sometimes too oblique for clarity. But it revealed uncommon powers that, regrettably, Walrond has not used further.
Langston Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), one of the best by a Negro author, is set in a small Kansas town, a transplanted bit of the South. Sandy’s mother, Annjee, works in the white-folks’ kitchen and his grandmother, Aunt Hager, takes in washing so that Sandy shall have his chance, in spite of his irresponsible father, Jimboy. A life poor in the world’s goods is shown to be “not without laughter”: there are great colored tent meetings, carnivals, barbecues, dances, and guitar concerts by the beloved vagabond Jimboy. At their best, however, these enjoyments are poor reliefs from the day’s hard work for the white-folks. Prejudice lies all around Sandy; going to the carnival on Children’s Day, he is ordered away with “I told you little darkies this wasn’t your party.” For Sandy’s pretty, joyful Aunt Harriet, there was nothing in Stanton after awhile but street-walking to the great grief of old, tired Aunt Hager. Excepting Aunt Tempy, who is sharply satirized as a high-toned striver, all of the characters are treated with sympathy. Here, done with poetic realism, is a good novel of boyhood.
God Sends Sunday (1931), the first novel of another Negro poet, Arna Bontemps, deals with sporting life at the turn of the century. Born on a Red River plantation, little Augie, a lover of horses, becomes a famous jockey in such racing towns as San Antonio, New Orleans, Louisville, and St. Louis. At the height of his fame he was “a treat to casual eyes.”
“I’se gonna git me a two-gallon high-roller hat dat won’t do. Gonna git me a box-back coat an’ a milk white ves’ wid red roses painted on it.”... His high-roller had twenty naked women worked in the eyelets in the crown. His shirts had two-inch candy stripes of purple, pink, green or orange.... His shoes had mirrors in the toes and dove-colored uppers with large pearl buttons....
Women flocked to him, especially Della and Florence, whom he loved “worse than a horse loves corn.” But his luck turns, and Lil Augie says:
I ain’t nobody. I ain’t nuthin. I’s jes a po picked sparrow. I ain’t big as a dime, an’ I don’t worth a nickel.
With all his bravado and vanity, Lil Augie is courageous as a bantam, always ready “to try anybody one barrel.” God Sends Sunday is not pretentious, but it is a well-done portrait of a winning character.
Against Southern Charm. Three of the most intelligent women of the southern literary renaissance have had their say about the South’s vaunted charm. In Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ My Heart and My Flesh (1927) the heroine discovers that she is half-sister to Stiggins, a Negro stable boy, who is the half-witted butt of the town, and to two Negro women. Frustrated and desperate, she turns more and more to furtive companionship with her sullen half-sisters. The incidental Negroes who work in boarding house kitchens, or take in washing, or do the heavy manual labor of the Kentucky town are far from the quaintly funny folk of Irvin Cobb and Ruth McEnery Stuart.
A roughly similar situation appears in Isa Glenn’s A Short History of Julia (1928), an incisive attack upon the upper caste South. While Julia is being brought up as a hot-house plant, her servant Cynthia has a full and loose love-life. Both end up unhappily, with nothing to look forward to. Patty, one of the most believable mammies in fiction, brings up her white charges most decorously, but neglects her attractive and rebellious daughter. Chivalry is summed up by Negro characters as “white women jes’ lying and lying to theirselves.” The aristocratic men-folk, old topers, who, untrue to one “southern tradition,” often get drunk, declaim that “a pure and virtuous lady is the finest work of the Almighty.” But they keep Negro mistresses, and, in their dotage, unlike the earlier gentlemen, “forget to cover up.”