Emily Clark’s Stuffed Peacocks (1927) is affectionately ironic toward the F. F. V’s. In “Chocolate Sponge,” a servant calmly states that she is a lady, because her grandfather was Colonel Ashton Wycherly. Since Negroes did not usually mention such facts, she is “frightfully uncomfortable to have around.” In spite of the mask of servility, which the cleverest house-servants “are careful never to let slip,” there are others who produce discomfort. Mammy Sally
had been separated, as a young woman, from her first husband, whom she loved, and transplanted in another country.... Her ancient eyes were inscrutable and not altogether pleasant when she was questioned about it.
Similarly aloof, unconventional and forbidding are two other mammies, who disdain both Negro hilarity and white sentimentality. In “Fast Color,” a Negro butler, almost a “stage darky,” kept his thoughts carefully guarded. Knowing Negro servants in “their dining-room work, the most gracious form of labor,” Miss Clark likewise knows that “their swiftest and simplest ways to impromptu gratuities” are not their only ways.
Regionalism. Less ambitious than the mystics and less probing than the critics of southern caste, a number of regionalists have followed the lead of DuBose Heyward, Howard Odum and Julia Peterkin. Nearly a decade ago a southern critic wrote that “the southerner has had to turn to the Negro when he wanted to paint life as it is”; and although less pertinent today, this partly explains the rush to describe the Negro. Many had new stories to tell, and they told them honestly and sincerely; many others offered twice-told tales. Their coverage of the South is widespread, and to follow them from Virginia to Louisiana is as good a plan as any.
Pernet Patterson’s The Road to Canaan (1931), a collection of eight stories, deals with Negro life in Richmond and the nearby country. Some are farcical, as the story where a visiting anthropologist, seeking to measure heads, spreads terror; some are pathetic. “Conjur” is a good tale of black magic; “Shoofly,” one the best, re-creates life in a tobacco factory; and “Buttin’ Blood” tells convincingly of the friendship of white and Negro boys. With no social protest and more than a trace of condescension, often engineered to end happily, Patterson’s stories still show understanding.
Paul Green’s few sketches of Negroes in Wide Fields (1928) do not have the power of his plays of Negro life, but they are sympathetic and true. There is bitterness in the stories of Arthur Loring, humble and hardworking “synonym for what the white folks thought Negroes ought to be,” and of Lalie Fowler, the mother of a child by a white farmer. Hardworking tenant farmers, “flash” sports and bad men are convincingly shown in this book as well as in Green’s novel The Body of This Earth (1935). It is significant that Green made over a story of poor-whites into a Negro farce, The Man Who Died At Twelve O’clock, with hardly any changes in idiom, characterization, and incident. A different Carolina locale and type of life are in R. H. Harriss’ The Foxes (1936), a good hunting novel which includes well described Negro stable-boys, dog trainers, and old servants.
South Carolina. A new locale of South Carolina and a new type of people are discovered in Po’ Buckra (1930) by Gertrude Shelby and Samuel Stoney, the authors of Black Genesis. In a community of quality white folks, “crackers,” Negroes and “Brass-Ankles,” Barty attempts to rise out of the last despised group, a mixture of Portuguese-Indian-Negro and American white stocks. But suspicion and gossip dog him about, and he becomes a drunkard and murderer. Minor Negro characters are well handled.
But where the authors of Po’ Buckra stand on their own feet, Mrs. L. M. Alexander in Candy (1934) seems to lean heavily upon Julia Peterkin. Trouble visits only rarely the love-free, carefree pagans of Mimosa Hill Plantation, and then it is such trouble as jealousy. Candy won a ten thousand dollar prize. Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Moan (1935) did not win a literary prize, but it did win for its author, Richard Coleman, the distinction (bandied about by so many publishers) of being one who in a single book presented “the true Southern Negro.” Needless to say Coleman approves the old dogmas such as “A nigger ... like de cotton fiel’ bettuh den any othuh place in de worl’ ...” and omits from his novel of exotic primitives any mention of insult and injustice.
Florida. Unlike Mrs. Alexander and Coleman, Zora Neale Hurston has no need to rely upon either DuBose Heyward or Julia Peterkin. Her short stories “Drenched With Light,” “Spunk” and “The Gilded Six Bits” showed a command of folklore and idiom excelled by no earlier Negro novelist. Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) recounts the rise of handsome, stalwart John Buddy from plowboy to moderator of the Baptists of Florida. But his flair for preaching and praying is exceeded by his weakness for women; even when he is married to the devoted Lucy who is “pretty as a speckled pup,” he still cannot hold his straying feet. His fall is as abrupt as his rise. Loosely constructed, the novel presents authentic scenes of timber camps, railroad gangs with the “hammer-muscling men, the liars, fighters, bluffers and lovers,” and the all-colored towns of Florida. The folk-speech is richly, almost too consistently, poetic. The characters are less developed than the setting; and the life they live is self-contained and untroubled. Nevertheless, Jonah’s Gourd Vine contains the stuff of life, well observed and rendered.
A trained anthropologist as well as a native of Florida, Zora Neale Hurston has made in Mules and Men (1935) the first substantial collection of folk-tales by a Negro scholar. Zestful towards her material, and completely unashamed of it, she ingratiated herself with the tellers of tall tales in turpentine camps, or on store porches, and with the preachers of tall sermons in backwoods churches. Whether of the folk hero John, or of Brer Dog, Brer Snail, and Brer Gator, or of more contemporary people and activity, Miss Hurston’s “big old lies” are a delight to read. Miss Hurston writes: