The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and do not say to our questioner: ‘Get out of here!’ We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person, because, caring so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.... ‘He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.’
Unfortunately, Mules and Men does not uncover so much that white collectors have been unable to get. The tales ring genuine, but there seem to be omissions. The picture is too pastoral, with only a bit of grumbling about hard work, or a few slave anecdotes that turn the tables on old marster. The bitterness that E. C. L. Adams recorded in Nigger to Nigger is not to be found in Mules and Men.
Miss Hurston’s second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is informed and sympathetic. After unfortunate marriages—the first husband, a grubbing farmer, looked like “some old skull-head in de graveyard,” and the second was intent only upon being the “big voice” in Eatonville—Janie Sparks is whirled into an idyllic marriage with high-spirited Tea Cake. There are good sketches of the all-colored town where comic-serious debates and tall tales are told on the mayor’s store porch. But the love story and the poetic folk-speech are the chief interests. The people, “ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor,” who swarm upon the “muck” for short-time jobs, do not get much attention. Life in the all-colored town is fairly easy, with enough money and work to go around. Here and there social protest is evident: in the aftermath of the hurricane the conscripted grave-diggers are ordered to make sure of the race of the victims, since the whites are to get pine coffins, and the Negroes, quick lime.
They’s mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment. Look lak they think God don’t know nothin’ ’bout de Jim Crow law.
The pine barrens and the swamps of Florida are the setting of Edwin Granberry’s Strangers and Lovers (1928) in which the mutual hostility of the Negroes and “crackers,” the brutality and the violence are skillfully detailed. In Theodore Pratt’s Big Blow (1936) a poor white girl who lives by herself in the waste-land is protected by Clay, a giant Negro. When a “cracker” forces his attention upon her, Clay saves the girl, apologetically but firmly. The “cracker” is astounded that Clay has “put hand to a white man.” Clay is strung up by a mob, and it is only by the greatest luck that he is saved.
Georgia. In Glory (1932), Nan Bagby Stephens, dealing with Negro life in a small southern Georgia town, is as intimate as Julia Peterkin with Negro speech and folkways. But her people, not the unmoral pagans of Blue Brook plantation, are earnest, self-reliant workers, in whose lives the church plays a very important part. The new minister, though not an Elmer Gantry, brings grief to the community by seducing Leah, one of the finest girls of his congregation. Roseanne, her sister, in a melodramatic scene confronts him with news of the girl’s death, and revenge is swift. Although the seduction scenes are unconvincing, the setting and characters are well drawn. Roseanne, shrewd about human nature until hypnotized by the preacher, is like Heyward’s Mamba and Hughes’ Aunt Hager, laboring and sacrificing so that the young will have a chance. Other characters are interesting: the railroad men, the charcoal peddler, the hair-dresser who says, “I puts ’em in and I takes ’em out,” meaning that she marcels on one side of the railroad tracks and straightens hair on the other. And the Ladies Aid Society, pathetically caring for their little church and worshipful of the preacher, is much more representative of Negro religion than the usual scenes of revival frenzy.
Death Is A Little Man (1936) by Minnie Hite Moody likewise deals with a hard-working, sacrificial heroine of strict morality who, living in the Atlanta Bottoms, has more than her share of trials and tribulations. The overfrequent violence becomes melodramatic, much that affects the life of the Bottoms is left out, and Fate is blamed too often. But the insight into character, the true local color and the skillful prose, entirely in the cadence and idiom of southern Negro speech, bear witness to an informed and sympathetic observer.
The Black Belt. Earth Born by Howard Snyder (1929) records the superstitions, songs, dances and church services of tenant farmers in the cotton belt. Parson Robinson, the Negro plantation owner, the wanton Malindy, her lover Big Jim Mississippi, and the violence and loose love making of an isolated community, are in the tradition of Julia Peterkin. So is Ollie Miss (1935) by George Wylie Henderson, the first Negro novelist to deal with sharecroppers. But the heroine, whether working her crop like a man, or restlessly hankering after the old days with her lover, or planning a farm for herself and her child, is well drawn, and the novel is a work of faithful realism.
Reuben Davis’ Butcher Bird (1936), another story of Negro sharecroppers, likewise centers attention upon a woman, “a butcher bird ... one of these here womens that gobbles up all the mens she can, then sticks the rest of them around on thorn trees and barb wire till she gets hongry again.” This wanton brings trouble to the hard-working hero until his quiet dependability makes a new woman of her and she sacrifices her life for his. Written out of considerable knowledge of folk-life, Butcher Bird excels local color like Earth Born by its sympathetic characterization.
George Lee’s River George (1936) is less concerned with free love affairs that end in violence, and more with the troubles of sharecropping life disclosed by recent studies. In the first part, as good a picture of sharecropping as any Negro author has achieved, George is a good worker, but since he is educated, knows when he is cheated, and teaches organization, he is a “bad Negro.” He becomes worse when the Negro paramour of a white man falls in love with him. Forced to run away to Memphis after shooting the white man, he becomes the legendary man of the river, told of in the author’s earlier Beale Street. Unreasonably, he returns to his native section and is lynched upon arrival. The second part of the book contains too much, but the first is truthful and therefore bitter. Its grimness stands in no need of the final less credible lynching.