The Delta. Evans Wall writes in The No-Nation Girl (1929) of Précieuse, the daughter of a white swamp-dweller and a Negro woman. It is the conventional story of the mulatto, who “had no right to be born,” falling in love with a white “outsider” and when abandoned, drowning herself in Suicide Basin, convenient for “no-nation girls.” The primitive goings-on are often halted for dogmas about the mulatto. Whenever she is decent, it is because of the inheritance from her father, who was a degraded outcast. But in moments of passion, her mother’s inheritance rules:
The girl’s half-heritage of savagery rose in a flood that washed away all trace of her father’s people except the supersensitiveness imparted by her taut nerves. She must dance or scream to relieve the rising torrent of response to the wild, monotonous rhythm.
In Love Fetish (1933) Wall deals with a “no-nation boy” in similar fashion.
Gulf Stream (1930) by Marie Stanley has more sympathy for the Creole heroine, but drives home the same thesis—that you “can’t hide from God and Affaca.” Adele, with “cream-ivory, magnolia petal skin” is easily seduced by a white man to whose home she delivers laundry. When her child is born, she refuses to look at it, fearing it will be black. Years later when she discovers that her daughter is milky-white, she becomes a devoted mother. The daughter, broadened by education, becomes engaged to a dark Negro. Adele cannot endure this, and walks into the bay to commit suicide, but love for her daughter makes her renounce the usual gesture of the tragic octoroon. Mille Fleurs Island, below Mobile, the home of mulatto Creoles of wealth and culture, is new to fiction, as is Adele’s final tirade against the father of her child. But there is also much of the usual trite generalizing about the tragedy of mixed blood.
Louisiana. Barry Benefield’s Short Turns (1926) includes two stories of Negro life. In “Ole Mistis” Old Jeff, one of the many “slaves of legal documents and ruthless legal machinery,” loses his crops and farm, and would have lost his horse, “Ole Mistis,” but for a landlord’s last-minute kindheartedness. “Sugar Pie” tells of the terror in a northern Louisiana town when Negroes are burned out, tarred and feathered, and hanged upon telegraph poles. Sugar Pie leaves the hate-ridden town, carrying the corpse of her nearly white baby. Green Margins by E. P. O’Donnell (1936) is a poetic book of the life in the delta below New Orleans, the melting pot of Slavonian, Filipino, French, Italian, Cajan and Negro fishermen, trappers and smugglers. Outstanding among the strange characters are the mulatto girl, Unga January, and Bonus, a mad Negro murderer. O’Donnell’s short stories about Negro life such as “Jesus Knew” are informed, bitter realism.
Elma Godchaux’ Stubborn Roots (1936) has a weird Negro character in Zero, who, although he insists upon wearing woman’s clothing, is the dynamic foreman on a sugar cane plantation. The respect and liking between Zero and the planter is persuasively conveyed. Other Negroes are convincingly shown at their work of planting and grinding cane and repairing the Mississippi levees. The same fidelity is in Miss Godchaux’ “The Horn That Called Bambine” and “Chains,” which contain sympathetic characterizations of Negro life along the river, with recognition of the brutality.
Lyle Saxon has brought to his novel Children of Strangers (1937) the skill and authority of his studies of New Orleans. Contrary to the usual procedure, the Negroes are treated with seriousness, and the patronizing whites who see Negroes “as the happiest people in the world” are ridiculed. Famie, the beautiful descendant of the free mulattoes who once, cultured and wealthy, owned vast plantations on Cane River, is the tragic heroine. After a traditional love affair with a white outlaw, Famie devotes herself to her child. Poverty-stricken, she sells some of the ancient heirlooms, then she becomes a servant for whites. These are violations of the caste-tabus, whereas having a child by a white man was not. When, in her loneliness, she turns to black people, and finally accepts the attention of Henry Tyler, she cuts the last family tie. Children of Strangers reveals a little known locale and people, the last of a
delicate race of Latins which had lived too near the sun.... The very old were curiously erect, their shoulders back, their chins up. They were sad, but they had dignity.... The boys and girls were handsome, their skins cream-colored or light tan....
Almost as interesting as Famie is Henry Tyler, a “shut mouth nigger—studying to himself all the time, wanting to learn to read letters.” The only socially conscious character in the book says to Henry:
It has always been like this in the South ... white men leaning on black men ... from the beginning. We made slaves of you.... You made us rich.... In rising, we pushed you further away from us.... Black men began to think, to move about, to go away.... That is why I couldn’t get you out of my mind as I watched you sweating in the field working for something that can never be yours because I have taken it from you.