CHAPTER XI
NEW ROADS
The Pattern of Violence. Although we have seen that such authors as Wood, Heyward, Adams and Frank revealed southern injustice to the Negro, it has remained for a later group of writers to register the fullest social protest. They know the land of the jasmines and myrtles; but they know a great deal more about it than those gentle symbols. Aware that one southern tradition—that of violence—is as long-standing as any, they have added darker color to the picture of the regionalists and folk-lorists, who often in their search for the peculiar and amusing, overlooked harsh and socially significant facts. They record what, according to the formula of taboos and restrictions, should be unmentioned. In spite of the chorus of comfortable and ostrich-like people who insist that in their state “the problem has been solved,” they reveal a widespread pattern of violence.
Sweet Man (1930) by Gilmore Millen tells of John Henry, the son of a white plantation agent who could not let Negro women alone. John Henry launches out as a “sweet man,” attractive to women, on the plantations and in Memphis, and finally becomes the paramour of a wealthy white woman in California. When, unbalanced by jealousy, she tries to frame him for rape, he kills her, then himself. The early chapters give a good, naturalistic picture of plantation life; the last chapters, even though sensational, are convincing.
Amber Satyr by Roy Flannagan (1932) is similar in some respects. Luther, strong and handsome, of Negro-Indian stock, has caution enough to resist the open advances of the love-sick farm wife for whom he works. But through her brazenness, the affair is discovered, and Luther is killed by her two brothers-in-law. The newspaper report is the usual one: Luther was killed by an unknown mob. In ironic contrast, one of Luther’s murderers is the father of a child by Luther’s daughter, and at the time of the tragedy a special session of the Virginia legislature is considering the “racial-integrity” bill. Amber Satyr is shot through with sardonic humor, but its chief impact is tragic.
Less spectacular, Welbourn Kelley’s Inchin’ Along (1932) deals with Dink Britt, whose enterprise and endurance make him a dangerous example to the croppers, white and black, who must be kept brow-beaten and shiftless. A marked man, he narrowly escapes being lynched. Inchin’ Along has some traditional and silly comments about racial characteristics, but the sympathy for the plugging hero and the picture of the hard lot of the tenant farmer, show Kelly to be clear-eyed and courageous.
Robert Rylee is well informed about life in delta Mississippi, and deeply concerned with its injustice. In Deep Dark River (1935) Mose Southwick, a share-cropper, protests against his wife’s carryings-on with the plantation manager. In self defense Mose kills a bad Negro, hired to kill him. When Mose is captured and framed, a liberal white woman lawyer takes his case, but cannot defeat the concerted line-up. Mose is dependable, sober, self-contained, with grim, double-edged humor, and burdened by the miseries of his people even more than by his own. So Mose must be put out of the way. Deep Dark River is unconvincing where Rylee makes his hero a symbol of Christian resignation and attachment to the soil, and is conventional in such statements as “Mose had the mystic singing and intuitiveness of the black race and the intelligence of the white race.” The white characters here are less intelligent than stupid and vicious. Although humane, Rylee does not idealize the Negro; he includes sketches of Negro highjackers, bootleggers, easy women, and toadies for white folks. His second novel St. George of Weldon (1937) is a character study of a sensitive southern youth, and the harsh treatment of the Negro is an important element in his education.
In Death in The Deep South (1936) by Ward Greene, a novel of southern injustice, the use of the third degree to exact confessions from Negroes is powerfully depicted. Theodore Strauss’ Night At Hogwallow (1937) is a hair-raising narrative. A Negro laborer is falsely accused of rape. This results in a battle between a northern road crew and the aroused southern townsmen, a beating by the Klan, the burning of the Negro section, and a gruesome lynching. It is a dark melodrama, as life in towns like Hogwallow too often is.
Jim Tully’s Circus Parade (1927) tells the story of “Whiteface,” a Negro who rose from stake-driver to clown, and who was burned at the stake by a mob on the rampage because a Negro had stepped in front of a white woman in the ticket line. “A Negro Girl” is likewise grim naturalism; the girl, caught sneaking into the circus, is assaulted by the circus roughnecks. In Violence, A Story of Today’s South by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1928) a Negro boy, in terror of exposure after a love affair, kills a white girl. He is saved from a lynching mob, but is electrocuted. In contrast, a philandering white minister who commits murder is freed.
Exceptional Negroes. Sinclair Lewis was one of the first to break with the preconceptions of the Negro held by Main Street. In Arrowsmith (1925) he includes a capable Negro scientist who, though a minor character, stands out from the ruck of the petty, grasping victims of Lewis’ satire. In Work of Art (1934) the attractive, intelligent and bookish Tansy Quill illustrates the “common tragedy of the superior Negro ... laden with all the complexities of twentieth century America heaped upon the dark burden lugged up from old Africa’s abyss.” Her suicide is conventional, but it gives Lewis a chance to satirize authors who, from a casual acquaintance with a hotel maid, build up masterpieces about Negro psychology and the voodoo of the swamps.