Come In At The Door (1934) by William March is merciless in its exposure of certain elements of southern life, and original in its treatment of Negro characters. A Negro woman, Mitty, bears six children to the “aristocrat” Robert Hurry, who, gone to seed, is now going with the wind in the waste land of the delta country. Mitty is wily but superstitious, loyal but self-centered, kindhearted but capable of fierce hate. The traditional Aunt Hatty and Jim are well observed. Most striking of the Negro characters is Baptiste, an educated Creole, a vagabond philosopher, whose tragedy is to haunt forever the southern boy whom he tutored.
The portrait of Baptiste indicates that as southern realists look more closely at life, they too become aware of exceptional Negroes. T. S. Stribling has complained that “White educated Southerners are completely cut off from black educated Southerners by the inherited attitudes of master and slave, and the one really does not know the other exists.” Lack of contact and ignorance still handicap honest realists, but their attempt at a complete cast of characters is noteworthy.
To James Saxon Childers, “White men and black men have long ago walked out of their color and are only men.” A Novel About A White Man and A Black Man In The Deep South (1936) deals with Gordon Nicholson, a white man, and Dave Parker, a Negro, educated at the same northern school. When Dave, a talented musician, visits his friend, the southern town is alarmed, since Gordon has a sister Anne. Dave is accused of a crime for which there is not a shred of evidence. He is acquitted, but Anne’s end is tragic, merely because Dave visits her brother. Irritated by northern interference as much as by southern injustice, Childers believes that the “problem” will gradually be solved by men of good will. His Negro characters, like most of the educated Negroes in propaganda novels, are nearly faultless. The novel is unusual in its sympathy, but it is jumbled, coincidental and not always plausible.
One of the South’s most promising novelists, Hamilton Basso included recognizable Negro characters in Relics and Angels (1929). Cinnamon Seed (1934) shows deeper understanding of Negroes, both in slavery and in the present; Horace, the old family servant; Sam, ambitious, resentful and therefore doomed, and Lance who rises to be a world famous “trombone player in a band” are especially well done. In Courthouse Square (1936) which deals mainly with the plight of a justice-loving liberal in a southern town, Basso’s pictures of Negro life are even more authentic and sympathetic. Of Niggertown, which the Negroes called High Rent, he writes:
Poverty ran through the section like a plague, hunger was a frequent visitor or permanent boarder in almost every house, but the inhabitants of High Rent, merging a simple philosophy with the terrible patience of the poor, complained but little and trusted in the humanity of a singularly inhumane and white-faced God for eventual succor and release.
An unusual character is Alcide Fauget, who is “like the reverend and respected head of a tribe: banker, counsellor, physician, friend.” So fair that he had attended a white southern medical school, he serves the darker half of his people. Neither obsequious nor arrogant, he goes his own way. But when he wishes to buy an old house, falling to rack and ruin, for a much-needed Negro hospital, he has stepped over his bounds, and is driven away by a mob of his inferiors. An intelligent, humane realist, Basso has unobtrusively but memorably conveyed the tragedy of Negro life in the South.
The “Multiple” Novel: Many writers have attempted to give cross-sections of the life of southern towns by using many characters on all levels. Margaret Sperry’s Portrait of Eden (1934) shows a Florida town which, after the boom, sinks back into lethargy and intolerance. The Negroes are generally shown as exotic primitives, especially at their shouting services in “The Church of Jesus Colored.” But the picture has social understanding as well:
Aunt Melissie danced, tangling her feet in a bitter tune against all the days she’d spent serving white folks, walking their ways, and all her children born to do bidding to white men. She danced and fell reeling at last, her shoes flung to the darkness....
Outstanding is the educated Negro, John Marquis, a native of the section, who, hated by whites and double-crossed by Negroes, wants to start a school for Negro children. He is lynched, and a white liberal, his best friend, is murdered. Portrait of Eden has some exaggeration, but what it records is not too spectacular in a state where the Klan still rides.
Less directly intent upon revealing intolerance and injustice than Basso and Miss Sperry, other novelists still include these since they wish truthful pictures. Siesta, by Berry Fleming (1935), is one of the finest examples. Cotton brokers, cotton farmers, plaintively wasting “aristocrats,” society folk and crackers, in “Georgetown,” Alabama, in the long drought of summer, are unforgettably set before us. Negro characters, an important part of the town’s life, are as authentically handled. Laney Shields, ambitious and decent, is trapped in a sordid love affair with the young white doctor for whom she is office girl. A little boy’s going after the laundry becomes a dangerous odyssey in the bullying town. Mattie Small, the “obsteprician”; a famed faith-healing Bishop and his blind stooge, are similarly well drawn. In Siesta the best talkers refer to the Negro’s tragic mask, and say that southern whites can know of the Negro only what he wants them to know. This is wise: Fleming’s recognition of the tragic mask helps him to get beneath it.