Caldwell is convinced that “much of the matter about the southern Negro and the southern white man has been a garbled mixture of romance and mis-statement,” and the authoritative fiction he writes about his native sharecropping country bears this out.
Proletarian Realism. Caldwell’s “Kneel To The Rising Sun” represents one of the most important trends in contemporary fiction. The Negro is at last being discovered as part of the working class. Radical novelists now stress the exploitation of the Negro masses, and urge that it is only by the solidarity of all workers that a new social order can be achieved. In spite of the overstress of propaganda, these writers contribute a great deal to realism. Seeing many of the so-called Negro characteristics as class disabilities, aware of much that is common in the lives of the poor, they have been able to get close to their characters, without condescension and without idealizing. They start from the basic beliefs that the Negro has been a great factor in building up America, that he has been miserably underpaid, that he is growing steadily more conscious of, and restive under exploitation, and that he can get nowhere without the white worker, nor the white worker without him. These are all truths that have long needed to be told. By themselves, they do not guarantee good fiction, but they cannot be neglected without falsity to Negro experience, and the contemporary American scene.
Scott Nearing’s Free-Born (1932), “unpublishable by any commercial concern,” is as well documented as his Black America, a sociological exposé of exploitation and persecution. The title is ironic: the “freeborn” Negroes are landless sharecroppers, kept from “jumping contracts” by a patrol system. One southern judge threatens to adjourn court and “attend to the matter himself” if there are not enough “he-Americans” to do a job of lynching. Jim, the hero, sees the burning of the Rosenwald school and the lynching of his mother and father (one of the most gruesome ever recorded in fiction and taken from actuality). His sweetheart is raped and murdered. In Chicago he is caught up in the race-riot. Embittered and desperate, he is taught by a communist that “t’aint cause you’se black that you’se exploited,” and that only by fighting shoulder to shoulder with white workers will there ever be a “free world under working class control.” Rebuffed by labor leaders, Jim nevertheless sticks to his new-found cause. Jailed for leading a strike, he dedicates himself to black and white slaves “who never were freed ... who keep your high and mighty world a-goin’.” Free-Born crowds too much upon the shoulders of its young hero, and is unconvincing in such details as Jim’s continued dialect after he has read Upton Sinclair, Marx and Lenin. But it is significant as the first revolutionary novel of Negro life.
Georgia Nigger (1932) is another exposure, attacking the convict-lease system and the chain-gang, with thorough documentation based upon visits, prison records and photographs. Spivak describes such devices of punishment as the iron collar, spikes, double-shackles, the stocks, the whipping post, the Georgia rack, where convicts are tortured by stretching, and the “sweat-box, a coffin of thick wood standing upright.” The convicts who rot their lives away in the filthy cages may be robbers and killers, or they may just as often be like David, a mere lad, picked up on petty charges to do the county’s hard work. Arrested in a round-up because Mr. Deering, in cahoots with the sheriff, has a lot of cotton to be picked, David is “redeemed” by the planter. Escaping from Deering’s armed camp, where Negroes who die from overwork are weighted and buried in the swamp, David is rearrested as a vagrant, and this time chooses the chain gang in preference to peonage, exchanging hell for hell. Throughout Georgia Nigger the Negro is shown to be a catspaw; vicious and murderous guards, landlords and sheriffs nullify the half-hearted interference of the better-disposed whites. But it contains more than the shocking; the heartbreaking struggle of David’s family against poverty is conveyed with deep feeling.
In Myra Page’s Gathering Storm (1932) the hill-people who have become underpaid, hungry “lint-heads,” doomed to shameful living, and the Negroes whose wretchedness is even greater, come together because of common suffering. Marge, a child of hill-people, reaches out to Negro workers “across the miles”, denounces the old way of hatred and bitterness, and urges the new way of solidarity. She and a Negro organizer are forerunners of the “gathering storm.” Like Free-Born in many respects, covering too much ground, Gathering Storm is even more of a thesis novel. But Miss Page’s sympathy with her Negro characters goes deep.
Dealing with a similar setting, Call Home The Heart contains but few scenes involving Negroes. Ishma, a mountain woman, saves a Negro organizer from a lynch mob but is revolted by close contact with Negroes: “Mountain people are always white.” A matured radical, recognizing the strength of her long-bred prejudice, patiently tries to persuade her that unless the workers of both races stand together, they will continue to be clubbed, driven and starved. Miss Burke’s A Stone Came Rolling (1935) contains more about the Negro. The “kindliness” of the past is satirized in an excellent description of a slave-trading. The present is desperate: a Negro woman says: “I ain’t had what you could call work in six months—not a tap at a snake.” An educated Negro, brought in as a safe speaker at a political rally, waits until white hearers have left, and then attacks the conservative speechmakers and urges Negroes to organize. Unemployed whites and Negroes march together, singing militant words to hymn tunes. In such a crisis, the city fathers, churchmen, and sheriff must have a victim. Stomp Nelson, a tireless, fearless, Negro organizer is selected, but by a ruse, his white comrades of the Unemployed Council save him from the mob. Negro characters are not major actors, but the Negro is shown as an important participant in the stirring of southern labor. The use of race prejudice by the overlords to prevent workers’ solidarity is clearly indicated.
In Now In November (1934) and Winter Orchard (1935) Josephine Johnson occasionally describes the harshness of Negro life. Her Jordanstown (1937) records a fight for better living conditions for the jobless and the underpaid in a small midwestern town. Anna Mosely, “a tall, mammoth Negress ... too articulate and brooding for her own people, too proud to be popular with employers ... alien in the bitter gifts of intelligence and race” is an interesting person, whether in her married life with Ham, or talking in meetings, or writing the song for the disinherited, or leading the march, or lying unconquered in jail, or inspiring the young white leaders: “Not till we do something all together ... we won’t change mo’ than a stitch in the world.”
The bitterness and understanding of Grace Lumpkin’s “White Man” (1927), the story of a Negro girl seduced by her employer, reappears with added power in A Sign For Cain (1935). A small southern community is well realized: the well meaning but weak liberals, resenting any interference with their “contented nigras”; the respectable judge (bought and paid for); the bootlegging and pandering leader of the American Legion who is the defender of law and order; the white men with their Negro women; the high-school boys ripe for violence; and the sheriff who keeps the Negroes “scared to raise their voices too high.” Nevertheless, when Denis, a young organizer returns home, he finds allies ready to join his struggle for justice. Denis is slowly but surely bringing about the union of underpaid white and black workers, when a few leaflets are lost, and traitors sell him out. Framed for the murder of a wealthy white woman, Denis is shot by the real murderer, who fears investigation by the northern lawyers. Denis is quiet but strong, humble only before the great work he has set himself to do; in jail, attacked by the deputies, he cries out “I’ve got no rights as a citizen. Then I stand on my rights as a man.” Other Negroes are well done: Mum Nancy, whose long years of meekness bring a sorry inheritance; Selah, the bound-out slavey, awaking to courage and hatred; Brother Shadrack Morton whose sermon on submissiveness in lynch-time is drowned out by groans, and Ficents, easy-going, but insisting “I got some fight in me yet; if there’s something to fight for.” Most interesting after Denis is old Ed Clarke, whose memory of his lynched father is still burning, a hard worker, unlearned but manly, leaving one master because he could do with “less kindness and more cash,” and contemptuous of “white-folks’ niggers.” The old plantation record furnishes ironic asides: one entry reads, “Sold Negro $1,200. Beautiful day”; another reads, “Candies for little Negroes ... 25 cents worth.”
Negro Novelists On New Roads. Except for a few cartoons, such as Two Black Crows in the A.E.F., the Negro in the World War has been scarcely mentioned. Victor Daly’s Not Only War (1932) “dedicated to the army of disillusioned,” attempts to do justice to the record of Negro troops. There is less about warfare, however, than about the workings of race prejudice. A southern white officer, who has carried on a flirtation with a Negro girl in the states, “breaks” a Negro non-commissioned officer for visiting a French girl. In a big drive the white officer is wounded; the Negro soldier tries to save his life. They are found the next morning, “face downward, their arms about each other.” Coincidences are too much relied upon, and the novel follows the apologist pattern, but the aim to deal seriously with what has been caricatured is noteworthy. Greater Need Below (1936) by O’Wendell Shaw deals with the life of a southern Negro college, but the characters are too idealized, and the plot is forced. The subject deserves a better novel.
Langston Hughes, in The Ways of White Folks (1934), his first collection of short stories, shows far superior artistry. All of the stories deal with manifestations of white prejudice. Hughes states that by white folks he really means “some white folks,” but the stories which turn the tables of caricature and contempt often seem inclusive. “Slave On the Block” and “The Blues I’m Playing” satirize the people “who went in for Negroes—a race that was too charming and naive and lovely for words.” “A Good Job Gone” shows the break-up of a wealthy white man who, fascinated by a golden-brown wanton, is jilted for a Negro elevator boy. “Rejuvenation Through Joy” farcically tells of a colony of effete whites who listen to lectures by a Negro, passing for white, who preaches the occult value of primitive rhythm. “Cora,” one of the most successful stories, attacks small town puritanism. In “Home” a world renowned artist returns home to be lynched as an “uppity nigger.” In “Father and Son,” from which the play Mulatto was taken, the son of Colonel Norwood and his housekeeper, determined not to be “a white folks’ nigger,” chokes his father to death after a quarrel and is lynched. In this not always convincing story, Hughes looks forward to the time when