the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will be broken, and men, all of a sudden, will shake hands, black men and white men, like steel meeting steel.
Hughes does not often strike this radical note in The Ways of White Folks; most of his stories protest jim-crow insults and injustice. In “Professor,” one of his latest stories, he attacks the compromising race “leader.” Hughes’ stories exist largely for the theses, but they are skillfully done, realistic in detail and bitingly ironic.
One of the most promising explorations of a new road is Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” which appeared in The New Caravan (1936). The portrait of the gang of Negro boys in the South is done with robust understanding. Swimming in a pool posted “No Trespassing,” which meant “No dogs and niggers allowed,” the boys are caught by a white man. In a fight after one of the boys has been shot, Big Boy gets possession of the man’s rifle, and when the white man lunges for it, Big Boy shoots him. His pal, Bobo, is caught and lynched. The terror of the community before Big Boy is spirited away is graphically conveyed. “Big Boy Leaves Home” is well informed realism, rendered with power and originality.
Without the distinction of Wright’s technique, Waters Edward Turpin’s These Low Grounds (1937) is still extremely promising. For the first time a Negro novelist tells the story of four generations of Negroes. Thoroughly conversant with the life of the farmers and crabbers and oyster shuckers of the Eastern Shore, Turpin has had the courage to handle this life without idealization, without shame, but with full sympathy. The story has its bitterness and sharp protest. Poverty is omnipresent, and oppression. The town of Shrewsbury is really Salisbury, ill-famed because of a recent lynching, and Turpin describes this tragedy. His characters, for all of their illiteracy and squalor, have dogged courage. Less successful in his hasty sketches of the life of better off Negroes in the big cities, Turpin’s novel still belongs with the best novels by Negro authors.
Summary. If many of the foregoing books have contained lynchings, this may partly be explained as a natural reaction to books that have stressed the contented, comical or quaintly picturesque Negro in a sunny South which “understands him.” It is important that American novelists are revealing the tragic in Negro experience. This has been present from the earliest, and honest observers know that it has been met with fortitude and struggle. Some novelists have recorded the brutality and shame as part of a tragic America; others show the Negro resisting heroically; and still others, hoping for social justice, are urging solidarity of all of the oppressed. They indicate a new and momentous trend in modern literature. It is a trend that makes the way easier for Negro novelists who, coming of age in technique and understanding, will find an audience ready for the important stories that still must be told.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What subjects tabooed in the South are treated in the novels of this chapter?
2. Why is it natural to expect that many southern novels would stress violence?
3. What is the advantage of the “multiple novel” in setting forth a community’s life?
4. List the “exceptional” negroes in the books of this chapter.