20–11222
In a series of eight sketches the writer, who has lived with the negro in Mississippi, in Louisiana, in Florida, the Carolinas and Kentucky, shows him as he is, neither praising him as his over-zealous advocate, nor indulging in race hatred. It is an arraignment of the white race for keeping this primitive people so long in confusion, discouragement and ignorance. The stories cover the period from the emancipation to the present and are arranged in chronological order. The stories are: The flight; The blue handkerchief; An Inskip niggah; Pom; The sleeping sickness; Fire from heaven; Malviney; Sixty years after.
“The stories are very readable.”
+ Booklist 17:72 N ’20
“The eight stories in this book are written with a commendable intention, but that intention does not after all extend beyond a limited field and a circumscribed aspect of the negro.” W. S. B.
+ − Boston Transcript p7 S 8 ’20 600w
“Unfortunately, while Mrs Martin writes with the authoritative manner of one who has known the black man intimately, she has, as she concedes, laid no emphasis in her tales upon negroes who have, to use her phrase, forged ahead. The result is an obvious struggle between the complacence which comes of having met coloured people as servants chiefly, and the feeling that it is inconsistent to deny them opportunity and to charge their race with the consequences.” H. J. S.
+ − Freeman 2:190 N 3 ’20 210w
“Mrs Martin avoids both sentiment and indignation; her tone is warm but quiet; she lets the stern implications arise in their bare and tragic force.”