20–5123
A story of the race problem told with an effective restraint. The plot is unusual. A white baby, for family reasons, is left in a negro cabin, to be brought up as a negro child and until the age of nineteen, to believe herself of negro blood. Then a dying and repentent grandfather restores her to her name and position and she is free to cross the line into the white world. Realizing what her fate will be wherever her story is known, she chooses to lose herself in New York, earning a living in the garment trades. Here she finds herself on the edge of the labor movement, but she is never quite drawn into it. She remains outside the conflict. The call to action comes to her when the life of her dark brother, the playmate of her childhood, is endangered, and to save him from the fury of a lynching mob, enraged to the point of blood lust at thought of a negro who has laid his hand on a white woman’s arm, she again crosses the color line and falsely declares herself of negro birth. The story ends as it began, in the South, with Hertha entering the beautiful southern home of which she is to be mistress, but even within its protection, with her lover’s arm about her, she looks ahead and knows that “the shadow of man’s making” will always lie beside her path.
Booklist 16:314 Je ’20
“Miss Ovington has written a novel of keen interest. She has handled the story unfalteringly. She has shown the immense possibilities that lie in such a theme when treated truthfully and artistically. She treats her colored characters with the same attributes of nature and temperament as the whites, and in so doing opens up the way to the possibilities in the future of American fiction.”
+ Boston Transcript p4 Je 2 ’20 2000w
“In no recent book has the American negro’s problem been more sympathetically treated than in ‘The shadow.’ She succeeds throughout in treating them as individuals rather than as racial types and does so with a simple and unselfconscious realism.” M. G.
+ Freeman 2:93 O 6 ’20 160w
“The execution is unexceptionable, but the people and the incidents lack concreteness. No doubt Miss Ovington has seen them in the flesh. But she has seen them as a sociologist rather than as an artist. But this will not trouble the average reader at all. And since in most of the novels he gets the characters are conventionalized into conformity with the demands of intolerance and hatred, one cannot but desire a wide popularity for this book in which the controlling spirit is one of humanity and of the civilized instincts.”
+ − Nation 110:558 Ap 24 ’20 160w