Fiction

:By WILLIAM PLOMER

Black Girl, White Lady. By Alan Hyder. (Arthur Barker. 75. 6d.) THERE is no sign that racial problems are diminishing in importance. The Germans, the Jews, the English, the Japanese, the Negroes—they are always with us, and though circumstances change, these races do not greatly change at heart, and as they are brought into fresh contacts with others, disharmonies certainly do not seem to grow less : the colour bar itself is of comparatively recent growth. Though " better understanding " is a hackneyed term for what may be a vital remedy, those who regard fiction as something distinct from "serious " literature would do well to remember how much, of our knowledge and better understanding of other races, and of our own, we owe to novelists. And now here- are four novels dealing with Negroes or coloured people and their contacts with whites, none of them epoch-making masterpieces, but three of them well worth attention.

The Ways of White Folks is polished and inviting, but Jonah's Gourd Vine opens unpropitiously with a badly- written introduction and the threat of a trying dialect, of which the following sentences are examples : " You jes' do lak Ah say do and keep yo' mouf shet or Ah'll take .uh trace chain tub yuh.' " What Ah wants tuh know is, which would you ruther be, if you had yo' ruthers—uh lark uh flyin', uh uh dove uh settin' ? "

If the reader is prepared to grapple with these phonetic complications, which include the word " unhunh," he will be rewarded by a genuine and in many ways admirable tale of Negro life, told largely in idiomatic dialogue garnished with proverbial sayings and home truths. It is a story into which enter many familiar and persistent elements of Negro life, whether in Africa or America—eloquence, humour, warmth, gusto, revivalism, superstition, witchcraft. Besides this, it has that essential touch of fantasy that is seldom caught in print by white people, though Prancing Nigger was a successful attempt. Not a long novel, it yet manages to convey a sense of the lapse of time and the development of character. The account of the courtship and married life of John and Lucy Pearson is full of a homely poetry. At the beginning of the honeymoon : " When she rode off beside John at last she said, ' John Buddy, look lak de moon is givin' sunshine.' He toted her inside the house and held her in his arms infant-wise for a long time. 'Lucy, don't you worry about your folks, hear ? !dim gointer be uh father and uh mother to you. You jes' look tuh me, girl chile. Jes' you put yo"pendence in me. Ah means tuh prop you up on ev'y leanin' side.'

Having to address him as an unfaithful husband, Lucy says :

" Yeah, John, and some uh yo' moves Ah seen mahself, and if you loves her de bes', John, you gimme our chillun and you go on where yo' love lie."

" Lucy, don't tell me nothin' bout leavin' you, 'cause if you do dat, you'll make two winters come in one year."

When he is a fugitive from justice and means to take to the woods, he says :

" Ah'll give mah case tuh Miss Bush and let Mother Green stand mah bond."

And here, for humour, is the conversation of another couple about to be wedded :

" Whar yo' shoes, Pomp ? " Mehaley asked. " You ain't gwine marry me barefooted, is yuh ? " •

Dey over dere under de bed. Yo' paw and the preacher argued so long and dem new shoes hurted mah foots so bad Ah took 'em off. Now Ah can't git 'em back on. Dat don't make uh bit uh difference. You gointuh see mah bare foots uh whole heap after die."

Mr. Langston Hughes, a Negro writer of considerable talent, has produced a collection of short stories about some of those points in American society where black meets white. They are some of the best short stories in English that have been written by a Negro, and under their diverting surface lurks a sorrowful awareness of racial problems. The author's

attitude seems not far removed from that of Milberry, a black boy who has one of the stories to himself : •

" The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks, is too much for me. I reckon they must be a few good ones, but most of 'ern ain't good—leastwise they don't treat me good. And Lawd knows, I ain't never done nothin' to 'em, nothin' a-tall."

it should not be surmised from this that Mr. Hughes allows himself to give way to violent protest : on the contrary, his obvious good nature leads him mostly to indulge in kindly satire, especially at the expense of those whites who " go in for " Negroes. Where the strain of injustice or of some cruel irony of circumstance is too much for him, it is not so much bitterness he expresses as the inexhaustible, noble and somewhat fatalistic patience of his long-suffering race. Unlike Miss Hurston, he employs a minimum of eccentric spelling : his Negroes do not lose character thereby, and belong more recognizably to our own world. On the other hand, the view of Negro character which he provides is not so objective or so wide in scope as Miss Hurston's. In his black characters the genial and gentle, tolerant and martyrish aspects of the Negro are most in evidence : it is upon the whites that he employs the resources of his irony. Anyone who has lived among black people knows what acute observers they are of ourselves. It is gratifying to find this acuteness in print.

Pitch Lake takes us to the West Indies. A book with a remarkably irrelevant title, it has, as Mr. Aldous Huxley

explains, " the great and very uncommon merit of being written by a man who is a native of the tropical place of which he writes." Mr. Alfred Mendes is a Trinidad Portuguese,

and his story is laid in Port-of-Spain, where the population includes Negroes, Indians, Chinese, South Americans and Europeans, and where, accordingly—to quote Mr. Huxley again—" there are constant opportunities for the clash of conflicting traditions and ways of life, for endless permutations and combinations of race hatreds and contempts, of envies and sycophancies, of bullyings and inferiority complexes and pathetically swaggering over - compensations." Mr. Mendes has not attempted a cross-cut or panoramic survey of the population in general, nor has he been at all interested in making Port-of-Spain visible to the reader. His leading characters are few, and mainly Portuguese, and he chiefly directs attention to the difficulties into which a certain Joe da Costa is led by a weak nature ever at its weakest where women are concerned. On the whole, his story produces rather a depressing effect. This is probably due to the fact

that the standards of the little West Indian world with which he deals are the standards of lower middle-class people so unsure of their place in the world that most of their time is taken up in trying to maintain or advance it by sticking closely to a narrow and ruthless system of racial and social conven- tions and taboos. He does not write with the poetic fervour that might raise the difficulties of his characters to the level of tragedy, nor does he exploit the comedy that might be discerned in the behaviour of such persons as the barely- mentioned Mrs. Texeira, who " didn't like her girls to go on picnics without her," or Mr. Stanhope, the English clergyman who would turn to his dog with an " Eh, Prince, my boy, what do you say, eh, about Christmas being upon us already ?" But Mr. Mendes must not be reproached for not having brought the resources of a Flaubert or a Jane Austen to bear on his subject. A serious writer at work in an unfamiliar field, he has written a truthful and workmanlike novel.

" Strong meat ; very strong meat," says the publisher of Black Girl, White Lady. A near-white -Jamaican girl, brought up

by a mother who is a negress, devotes herself to the business of getting accepted as white.

" Either it is jest black-gal an' Ise stays here in dis place with mammy—or dese facts takes me down along past all dem cabins an' dem po' black niggers. Ise jest got to walk right past dem cabins to be white-lady. Jest got to walk right past."

Unfortunately as soon as Mr. Hyder gets her past the cabins he begins to offer us " strong meat " instead of a plausible story, and the effectiveness of his opening chapters rapidly deteriorates.