The Blacker the Berry, by Wallace Thurman Macauly. 262 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
Plum Bun, by Jessie R. Fauset. F. A. Stokes: 379 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
One wishes these novels by two of the younger Negro writers were better balanced in technical merit, for in theme they are in important complementary contrast. Negro fiction is now near its acme, at least as far as public interest goes; the inner mechanisms of Negro life are close to the surface after generations of repression. Of course the psychological mainspring is the Negro’s own reaction to prejudice. Here on the one hand we have the story of a black girl harrassed in her adjustments to life by the subtle color prejudice of the mulatto complex from within, and on the other the equally difficult, near-tragic drama of escape by Angela, the heroine of Plum Bun, who “passes” and follows the logic of her artistic talent across the color-line.
Both novels mark significant points in that process of self-revelation to which the “new Negro” writer has set himself. Unfortunately Mr. Thurman’s first novel must be regarded as a ground-breaker only, as calling attention to an important theme—Emma Lou, the dark girl’s story, must be written sometime with greater art and a truer sense of values. For this novel in itself is sophomoric in style and downright exhibitionist in psychology. Drab realism of the favorite contemporary sort plainly misses the characteristic notes of Negro life, the warm emotional color, the naive paradoxes, the fascinating amorality, and the quizzical humor. Missing these things, Mr. Thurman’s book is more Caucasian than many a book by sympathetic and artistic white writers like Du Bose Heyward or Julia Peterkin. Still, one of the most important chapters of Negro life has been opened up, and he who reads between the lines may see the tragedy that this journalistic melodrama spotlights.
The other book is a second venture by the author of There Is Confusion, and is a far more mature rendering of life both in style and substance. Angela’s return to the race through the discovery of mixed blood in her fair-skinned lover is just as logical and as human as her resolve to venture out beyond the color-line. Here the motivation is what it normally is, life reaching out over limitations for larger living, and not just the mere canker of adopted illusions. Yet there is this latter element in Negro life also; only its tragedy must be written sympathetically and humanely.
Gradually we may say the Negro character in fiction is throwing off the wrappings of caricature and stereotype; the creatures which propaganda and counter-propaganda have given us have one common defect, they haven’t been convincingly human. When they become fully so, Negro fiction will become what it should be, a vital department of art, a significant section of life and not an extension of politics and sociology. Of Miss Fauset’s settings, Philadelphia, New York, Paris, Philadelphia is the most competently rendered; and this quiet pool of respectable Negro middle-class life is too often disregarded for the swift muddy waters of the Negro underworld and the hectic rapids and cataracts of Harlem.
With the re-publication after twenty-five years of Chestnutt, the pioneer novelist’s Conjure Woman and the announcement of Banjo, Claude McKay’s sequel to Home to Harlem, surely it is an open season for the Negro novelist.