But one finds on all hands the weakening of race consciousness, impatience with Race Champions and a growing taste for literature as such. The wedge has entered the great inert mass and one may expect some noble things from the Florida Negro in Art in the next decade.

  Stories of Conflict

  Review of Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright, New York: Harper & Bros. (The Story Press), 1938.

  This is a book about hatreds.1 Mr. Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.2 Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work.

  But some bright new lines to remember come flashing from the author’s pen. Some of his sentences have the shocking-power of a forty-four. That means that he knows his way around among words. With his facility, one wonders what he would have done had he dealt with plots that touched the broader and more fundamental phases of Negro life instead of confining himself to the spectacular. For, though he has handled himself well, numerous Negro writers, published and unpublished, have written of this same kind of incident. It is the favorite Negro theme just as how the stenographer or some other poor girl won the boss or the boss’s son is the favorite white theme. What is new in the four novelettes included in Mr. Wright’s book is the wish-fulfillment theme. In each story the hero suffers but he gets his man.

  In the first story, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the hero, Big Boy, takes the gun away from a white soldier after he has shot two of his chums and kills the white man. His chum is lynched, but Big Boy gets away. In the second story there is a flood on the Mississippi and in a fracas over a stolen rowboat, the hero gets the white owner of the boat and is later shot to death himself. He is a stupid, blundering character, but full of pathos. But then all the characters in this book are elemental and brutish. In the third story, the hero gets the white man most Negro men rail against—the white man who possesses a Negro woman. He gets several of them while he is about the business of choosing to die in a hurricane of bullets and fire because his woman has had a white man. There is a lavish killing here, perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers. In the fourth story neither the hero nor his adversary is killed, but the white foe bites the dust just the same. And in this story is summed up the conclusions that the other three stories have been moving towards.

  In the other three stories the reader sees the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late. A dismal, hopeless section ruled by brutish hatred and nothing else. Mr. Wright’s author’s solution, is the solution of the PARTY—state responsibility for everything and individual responsibility for nothing, not even feeding one’s self. And march!

  Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf. But aside from the broken speech of his characters, the book contains some beautiful writing. One hopes that Mr. Wright will find in Negro life a vehicle for his talents.

  The Chick with One Hen*

  In the January issue of Opportunity Dr. Alain Leroy Locke published something which he calls a criticism of the Negro books published in 1937.2 No matter which way you look at it, the piece is an example of rank dishonesty. It has not the innocence of conviction in error. It is a conscious fraud. Dr. Locke knows that he knows nothing about Negroes, and he should know, after The New Negro, that he knows nothing about either criticism or editing, both being branches of the same thing. Dr. Locke, conscious of his degrees, pants to be a leader, and in his eagerness to attract attention he rushes at any chance to see his name in print, however foolish his offering.

  For instance he says in what he calls a criticism of Their Eyes Were Watching God, that the great force of the book was in the folk lore in it as in my other two books. Now, either Dr. Locke does not know Negro folk lore or he lies with malice afore thought. There is not a folk tale in the entire book. A folk character is mentioned in one connection that does not affect the story in any way. If Dr. Locke knows nothing about the matter, then he should have kept quiet. If he does know better, then he should have felt the obligation of his many degrees to be honest. To his discomfort I must say that those lines came out of my own head. In the final paragraph he says that the book has “condescension” which is just another instance of Dr. Locke’s trying to bruise the brains of the public with his personal angle.3 I know just why he said it and I am going to point it out.

  Dr. Locke wants to be a leader. He felt sure that his degrees would guarantee that much at least.4 But the time has passed when Negroes bowed down before mere letters on a piece of paper. And so far, Dr. Locke has offered nothing else to see. Up to now, Dr. Locke has not produced one single idea, or suggestion of an idea, that he can call his own. So far he has not had the courage to even champion an idea that belonged to someone else until it was already generally accepted. He waits good to see which way a procession is going then when he is very sure, he rushes up to the head of it by a forced march in the dark and says, “Come on, parade, I’m your leader!” He will approve of anything that is already approved of. So lacking in both talent and courage, he has failed to be that which he yearns for—a leader. Now this brings us to the second clause. When he says that there is “condescension” in Their Eyes Were Watching God, he is complaining that I do not write like Sterling Brown.5 And that constitutes a crime in the good doctor’s present feeling about Sterling Brown. Not that Dr. Locke has any sympathy with either the down-trodden Negro nor the working man, but Sterling Brown is committed to that political philosophy and that is enough for Locke. His impatience with everyone who does not agree with Sterling Brown could be likened to the fury of a hen with one lone chick, but in this case, the ideas belong to Sterling so we have to say the chick with one lone hen. Sterling, it seems, consults with Locke, so he must be right. Nobody objects to Sterling Brown having his own political view-point. He is free to write volumes and volumes about it. But not between the covers of my books. My great crime is that I did not consult Dr. Locke. Seeing that all of the great critics of America approved of the book Dr. Locke certainly would have approved of it if I had consulted him. And God help those who go ahead and succeed without consulting him!

  An instance of Dr. Locke’s insincerity. I remember well at Howard University that he was one of the leaders in a hullabaloo against the singing of Negro spirituals.6 That was before so many people in high places had praised them. Now he tootches his lips all out and shivers with ecstasy when he speaks of “those beautiful and sensitive things.” I remember his trembling with emotion over “the faithfulness to Negro religion” in The Green Pastures.7 Which is anything you want to call it but the truth. But nobody was going to catch Dr. Locke not chiming in with anything so popular as that.

  Dr. Locke is abstifically a fraud, both as a leader and as a critic. He knows less about Negro life than anyone in America. And if what he did in The New Negro is a sample, he does not know anything about editing and criticism either. You can tell by reading what he writes that he intends to be a great big fraud. It does succeed in being a fraud, but not a big one. He intends to pass off his “personal” touches as criticism. He is a public turn-coat and ought to be pointed out as such. He has set himself up as an opinion-passer without having the material for the opinions. I will send my toe-nails to debate him on what he knows about Negroes and Negro life, and I will come personally to debate him on what he knows about literature on the subject. This one who lives by quotations trying to criticize people who live by life!!

  Jazz Regarded as Social Achievement

  Review of Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz by Rudi Blesh, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.

  Comes now Rudi Blesh to sing the trumpet and the city.1 The trumpet is the “vocal” trumpet of jazz, and the city was founded by the French and named New Orleans.

  “Shining Trumpets” is a fairly large and definitely ambitious book, generously illustrated with photographs of contributors to the history of the art of jazz. There is a meaty appendix to the work and a helpful index. The text at times is plaintive, sighing for the days when Negro dance music was jazz and jazz was king—before the big band was born and swing began its bobby-soxing reign. Then the author waxes indignant at the usurpation and the usurpers of the throne of jazz. At times the book is mighty informative, and the author makes some penetrating observations on persons prominent in the music world and evaluates their contributions.

  Rudi Blesh is a prophet and apostle and quite boldly assumes the role of special pleader in this book. For him it is jazz and New Orleans against the world, and he is out there on the battlefield with his sword right in his hand. “Shining Trumpets” is the result of this militant enthusiasm. There was also “the need of a serious book about authentic jazz.”

  There is no clear-cut definition for the lay reader of what jazz really is other than the statement that it is a method of playing certain instruments. The reader is given a colorful picture of New Orleans in the decade following the Civil War, when jazz is reputed to have originated in that city. He is treated to the spectacle of the marching street bands of the Negro fraternal orders; the dances and social affairs employing these bands in the birthing years of jazz; the wind-voiced instruments, cornets and the like that came to be the foundation of jazz as it was played.

  “Jazz emerged. It began not merely as one more form of Negro folk music in America, but as a fusion of all the Negro musics already present here. These, the work-songs, spirituals, ragtimes and blues all stemmed back more or less completely to African spirit and technique . . . took all this music and added elements of American white folk musics. It added, as well, the music and the distinct instrumentation of the marching (brass) bands and the melodies of French dances, (memories even from the French Opera House), the quadrille, polka, waltz, the rhythms and tunes of Spanish America and the Caribbean, and many other musical elements.

  “The American Negro poured these rich and varied ingredients into his own musical melting pot and added his own undying memories of his life on the Dark Continent. . . . Under the pot he built the hot fire of creative force and imagination and then, preparatory to a miracle, stirred them all together. For jazz is no musical hybrid. It is a miracle of creative synthesis.”

  These words, perhaps the nearest in the book to a definition, or explanation of what constitutes jazz, leave the layman hazy. The analytical will certainly wonder how all these elements, available by pure accident at the time, and so unlike in concept and expression, could ever have come to sound so Negroid in the first place, and secondly could have been considered by the author as forming the basis of a permanent art. When Mr. Blesh takes to task the big-name bands that superseded the small jazz bands after 1935 for stealing from the classic composers, is he not accusing them of doing the same thing that he praised in the originators of jazz? If a technique, by his own admission, borrowed from the white military bands along with the instruments, and the material borrowed from so many white sources, could be considered authentic Negro art, then the history of jazz and its dethronement by the big swing bands was inherent in the beginning. Mr. Blesh’s complaints against swing and the mores of the times amount to something like that anecdote which was going the rounds some years ago: The wife complains to her husband that the maid is not honest. What is her proof? Why, all those towels which they took from the hotel, the maid had stolen.

  Rudi Blesh makes a laudable attempt to present the history of jazz in a self-setting . . . to display his pearl upon the nacre of the oyster shell. But he goes too far afield, and the reader finds his attention directed away from jazz men and the development of jazz to questions of social justice, race, and even anthropology, ethnology, and biology, none of which he deals with in a convincing manner. These rushes of scholarship to the head lend to the book a highly suppositious flavor. The author hands down dicta with the air of being as unoriginated as God.

  For example, he tosses off his ideas about the origins of the blues, without seeming ever to have heard of that authentic cradle of the blues, the Jook.2 He states in one place that the work-songs were brought to this country from Africa. He thinks that the spirituals came from white hymns, the same mistake made by Dr. George Pullen Jackson from examination of too few samples and hasty generalization.3

  And the author reads out of the lodge any characters that do not meet his personal definition of jazz. In this subjective manner he discounts W. C. Handy, and many others, Negro and white.4 He completely ignores a magnificent blues singer like Ethel Waters.5 In the days when she did sing them, she could and did lift a blues song from her well known diaphragm and lam it against the back wall of a theatre with the very best. Yet from “Shining Trumpets” the reader would get the impression that Ethel Waters was as unheard of as God’s brother. Mr. Blesh plays down Josh White, who by many is considered a truly great guitarist in the Negro manner, which is the most intricate guitar-picking on earth.6 Gabriel Brown is not even mentioned, though he too is a great artist on the guitar and in recordings.7 Instead Mr. Blesh plays up Lead Belly, who, as a performer, I would swear, is not worthy to unlatch the shoes of either.8 He is, however, a discovery of Alan Lomax, to whom the author acknowledges his indebtedness.9 Under the flag of the championship of “pure” jazz, Mr. Blesh either ignores, or takes a swing at, many successful Negro and white exponents of popular music whom he accuses of hybridizing “true” jazz. Louis Armstrong is for him a notable exception.10

  In spite of these disagreements with Mr. Blesh I find “Shining Trumpets” a valuable contribution to American music. The author has painstakingly assembled an imposing mass of records and analyzed them for the reader. His accounts of jazz-making and jazz-makers from 1870 on makes extremely interesting reading. Without the belaboring which Mr. Blesh gives the point, the intelligent reader can discern in the history of jazz a comforting social achievement. For here is the pageant of the popular music of the nation based on Negro idioms, developed and elaborated and diffused through the nation by white and Negro performers and composers alike, the various elements combining to produce a dynamic voice of the people, by the people, and most certainly for the people—a national art. This mode of expression, certainly more inwardly understood than the austere Declaration of Independence, more nearly typifies the spirit that broods over the continent.

  Review of Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant

  Review of Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant, New York: Macmillan, 1946.

  Voodoo in New Orleans is offered by Robert Tallant, the author, as the most authoritative work on the subject.1 The student of folklore therefore expects to find first, properly authenticated material unpublished before, and the answers to the following questions: 1. What is Voodoo? 2. What is its esoteric background? 3. Who were and are the exponents and carriers of this culture in New Orleans? 4. From what sources did the author gather his material? 5. What is the historical background? 6. What inferences have been drawn to add to the sum total of human knowledge?

  There is nothing in Voodoo in New Orleans concerning Hoodoo (to use the American name) that has not already been published, and in more specific terms:2

  1. Hoodoo is nowhere defined in the text, except by implication. “Voodoo is an all-embracing term which included not only the god and the sect, but all its rites and practices, its priests and priestesses, and the people who obeyed its teachings” (p.9). No god of that name, nor any of its possible derivatives has ever been found in Africa by the Herskovits[es], nor any of the other anthropologists who have made studies of African religions. “. . . thousands of these snake-worshippers were sold into slavery in the West Indies” (p. 9). (For this authority, see Magic Island by William Seabrook but no scientist has ever found snake-worship predominant in West Africa, an area of ancestor-worship.3 In the few tribes where it is found, the snake is the symbol of fertility.) “. . . clawing and biting and falling on the ground in embraces of frenzied lust. They were possessed.” (Again see Magic Island. It is apparent that the author defines the functions of Hoodoo as a mere stimulation to sex. He fails, however, to sustain this all the way through.)

  2. The author makes no attempt to establish the esoteric background by a comparative study of the African religions, nor the developments in Santo Domingo. He merely quotes several writers of fiction who wrote about occurrences brought to public notice. Thus he follows closely, not what went [on] inside of the Hoodoo establishments, but the popular notions about Hoodoo which include the clichés of all fiction writers when describing a primitive rite anywhere. They dance, go into a frenzy and crawl off into the dark in couples, just as all fictional ghosts rattle chains.

  3. The best efforts of the author were in digging out of the newspaper files the names of the best known Hoodoo “doctors” of the past. No light is thrown upon those numerous others, however, who did not for one reason or another attract the notice of the press or the police.

  It would have been infinitely more valuable to the work had the author spent less time trying to establish the well-known Marie Leveau as a procurer and a gambler and more upon the aspect of her work as a Hoodooist.4 The length, too, that he dwelt upon the spurious Marie Leveau II is both worthless and wasted, for numerous women sprang up after Marie Leveau to attempt to profit by her reputation. The New Orleans area is crowded with both men and women to this day who claim to be descended from Leveau in one way or another, and to be following her routines. The effort to establish relationship is just as footless as to comment on the blood relationship between the subsequent Roman Emperors and the family of the Caesars. An analogous situation exists on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts where so many Hoodoo doctors claim to be a “doctor Buzzard” after the success of the first man of that name, who has long been dead.5