Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

and what is the right procedure for
black people.
In his story, "The Nickel Misery of
George Washington Carver Brown,"
Jewish Ivan Gold writes about a
black soldier who simply is not to be
believed, except in the fond fantasies
of white people . He speaks in an
ersatz Amos and Andy dialect, saying
such non-black things as "You's
all confused" and "Y'all know who
Copperhaid is, that skinny nigrah
boy," indicating that Mr . Gold might
have been more at home with a white
Anglo-Saxon boy from the Ozarks .
Worse, Mr . Gold makes his caricature
a black-faced Jewish schlmiel,
a double-dumb loser with an outsized
capacity for debasement which
might be common among Semites but
which is black only in the veiled
hopes of white people . Mr. Gold,
in short, suffers from the William
Styron-Nat Turner syndrome.
The Bernard Malamud story,
"Black Is My Favorite Color," is
better than Mr. Gold's but Mr . Malamud
is a better writer than Mr . Gold
and an infinitely superior observer
of human beings and their behavior,
black or white . However, a black
lady friend who read Mr. Malamud's
story at my request was not impressed
with the author's creation of
the black female character in the
story, Ornita . "I guess there are black
women like that," she said . "But I
don't know them ."
The white southern woman author
is the late Flannery O'Connor of
Georgia, a fine and sensitive writer .
Her black character in the story,
"Everything That Rises Must Converge,"
is observed ; Mrs . O'Connor
does not enter into the woman's
psyche ; she plays it safe . The story's
chief character is a white woman,
with whom Mrs . O'Connor' is-and
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969
should be-familiar, a run-of-themill
Georgia racist . But, here, a word
should be said : Mrs . O'Connor chose
one kind of Georgia expression of
racial bigotry . She might well have
chosen another. Two women are
likely to confront each other across
the racial wall in much less violent
terms than two men, and yet confrontation
between men is more
usual . A black writer might well have
chosen the more usual confrontation
and, to Mr . and Mrs . Hills, his story
would have been unacceptable as
literature .
One thing more : The Hills state
authoritatively that Ralph Ellison and
James Baldwin are the "only two
really first rate Negro writers" who
can be named, relegating to mediocrity
such superb craftsmen as John
A . Williams, Paule Marshall, William
Melvin Kelley and Ernest J. Games,
and totally ignoring Saunders Redding,
Robert Boles, Carlene Hatcher
Polite and Kristin Hunter . The Hills
can be excused for not knowing
about Alice Walker, Lindsay Patterson,
Audrey Lee, Louise Meriwether,
and the whole new bundle of black
writers just being published, and no
one expects them to recognize the
genius of "militants" LeRoi Jones,
Larry Neal or Ed Bullins, but they
have slapped in the face even those
black writers who slavishly submit
to the white literary dogma which
demeans them.
How We Live, then, is important
for black readers and writers for the
reason that it provides them with
an example of what they must contime
to guard against . Black students
in and out of "integrated" schools
must be protected from the virulent
racism inherent in "criticism" by literary
gurus like L. Rust and Penny
Chapin Hills.-HOYT W . FULLER
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