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Black Beauty ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL—Julia Peterkin & Doris Ulmann—Ballon ($3.50). One of the very few Southern gentlefolk writing today, Julia Peterkin has a proprietary interest in the Negro, who in her books behaves according to Hoyle (Southern style). Neither lynchings nor Harlem hotspots darken her clear pages. A Martian visitor reading Authoress Peterkin would hardly guess that there was such a thing as a "Negro problem." For her and her readers the Negro is the Southern plantation darky, whom Southerners always represent as being a lovable, child-like creature, living as a happy dependent on a sympathetic white master. Race-conscious Negroes and Northern negrophiles consider Authoress Peterkin's gently glowing picture partial, incomplete, but readers in general fall under the charm of her affectionate sympathy. Photographer Doris Ulmann's share in Roll, Jordan, Roll is 70 masterly photo graphs of Negro types, scenes. With these pictures as text, Authoress Peterkin has written a rambling series of delightful sketches. Some of them: Jinny, who took a carving knife to her man when he done her wrong, took him back when he refused to testify against her in court and the judge gave her a suspended sentence ; Uncle, oldest plantation inhabitant, who believed he had a right to three men's ra tions because he had lived as long and worked as hard as any three men; the deaf woman who killed her baby because her man would not acknowledge her. Expert reporter of Negro dialect, Au thoress Peterkin can get the authentic ef fect even in an indirect transcription : "After his lawfully lady left him, he looked so down in the heart, she offered to do his washing and cooking. ... He stayed out late mighty nigh every night and came in looking all whipped down. . . . When she asked him where he went he made power ful good excuses, for he had a mighty glib tongue. He swore to God the first night that the holy spirit had fallen on him so heavy during the sermon he had to leave the church and go off in the woods to pray. ... He talked mighty sweet about how he hated to leave her home by herself and all like that, but his tongue fumbled so it could not talk sweet enough to fool her. She had a good notion about where he spent every God's night he was gone."
The Author, Julia Mood Peterkin is the daughter of a South Carolina doctor. After leaving Spartanburg's Converse College, against her family's wishes she got a job as country school-teacher at Fort Motte, S. C. Two years later she married William George Peterkin, cotton planter, and became mistress of Lang Syne Plantation, about ten miles from Fort Motte. That was 30 years ago. She had a busy life keeping house, entertaining, riding, hunting, fishing, acting as "judge, jury, doctor and family adviser" to the hundreds of Negroes on the place. Not until she was over 40 did she begin to write seriously; her first collection of sketches, Green Thursday, was done unbeknownst to her husband or son. Scarlet Sister Mary won her the Pulitzer Prize (1928), was afterwards dramatized for Ethel Barrymore.