THESE LOW GROUNDS—Waters Edward Turpin—Harper ($2.50).
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD— Zora Neale Hurston—Lippincott ($2).
U. S. Southerners are sure that, within the narrow limits they allow, they understand the Negro better than Northerners do. To Northerners the Negro is not a social problem but a minor, hardly noticeable industrial phenomenon. Nevertheless, even dyed-in-the-wool descendants of Lincoln's emancipators sometimes find it a socially embarrassing experience to encounter the emancipated Negro, whether in Harlem or between the covers of a book. Southerners would simply disregard the equalitarian gropings implicit in such novels as These Low Grounds and Their Eyes Were Watching God; Northerners might well find in them some indigestible food for thought.
Both Negro Author Turpin and Negro Author Hurston paint their racial pictures, with little shading, in glistening blacks and lurid tans. But to white readers who object to their violent brushwork they might truthfully reply: Negro life is violent. Author Turpin's story traces the fortunes of a Negro family from its uprooting in the Civil War to its rootless present. Martha, daughter of a plantation slave, died too soon to prevent her daughter from growing up in a bawdy house. Her granddaughter, starting off as a respectable farmer's wife, ended up on the Harlem stage, mothered a high-minded athlete who was painfully settling down at story's end to teach his compatriots how to raise themselves by their educational bootstraps.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, an upstanding coffee-colored quadroon outlasts all three of her men—the last only because she was quicker on the trigger than he was—goes back to her village to rest in peace and to make her friends' eyes bug out at the tales of what she and life have done together.