Books: Pastures Still Green

LET THE BAND PLAY DIXIE—Roark Bradford—Harper ($2).

Roark Bradford has gone the late Joel Chandler Harris one better. Harris' classic Uncle Remus showed the Negro as storyteller, at one remove from his own concerns; in Bradford's tales Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit appear in their own black skins, without disguise. Negrophiles and educated Negroes may object that Author Bradford simplifies too much, sentimentalizes too often, but plain readers like his stories. Marc Connelley's The Green Pastures, founded on Bradford's first book, Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun, was the Broadway hit of 1930, won the Pulitzer Prize that year. Let the Band Play Dixie, his latest collection, shows that his pastures are still green.

Author Bradford's Negro dialect has an authentic ring but is stamped with his own mark. In almost every book he introduces some memorable tag of nigger-talk. In Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun it was: "Soap an' water, country boy"— deep South for Broadway's "Oh, yeah?" In Let the Band Play Dixie it is the almost untranslatable "and de doctor can't do me no good"—an expression denoting joyful determination, usually in the direction of gin or gals. For fittingly strong words to express astonishment: "Well, do, my Redeemer!"* Sample of Author Bradford's method of writing dialect: "And Valivostop! Dat's whar us stopped at to load on some coal. Dey got some drinkin' licker made out'n rice and bramboo and stuff named vockster. And drunk you? I tuck jest two drinks and dey had to tote me on de ship in a sack!"