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Freedomways Third Quarter 1969

bound - middle class-bound, to be exact. This affliction was terminal in the case of her first adult novel, "God Bless the Child", a synthetic and pretentious chronicle of black frustration and despair. Although stylistically persuasive, one discerns between the lines of the present work attitudes that are discordant with it's face value. 

At the outset, one is uncomfortable with the portrayal of Lou as light-skinned with long "red" hair, not because of some petty prejudice against "high yallas" which, a priori, must reject the casting of one as a heroine, but because of the way in which Miss Hunter makes Louretta's color an issue. An incident and reference or two comment on the uncharitable and sometimes cruel attitudes of blacks towards their brothers and sisters who, by accident of birth, bear what is now an unfashionable hue. Yet this comment is unaccompanied, either implicitly or explicitly, by understanding of the fact that in a nation ridden with color consciousness, it has been a buyer's market for the light-skinned black compared with the lot of his darker, more nappy-haired brother. That a given individual may not deserve the scorn he or she often elicits from the unanointed can be poignant and heartrending, but it is really beside the point. More to the point in "Soul Brothers" - and her lies the rub: Lou is conceived and endorsed as a young lady in whose favor life's cards are subtly stacked, thus lending some justification to the now casual/now vicious resentment of her peers. Her personality is bathed in sweetness and light; qualities are assigned to her that have generally, in the myth and lore of Americana, been associated with whiteness. Inadvertently perhaps, the author has "chosen" Lou. (According to the book jacket Lou is, to an unspecified extent, autobiographical. Interesting.) 

In contrast, the story's villain (whose villainy is transformed at the end due to quick thinking on Lou's part) is a slight youngster named Fess-a nationalist revolutionary, we are told, who is very dark-complexioned, strikingly unattractive and evil-tempered. In other words, short, black and ugly. We learn at one point, when he mildly assaults fair Lou, that his cold, Black Pantherish posture conceals a case of what is known in the vernacular as "devil fever". Fess's reformation consists in his ultimate capitulation to the system: having written a poem with an oldtime musician, Blind Eddie, and Lou set to music, Fess steps forward as the singers' manager when the record company executives visit the clubhouse. This characterization is suspicious, to say the least, and becomes doubly so when measured against the well-endowed Louretta. In a novel for black teen-agers, to dismiss summarily a young man's intelligent (the author frequently 

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