Let the people mix

man

Reprinted from FREEDOM, London.

Y first knowledge of Lonnie ColeMY was second-hand, and long-arm second-hand at that. My daughter-in-law told me what her aunt had said about "Sam". I read the book at Bristol and went straight to wellknown booksellers there with a list of the author's works. They had none in stock. I ordered three of them. Yes, three-just like that, though heaven knows I have few enough pennies to spend on books. Nor was it because "Sam" was about homosexuals or because it was the best fiction on the subject I had ever read, but because it was the best novel on any subject I had read for some time. The subject is as banal to me as to most orthodox; here I found it written about in a manner that brought it to clean fresh life; and to my mind it was rescued and exalted by the unusual oustanding relationship in the book, between one of "them" and a married woman, the most enduring and significant of various parings, and carried to a height at which one might even without blushing use that little soiled four-letter word, love.

But it is not so much about "Sam" that I want to write here, greatly, as. I esteem it and much as it lacks recognition, as about some other books of this writer. "Sam" was the only one published in England, the Bristol booksellers told me; so I wrote to an American friend who took the trouble to obtain for me a second-hand copy of one that was out of print, "Clara", and to have the publishers, Little, Brown & Company of Boston, send me a copy of another earlier one, "The Southern Lady".

Perhaps I exaggerate Mr. Coleman's commitment in the title of this article. He is neither dogmatic nor prophetic. Nowhere does he advocate miscegnation; but nowhere does he refute the rationalist anticipation of that ultimate solution. Here's how the subject emerges in a small mixed company of American tourists in a freighter bound for the The centre of their Mediterranean.. The circle is the Southern lady. Her husband has none of her prètentious but unquestionable Southern charm. The narrator is a novelist whose conciliatory attitude toward the race question is so offensive to them that the lady feels herself driven to "wonder a little", in the lightest manner, if he might not have just a speck of the tarbrush himself: and he replies: "That could be true of both of us, couldn't it, since we're Southerners, and more than one fine Southern family has been known to.. . .”

Her husband intervenes furiously. On another occasion the narrator draws the husband into an exposition of his belief in coloured inferiority, which ends with the assertion that "the usual Nigras, the one with a little white brains, usually get it from the white man, usually have white blood in them."

"Then you suggest that the quickest and surest way to raise the level of Negroes is to have children born of Negro and white parents?"

"I said nothing of the kind," Austin said angrily. "That's what you say

The real purpose of this integration you're all pushing for in schools and transportation is to force interracial marriage. That will lead-or would lead, since we're not going to

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let it happen to complete mongrelizaBut the racial theme is carried to its tion of the white race The white tragic conclusion when the Southern race would disappear. The race that lady, ridiculing the narrator's susceptihas built the Western world. The bility, comes to the fancy dress party on trees would grow up again and we'd the last evening of the voyage, her neck all be swinging through them."

"In stead of from them?”

This arouses anger, but Austin keeps it down until, in reply to his talk of racial wars, the narrator says:

and arms and shoulders coloured a dark

brown, and sings an appropriate ditty. "Is that what Mr. Fisher likes? Did I do all right?"

The end of the party is tragic. The "Why not make friends with the narrator has no mercy for her. Yet after dark people and not have wars?" "Because!" Anger sent his voice we have seen the last of the lady and out of control. "They are not to be the narrator has met Annie again in New friends with white men! I'll tell you York and cleared up most of the details, how not to have a war. Drop the the mystery of his intensely felt but bombs on them now. That would negative affinity with the lady is not unshow the world and the Nigras at veiled; nor is it when he goes to her home that we mean business!" home and verifies all she has told about "I don't get out in the world much," it. Only when he learns from his mother I said, "I've heard there are fools like you, but I've never met one be. about his own origin is he and the reader-aware of the tragic significance fore." The author's basic theme in this, as in of the brief reference to the lady's end his other books, is love, the idiosyncrawhen Annie reassures him in New York:. tic freedom of love. There is a glimpse "Don't look unhappy. There's nothof it in two contrasted minor characters, ing you could have done." "There was." two lonely old ladies, Connie Morrell, age 64, and Annie Peacock, 79. The sailors are overheard by the narrator discussing Connie's affair with one of them when she joins him. She teases him for listening "like a chambermaid" but she doesn't care.

in her freedom.

"Don't tell me, Douglas, I don't ever want to know. But don't blame yourself, my dear. That poor woman used you, too...

It is the problem of hidden miscenegation and "passing", brilliantly tragically presented; the other book "Clara", gives the solution-knowledge and-en-

"She laughed. 'I've done it!' I said I would that first day and I have, durance, leading to love. Clara is in You are shocked. Did you think people every way mistress of Carl Sayre's house stopped when they got as old as I am? to which he takes his unsuspecting bride, I suppose some never care about it, the narrator of the story throughout. but I've loved it ever since the first They have seen each other once before time when I was eleven." -the Negro servant and the white girlAnd here's the other old lady. Annie and hated each other at sight. Everyhas broken loose from Main Street for thing imaginable occurs to intensify the the first time and is thoroughly revelling enmity, and following each occasion something is said or done to keep them Annie's expression of rapture (on together. The brilliance here is not so first sight of European land) was so much in incident as in the convincing intense and pure it brought tears to my eyes. She gave a deep sign and development of the wife's reconciliation turned to me. to a standard of living unimaginable to "Douglas!" She touched a finger her in earlier days enduring the fear to my cheek. and incapacity to deal with the sexual "I love you, Annie." savagery of her husband, to which Clara · She smiled. "I love you too. Isn't holds the key of unquestioning submisit nice for people to say that and mean sion-the agony of being childless while it and not want to hang on to one Clara has his son-the unwelcome friendanother or change one annother?"

ship between that coloured boy and the