Peterkin Folk

Peterkin Folk

BRIGHT SKIN--Julia Peterkin--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50). Asleep in the little shack along the Spanish-mossy river, little Blue is wakened by his father before dawn, told to come along, leave his mother and his home forever. Blue's mother has played the whore: Blue is the only child his father knows to be his own. Together they are going back to Blue's father's parents, Cun Fred and Aun Fan.

Cun Fred is foreman of a big cotton plantation. Aun Fan, a midwife, "catches" the plantation hands' pickaninnies when they are born. Except for Big Pa, Blue's mother's wonder-working grandfather who back in Africa had been great King Taki's oldest son, Cun Fred and Aun Fan are the most influential people in the settlement. With them Blue's father, going farther afield himself, leaves Blue to make his home and fend for himself.

Blue makes friends with Man Jay, the settlement's bad boy and with Cooch, the bad little girl who knows "where babies come from and everything." Best of all he likes Cricket, a little orphaned "bright skin" girl, half white, half black. She lives with Blue's Uncle Wes and his wife Missie, works in the cotton fields, whips the okra bushes to make them bear. Everybody prophesies a bad end for the "bright skin," warns Blue to keep away from her.

After Uncle Wes dies of a knife-wound, complicated by Big Pa's conjuring, Cricket grows more & more restless. Though she loves Blue, she will not listen to his marriage proposals: she wants to go off to the big city, where Man Jay had gone before. When a rich stranger appears in the neighborhood and steals the bootleg trade away from Uncle Kelly, Cricket takes up with him. On the day set for their wedding the groom does not appear. Uncle Kelly has settled him. But the bride, all dressed for a wedding, must have a groom. Blue snatches the opportunity.

Things do not go well with Cricket and Blue. Three months after the wedding she miscarries the rich stranger's child. Blue hides her shame, but Cricket is sick of the settlement, its people and its life. Even her love for Blue cannot hold her; she runs off to New York, joins Man Jay in Harlem. When, later, they return to persuade Blue to give her a divorce, Blue cannot understand what it is all about. After a fight in which Cricket defends Blue against Man Jay, Blue lets his love go. He will see her again, no more, no, never more.

The Author. Since Scarlet Sister Mary received the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, Authoress Julia Mood Peterkin has lived much the same local life as before with her cotton- planting husband on Lang Syne Plantation, Fort Motte, S. C. Once a winter she goes to New York, "to pleasure herself," not to be lionessed. At home the local colored folk know that "Miss Julia" has put them in books, do not much care. Negro intelligentsiacs agree with the whites -- that Authoress Peterkin writes accurately, vividly of the Gullah Negroes. Equally vivid, Bright Skin gives a broader picture of Gullah life than Scarlet Sister Mary, Though Ethel Barrymore made no stage success of Scarlet Sister Mary, this time cinemen are reported to be dickering for the rights already.

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