Babies, Scandal & Apples

HE WAS NOT MY SON, by Madeleine Joye (155 pp.; Rinehart; $3), runs a topical race with recent headlines about the two London mothers who were handed the wrong babies at feeding time. At first despite hospital tests they insisted that they, had taken the right babies home to rear. Then, reluctantly, they agreed to switch. Swiss Housewife Madeleine Joye's predicament was even worse. She had no cause to suspect that one of the twins she bore on July 4, 1941 was not her son. True, Philippe grew up skinny and Paul plump: they were "as different as a cock from a rabbit." When the boys were six, Mrs. Joye met little Ernstli, a frail youngster who looked so much like Philippe that she began to wonder. She questioned Ernstli's mother, learned that he had been born at the same hospital, on the same day, at roughly the same time as Paul and Philippe. Scientific tests eventually showed that Ernstli was Philippe's identical twin and that Paul, switched at birth by mistake, was the son of the woman who had raised Ernstli. Wrote Mrs. Joye in her diary: "I can't weep any more, and my lair would be snow-white if I didn't dye it." She dreaded giving up Paul, but she could not resist claiming Ernstli. After the boys were switched back to their real mothers, Ernstli wept for days, but soon stopped addressing Mrs. Joye as "Madame" and started calling her "Maman." Mrs. Joye's unpretentious account is bound to give imaginative parents plenty to think about next time they take a baby home from the maternity ward.

MAMMY PLEASANT'S PARTNER, by Helen Holdredge (300 pp.; Putnam; $4.50), a follow-up on last year's intriguing Mammy Pleasant, tells what happened in brash, crime-infested 19th century San Francisco when an unprincipled Scotsman, fleeing a murky past, teamed up with a ruthless quadroon beauty, in pursuit of a glittering future. Mammy was born a Georgia slave. She had a wasp waist and an eagle eye, and when she bared her claws neither slow prey nor a fast buck had a chance of getting away. Among other things, Mammy was a madame who lavishly entertained in her elegant house (it cost $10 for a caller even to be considered for admission). Mammy's partner in many financial ventures was the fabulous Thom as Frederick Bell, who arrived in the West penniless and rose to the throne of Quicksilver King. In the end, when Mammy and Bell quarreled, she pushed him over a staircase railing to his death (the murder was never proved against Mammy before she died in 1904 at the age of 87). Author Holdredge's solidly researched story suffers from arid stretches, but there is noth ing arid about beautiful Mammy Pleasant or the life she led her partner.

JOHNNY APPLESEED: MAN AND MYTH, by Robert Price (320 pp.; Indiana University; $5). Helped along by poets, folklorists, chambers of commerce and generations of Midwestern grannies, the legend of Johnny Appleseed has lengthened until lots of American kids are as sure as God made little apples that Johnny planted every orchard in the land. In this unassumingly authoritative book. Author Price, who lives in Ohio's Appleseed country, good-humoredly sorts out reluctant fact from ready fancy. Lugging a knapsack with apple seeds into the wilderness about 1800, Massachusetts-born John Chapman for the next 45 years planted his nurseries in inviting places on the Ohio and Indiana frontiers. A dedicated Swedenborgian, he peddled his seedlings and otherworldly chatter among the settlers, wearing rags, walking barefoot even on ice, sleeping on hearths or in hollow logs, and sharing what little he had with white folks, Indians and the birds of the air. Before he died at 70, near Ft. Wayne, Ind., his fame was already spreading beyond the banks of the Maumee and the Mohican where, says Vachel Lindsay,

He ran with the rabbit and slept with the stream, And so for us he made great medicine . . .

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