Skin Game

A PLACE WITHOUT TWILIGHT (382 pp.) --Peter S. Feibleman--World ($4.75).

The bedtime story told by Serge Morris to Cille and her two brothers was always the same. "In one of the biggest, finest houses in the District, there was a young man living whose name was Dennis," Serge would begin. "Dennis' family was the most important family in six streets, and they didn't like to let theirselves forget it none. They had two buggies, and three horses (In case one got sick) . . . They had everything."

One day (Serge would continue as he sat with the kids in their warp-walled house in New Orleans) Dennis saw a girl sitting in the parlor of a neighbor, so beautiful that he loved her right off. Even when Florabelle looked him full in the face and he saw that she only had one good eye, he didn't mind. He lifted her in his arms and put her in his buggy and drove her out for a ride. Parked out beside Lake Pontchartrain, he asked her to marry him. She winced; then, without saying anything, she threw aside the quilt that had covered her lower half. From the waist down, she was a fish. She dived into the lake and swam off.

The Long Way Around. Droning on, lolling back in his chair, Serge would ramble to the end of the story his children knew as they knew their own skins. For 40 years, he told them, Dennis drove out every afternoon to watch beside the lake for Florabelle. Then one day she swam back. "She didn't have but one tooth left in her head, and 40 years under water hadn't done that one much good. Even her tail had lost over half its scales ... Florabelle had more or less had it. But Dennis didn't care . . . He asked her . . . 'Why did you do it? Do you think I care if you can't walk? . .. Do you think-I care if you half-blind? ... Do you think I care if you half-fish?' "

Florabelle bared her tooth and cackled up at him: "Lord, Sugar," she said, "it ain't none of that. It's that I'm one-tenth Negro."

The novel takes its flavor from the fable; slyly, wryly taking the long way around--and sometimes taking far too long to illuminate his bitter lessons--Author Feibleman has written a first novel about Negroes that is strikingly unlike most other literary heftings of the black man's burden. Perhaps because he is white. New York-born, New Orleans-reared Novelist Feibleman, 27, lacks the pamphleteer's rage of Richard Wright (Black Boy) and the jazzed-up, Joyced-up intellectual's revulsion of Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man). His book is not a work of protest; it is a soft laugh at the whole spectrum of racial ironies.

The Shape of Life. The viewpoint is convincingly Negro; yet Cille, the heroine, is a light-skinned outcast who can see both races with a pariah's eyes. In the novel's collisions between black and white, mockery cuts both ways.

Color is the villain, but here its evil agent is not oppression by the whites (they are only gently oppressive, and sometimes bumblingly kind), but the hard, protective shell of ignorance secreted by the blacks. The novel's story is of a family festering in such a shell, built of fear and blind religiosity. Don't ask questions, Cille's mother repeats, walling in her children. Don't think; thank the

Lord. When a child dies, the mother smiles triumphantly. He has completed a risky voyage through a dark world.

Cille alone of the family has the strength to break out of the shell, but she is marked by its color and shape. The story of growing up and twisting free is outstandingly well told by Novelist Feibleman. The book's most noticeable fault is a sluggish pace, but while the narrative occasionally lacks interest, the characters do not; if the novel lacks the spare silhouette of art, it has, abundantly, the lumpish shape of life.

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