The Haunted Castle

FIRST FAMILY (253 pp.)--Christopher Davis--Coward-McCann ($3.95).

For years, a weather-beaten FOR SALE sign has drooped dispiritedly in front of the big Victorian house. With its crazy turrets, towers and gables, the place half-frightens Katie Charles, a pony-tailed 13-year-old who lives across the street and pretends that the house is a haunted castle. One day the sign is gone, and a contagious whisper races along the sycamore-lined street that the house might as well be haunted. The first Negro family is moving into Sheridan Avenue in the placid Midwest suburb of Courtland Park.

Unexamined Values. Remarkably close in plot to Peaceable Lane (TIME, Dec. 12), First Family also probes people who lead lives of unexamined values that suddenly must be lived by, but it is a work of deeper psychological perception than its predecessor, more skillfully written and emotionally wrenching.

The drama in First Family comes from the interplay between two families, the colored McKinleys and the white Charleses. Mr. McKinley is a sedate, scholarly classics teacher. He has a self-effacing sister and a gangling, precocious, twelve-year-old son named Scotty. The family dynamo is Rachel -- a cool, lovely, relentless wife and mother. She intends to put her shoulder behind the integration issue, and her shoulder consists most ly of chip. As Rachel puts it: "I don't mind disturbing people a little. It's my idea to make them think about what they're like and what we're like -- not in the kitchen or waiting on tables, but as part of their lives." Death in the End. Most Sheridan Avenue families do not want the Mc Kinleys as part of their lives. A petition circulates asking the Negro family to sell and move out. Venal white and colored real estate brokers spread panic. But from their first good-neighbor visit to the McKinleys, the Charleses try to live out the ideal of tolerance. Sally Charles is alternately warm and terrified, but her husband Stephen is a doctrinaire liberal who sternly instructs his daughter Katie: "If Scotty shows any signs of being interested, you're to become friendly."

Scotty is all too shortly a puppy in love. As he did in his first book, Lost Slimmer, Novelist Davis, 32, beautifully captures the long, grave dialogues on the borders of teenhood, the spasms of physical wildness, the sudden paroxysms of laughter. His adolescents are as real as any living writer's, unless the writer is J. D. Salinger. And there is a Salinger touch in the tragedy that follows. Scotty begins talking of marriage in 20 or 30 years, when "the entire social structure will be changed," and a sobered Katie realizes that she does not want to be that "serious" about their friendship. The mothers become violently involved in the childish dispute, and Scotty will not rest until he goads Katie into saying that she is rejecting him for his color. Then he slaps her face. As in Peaceable Lane, death waits at the end of the story.

Questions Without Answers. First Family will irk professional Negroes, professional liberals, and all do-gooders who seek easy or militant solutions to racial problems. Aware of the wounding pathos of social change, Novelist Davis persistently counterpoints Courtland Park's seasonal harmonies of nature with the discords of human nature. Convinced that integration will come, he questions the ingenuousness of those who believe that white and colored children can go to school together, enter one another's homes and then be barred from one another's hearts. The powerfully ambiguous figure of Rachel poses questions that must remain questions (at one point, when a colored family moves in next door, she screeches into the telephone, "You people aren't wanted here!"). Is she fighting for Negro rights or the right to deny being a Negro? Is she right or wrong in assuming that all integration is token integration if love is lacking?

For devising characters as complex and thorny as these questions, for enriching those characters with folly and wisdom, for stirring the spirit in a matter of conscience, for steadily honoring prose above propaganda. Novelist Davis deserves well of all readers whose partisan cause is the living novel.

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