Smoky Legend

By John Skow

FAITH AND THE GOOD THING

by CHARLES JOHNSON

196 pages. Viking. $7.95.

This small, quick-witted novel about a Southern black girl's misadventures in Chicago is a tricky mixture of down-home storytelling and faculty-lounge chitchat. The storytelling is rich. The chitchat, consisting of philosophical jar gon in several languages, is rather brittle. The heroine, a rural Candide named Faith Cross, is told by her dying mother to find life's Good Thing. She seeks guidance from a swamp witch, a withered and warty old necromancer with one green and one yellow eye.

The swamp witch messes about with chicken blood and hogs' entrails, and ticks off possibilities. The Good Thing, she cackles, "must be the right function-in' of an organism as it participates in a form, or the fulfillment of a Ideological principle inherent in all matter, or ..." This owlish comedy is a blackface up side-down version of Merlin's routine in T.H. White's The Once and Future King. Merlin, who had all philosophy beneath his pointed hat, kept getting his spells confused. The swamp witch, who seems confused, spouts philosophy as if she were Hegel.

This is funny in a mechanical way, but it is more interesting as a deliberate contrast to the country-speech patterns still heard in black city lingo, and to the folklore half believed in and half smiled at. "Kill a frog or toad, dry him out completely in the sun . . . among his bones will be one that resembles a fish hook ... To win your intended lover, hook the fishbone into his clothing. . ." Faith Cross, a backwoods believer, journeys to Chicago and becomes first a wholehearted whore, then an adipose housewife, anesthetized by hair spray and appliance hum, then, cast off and pregnant, the victim of a ghetto fire Finally back in Georgia, withered and maimed, she completes the seven ages of black woman (something like this seems to be in the author's mind) by be coming a swamp witch herself.

Faith's story is philosophical noodling, more smoky legend than shoes-in-the-dirt fiction. What saves it from arch ness is the warmth and sense of the telling. The 26-year-old author is black, and variously a cartoonist, TV writer-producer and philosopher, currently teaching at New York's Stony Brook. More than anything, his book is a wry comment on the tension felt by a black intellectual. It shows enough narrative strength, though, for the reader to hope that Johnson will go on to try a straight forward novel.

John Skow

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