But Both Black

SCARLET SISTER MARY--Julia Peterkin--Bobbs Merrill ($2.50).

BLACK SADIE--T. Bowyer Campbell--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Black Sadie is a common cornfield nigger raised to trusted though untrustworthy house servant, and by chance transported to "Easter Orange," N. J. There a wealthy, ridiculous patroness of the new art "discovers" her; it seems that Sadie's angular primitive skull is "the focus of the geometry." Cubism is at its height; the Negro fad starts its blatant vogue with a nude of Black Sadie. From popular artists' model, Sadie proceeds to nightclub fame ending abruptly with a row, murder, discreet fadeaway. On the whole she is glad to be shet of no 'count white folks that treat her as an equal, but the whole gamut of her staccato experience, pertly recorded, actually affects her not at all.

In sharp contrast, artistic as well as factual, is Julia Peterkin's cadenced history of a Negro woman who never left the plantation, and yet developed a mature philosophy, spangled with ancient superstition. Si May-e's story touches peaks of high comedy, drops to depths of black misery, and through it all glows the indomitable vitality of Si Maye herself.

Less panoramic than Black April, and therefore the less powerful, Author Peterkin's present volume is nevertheless a compelling story of human character in elemental contact with love, growth, death. Rich in pathos, it also sparkles with the amusing antics, and ridiculous superstitions of the primitive race.