Cal & Ezekiel

WITHOUT MAGNOLIAS (274 pp.)--Buck-I'm Moon--Doubleday ($3).

The slightly lazy and limpid air of a fresh Florida morning, authentic as can be, comes through on the first page of this novel. The rest is not all so authentic, but as a novel about the "race problem" it makes more sense than many more violent pieces of writing.

Without Magnolias is largely concerned with a kind of Negro life seldom treated in fiction: the academic and intellectual life. The most interesting conflict in the 'book develops between two men who, by type and training, are least inclined to go at each other's throats: the president of a small Negro college and the white editor of a small liberal newspaper. Each thinks he is working for equality, but Editor Cal Thornton is on the board that approves President Ezekiel Rogers' annual budget. To the shame of both of them, the time comes when Editor Thornton makes clear that he and he alone is boss.

Meanwhile, the novelist tells the stories of the Negroes whose lives are directly touched by this affair--the Rogers family, Ezekiel's secretary, Bessie Mathews, and her hard-working brother, Luther, who tends bar at a hotel in Citrus City and later goes to work in a shipyard. Author Moon writes of people like Luther with great warmth of insight and a fine ear for inflections of speech. On the other hand, there is something a little too Galahad-like about the radical Negro intellectual, Eric Gardner, whom President Rogers is finally called on to defend against Cal Thornton.

At this point, Novelist Moon begins to favor an uncompromising thesis. He makes Editor Thornton, in demanding that Gardner be fired, revert to stereotyped white brutality, and he makes President Rogers seem culpably weak for giving in. The thesis: Editor Thornton's liberalism has never been much more than a way of satisfying his own vanity, and Rogers' lifelong effort to educate his race has actually--and even consciously--played into the hands of the segregators.

Moon has the essential gift of the novelist--to let his characters live their own lives--but he sacrifices too much of it for the sake of his propaganda point. This apparently had less weight than the book's solid merits with Doubleday & Co., which has been awarding the George Washington Carver prize since 1945, for "outstanding writing by or about American Negroes." The current award has gone to Bucklin Moon.

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