Word: blackness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...between Cumnor, Boars' Hill, and Shot-over. The dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the spires and towers of St. Mary the Virgin's, Magdalen, Merton, and the Cathedral are lost in the lower reaches of this fog-bank. The streets are shining with wet; the Old Schools Quadrangle is black and forbidding; the various College and University buildings look like the cubic masses of a modern stage-setting. The purlieus of St. Aldate's are wrapped in gloom. Only the most intrepid explorer would venture into labyrinthine Hell Passage, or attempt to thread the intricacies of Logic Lane...
...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...
...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...
History and legend are filled with plagues, most horrific of which was the Black Death which scourged Europe in the middle of the Fifteenth Century. When Boccaccio's characters fled Florence in 1438 and spent their exile telling the stories of the Decameron, they thus escaped a swift, nauseous blight which, so the tales run, made dark convulsions of men's faces, twisted tortures of their bodies...