Word: chilluns
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Roark Bradford has already added his bit to U. S. letters in Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun, the book from which Marc Connelly made The Green Pastures. Author Bradford has never quite recaptured the careless rapture of his first book, but he is now well established as a legitimate heir of Joel Chandler Harris. The Three-Headed Angel is a new departure for him, not only because it is not laid in the deep South but because it has only one Negro character. Most readers will consider that his Hoop Pole Ridgers make up for the loss...
When Marc Connelly, under the influence of Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam An' His Chillun, had finished The Green Pastures, he took it to Producer Jed Harris. Producer Harris was busy with Uncle Vanya (TIME, April 21, 1930). Producer Crosby Gaige also turned down the Connelly piece and the Theatre Guild would have none of it. But the play interested Rowland Stebbins, an inactive Wall Streeter who was having a fling at Broadway under the name of "Laurence Rivers." The character of "de Lawd" in Connelly's Negro miracle play pleasantly reminded music-loving...
...their own black skins, without disguise. Negrophiles and educated Negroes may object that Author Bradford simplifies too much, sentimentalizes too often, but plain readers like his stories. Marc Connelley's The Green Pastures, founded on Bradford's first book, Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun, was the Broadway hit of 1930, won the Pulitzer Prize that year. Let the Band Play Dixie, his latest collection, shows that his pastures are still green...
Author Bradford's Negro dialect has an authentic ring but is stamped with his own mark. In almost every book he introduces some memorable tag of nigger-talk. In Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun it was: "Soap an' water, country boy"- deep South for Broadway's "Oh, yeah?" In Let the Band Play Dixie it is the almost untranslatable "and de doctor can't do me no good"-an expression denoting joyful determination, usually in the direction of gin or gals. For fittingly strong words to express astonishment: "Well, do, my Redeemer!"* Sample...
...read so excellent a story as that of the Colonel's children. There are three of them, all under the care of the most entertaining Mammy there ever could be, and it is she who provides the pathos and zest in her lovingly abusive handling of these refractory "chillun". The locale might be any southern town and the phrases of the youngsters are largely composed of the rich, picturesque language of the Negro...