[Jesse Fauset's] Foreword to The Chinaberry Tree announced her orientation. She first makes the statement that "to be a Negro in America posits a dramatic situation." But then she goes on to her major concern: "But of course there are breathing spells, in-between spaces where colored men and women work and love and go their ways with no thought of the 'problem.'" She has just taken the "dramatic situation" out of the formula. Indeed, the racial identity of the characters in The Chinaberry Tree is almost inconsequential. But this was precisely her point; she purposely depicted "something of the homelife of the colored American who is not being pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice. And behold he is not so vastly different from any other American, just distinctive."

The black middle class was not an invalid subject for fiction, but Miss...