"Black April" was a remarkable book, possibly the most convincing presentation of the Negro that has yet been made by a white person. More than that, it was a considerable work of art. With a mastery of dialect and folk-lore unequalled and with a pervasive sense of the plantation background from which the black figures emerged, Mrs. Peterkin so completely dramatized all her material that it was almost impossible to tell whether the writer was an alien observer or a Negro become wholly conscious and expressive. That sense of strangeness of the looker-on, which the most sympathetic treatment of the Negro by the white has always betrayed, as if the "superior" were trying in vain to comprehend the "inferior" across the racial barrier, was never once present. In "Black April" Mrs. Peterkin did not explain or exploit: she created the black world in its own terms….

In this...