["The River Niger"] is so generous—so rich in character, detail, incident, emotion, and humor—that it more than fulfills the promise of Mr. Walker's not so successful "The Harangues" of a few years ago. "The River Niger" is about a family in Harlem and the crises that beset it during the single week of the action…. The title makes an apt image for the whole drama—the black river flowing through Africa, the black wave of humanity flowing through America, the strong tide of love and affection flowing through the family scraps and pretenses and jokes. And there is an undercurrent flowing, too—of pain and frustration. Johnny describes himself as a fighter without a battlefield—even the black revolution seems to have lost all purpose for him—but by the time the action is over he has finished the poem and found his battlefield, something worth...