Books: Case Histories

STAR SPANGLED VIRGIN—DuBose Heyward—Farrar & Rineharf ($2).

Last week DuBose Heyward, who made his literary reputation by sympathetic studies of Negro life in his native South Carolina (Porgy, Mamba's Daughters), did his sympathetic best by the poverty-stricken Negroes of the Virgin Islands.

When the New Deal's relief policies first struck its tropical poorhouse, the results were a lot stranger than on the mainland. Star Spangled Virgin's catchpenny title covers a thinly disguised series of relief case histories.

A one-crop island, St. Croix was hard hit when the bottom fell out of the raw sugar market and Crucians could no longer buy corn meal and salt fish to keep their fungee pots going. But relief cards, at first ignored as a white man's joke, soon brought an unprecedented prosperity. The Negroes, given canned goods, traded them for rations they liked better, for bright flimsy dresses, dime-store jewelry, tobacco.

Novelist Heyward's principal case history is that of broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed Rhoda Berg, whom squat, bandy-legged Adam Work had deserted five years before. When Adam came back after the crash, she refused to sleep with him, pined for the days when "dere was always something it was time to do ... to tie de canes, to hoist de bundle to yo' head an' feel de good weight press down on you till yo' feet bog in de wet places." Like the rest, however, Rhoda accepted relief, enjoyed its trimmings. Some of them: a local-talent band which played The Star-Spangled Banner and Tipperary just alike, an open-air performance of Pinafore in thick flannel costumes meant for Alaska, sent to St. Croix by mistake.

When the Government abandoned direct relief, bought the bankrupt sugar plantations and broke them up into homesteading units, matriarchal Rhoda was delighted. She picked out the best tract she could find, then let Adam come and live with her on it. "De only way to get de devil out of dese people," she said, "is to sweat it out. Noodeal's done tried restin' it out, an' it didn't work."