Books: Long Night's Journey

A TOUCH OF INNOCENCE (312 pp.) —Katherine Dunham—Harcourt, Brace ($4.95).

In the day of the ghost—particularly among haunted show-business autobiographers—Dancer Katherine Dunham's decision to do her own writing is something of a breach of convention. Even more remarkably, she writes with skill and taste, and has made her personal history reflective rather than regurgitative.

Author Dunham states in a note to the reader that what she has written is not an autobiography, but the book's heroine is a girl named Katherine Dunham who grew up near Chicago, as did the author, the daughter of an American Negro man and a light-skinned French Canadian woman. Albert Dunham, the sullen, tormented father, dominates the story. Ambitious and immature, he marries beautiful Fanny June Taylor, a well-to-do woman many years older than he, and for a time is able to regard himself as a man of property. But not long after Katherine is born, his wife dies, and the property is dissipated among relatives.

Dunham eventually remarries, after a harrowing period in which Katherine and an older brother are farmed out haphazardly to a succession of relations. But the new wife is plain and the family poor. Dunham withdraws into brooding resentment, emerging now and then to tongue-lash his wife and belt-whip his children.

Author Dunham writes movingly but without bitterness about the struggle of the children to break free of the father, and about the genteel shabbiness of lower-middle-class Negro life. A set piece on the well-calculated emotionalism of a Bible-banging preacher could hardly be done better. And the reader feels sharply Katherine's humiliation and despair when her neurotically protective father insists on being her dancing partner at parties. For violence and despair, the Dunham family wars approach Eugene O'Neill's. When the last blow has been struck—backhanded, across the mouth—and Katherine has at last left home, it seems astonishing that she has somehow survived her long night's journey into day.