Books: Gelouries!

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MY GREAT WIDE BEAUTIFUL WORLD—Juanita Harrison—Macmillan ($2.50).

Juanita Harrison is a 45-year-old Negro lady's-maid who never stays long in one place. She invariably resigns her domestic job before she is fired. To Juanita work is simply the means of making enough money to move on. She began her travels at 16, and gradually got the ambitious notion of going round the world. In 1927 she had enough money saved to start. This diary of her eight-year journey through 22 countries was arranged (but not corrected) by the daughter of one of her employers-by-the-way. The title was not Juanita's invention, though it echoes her sentiments. She herself has a more personal word for a world that is great, wide, beautiful. Her word is "gelouries."

In preparation for her adventure Juanita studied Spanish and French, but personality was her Esperanto. Well-schooled in the ways of men, mistresses and markets, she never took long to get her bearings. A shrewd bargainer, she traveled and boarded thriftily, got many a free meal from gallant or hospitable foreigners. Whenever her money-belt grew thin she had no trouble getting a pleasant, well-paid job with some rich family, in London, Paris, Antibes, Cairo, Bombay, Barcelona, Madrid. Determined but optimistic, she took the rough with the smooth, enjoyed it all.

Juanita loves good food, refers constantly to her fare: "No body can cook cabbage to beat the Irish of Cork not even the American Colored Southerners." Sometimes a new dish led her on a little too far. In Brno, Czechoslovakia "I ate too many dill pikles but the dancing got it down." She saw all the sights. In Madrid, it was bullfighting ("Bull fighting and ice cream are the two best things on earth"); in India, the Taj Mahal ("I would just like to put a glass over it I feel I must cover it over"). And she was not slow to compare national customs, "the American English they are nauty the Scotch very nauty but the French are really bad the worst at Nice I didnt want to believe my eyes." Yet she was never really shocked by the nautiness of man: "I like to stay long enough to flirt in each country to test the man of each place is what I like during . . . but I am auful foxie." What adventures Juanita tells about were mostly connected with men. Sometimes she outran them. Sometimes she had to hand them a good crack on the jaw. Sometimes they hit her back. ("He ask another man if I was French and tryed to hold my hand I got angry and Hit Him in the Face and quick as litning He hit me in the Face . . . that was my first fight, and the only ungentleman man I have meet in Turkey sorry it happen as I had been thinking all day if I had to give a prize to the most respectfully men it would go to the Turks, the other men felt so sad.") She turned her most dangerous mishap (a train wreck in Czechoslovakia in which 26 people were killed) into profit, when she asked damages for a black eye, got the $200 she asked for.