Books: Again, the Beloved Country

TALES FROM A TROUBLED LAND (128 pp.)—Alan Paton—Scribner ($3.50).

"I should like to write books about South Africa," said Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton a dozen years ago, "which would really stab people in the conscience." That is what he has succeeded in doing from the first. A tough and fearless little man who loves his country and its people, black and white (he is the leader of the Liberal Party in South Africa), Paton does not rank as a major writer. But for his purposes, he may be something even better: a male Harriet Beecher Stowe who avoids both the mawkishness and the melodrama of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In Life for a Life, one of ten stories in this collection, a white man is murdered, no one knows by whom. Roused to easy brutality, the police murder in turn an innocent Negro shepherd, and when his wife humbly asks for his body, the heartbreaking request is turned down; she is given three days to leave the house where she has spent her life. So much for the meek. But Author Paton deals not only with those who dare not fight back. In Debbie Go Home, a young colored girl dreams of the party, a sop to her people really, which the white administrator of the province has organized. It promises only a false happiness, but her mother wants her to have one night and one dress she can remember. When her militant father and brother forbid her to accept the invitation, something more human and complex than even the color bar takes over.

Author Paton was for many years the principal of a colored reformatory in Johannesburg, and some of his most telling yarns are about boys whose characters have been twisted by just such institutions; if they were white, the stories would still make their point. A Drink in the Passage carries Paton's message to his goal. It is really an eloquent, understated editorial with none of the easy indignation of the professional editorial writer. Through a fluke, a Negro sculptor has won a first prize, for a moving sculpture of a black mother and child. Because of it he is surreptitiously taken to a white man's home—an action forbidden by law —and given a drink with the family. There, unspoken, he finds sympathy and even love, but hurriedly offered in the passageway lest they all sbe discovered. Almost more than any recent writing about South Africa, the story gives a glimpse of the fundamental decency that Paton insists is there below the official layer of hate.