Where the Blues Begin

His EYE Is ON THE SPARROW (278 pp.) --Ethel Waters, with Charles Samuels--Doubleday ($3).

"I never was a child.

"I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

"I never felt I belonged.

"I was always an outsider.

"I was born out of wedlock, but that had nothing to do with all this. To people like mine, a thing like that just didn't mean much.

"Nobody brought me up."

So begins His Eye Is on the Sparrow, the autobiography of Singer-Actress Ethel Waters. It is surely one of the frankest self-revelations ever to see print, a combination of depressing sordidness and one proud Negro's piled-up resentment against the experience of white discrimination. It is also, just as surely, an American success story. It is often vulgar to the point of endangering sympathy for its narrator. It is crudely ghost-written in a mixture of Broadway pressagentry, dubious religiosity and chip-on-shoulder sensationalism. It also has a final ring of truth that may account for its being a March selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Errands to Run. Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pa., the daughter of a Negro girl who was raped at the age of twelve. As she remembers her childhood, it was a continuous round of poverty, filth, lust and violence. By the time she was seven, she had an adult's knowledge of sex. Farmed out by her child-mother and her grandmother to a succession of relatives, she had a childhood "almost like a series of one-night stands."

When her people moved to Philadelphia, it was to the red-light district, where Ethel, not yet six, picked up money running errands for prostitutes; she still has "great respect" for them as "kind and generous" people. Hunger also drove her to become "a very good child thief," and at eleven, "I had trouble getting men to leave me alone."

Image to Cuddle. But before that, something else had happened. At her Roman Catholic school, she was taken into the church, and through His Eye Is on the Sparrow runs a strong if naive faith: "The Catholic religion gives you a beautiful image to cuddle. I who have always believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth try to get God in my corner."

Most of Actress Waters' book is an en-gagement-by-engagement account of how she went from shimmy dancer and blues singer in mean Negro dives to better things on stage & screen. But it is edged with appalling descriptions of racial discrimination, freely spiced with a man-by-man record of her long, disastrous and violent love life. A great actress, she has nothing important to say about acting. A vital human being, buffeted by life even in success, Ethel Waters never lets her bitterness get far offstage. But it is a story worth having for the truths it has to tell about the millions of her race who never got top billing.

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