White Is a Color

A GOOD MAN (239 Pp.)--Jefferson Young--Bobbs-Merrill ($3).

There were those in Longfield, Miss. who thought that Albert Clayton was getting too big for his britches. He was a hardworking, illiterate sharecropper who had cleared all of $43 the year before, and this year's prospects didn't even look as good as that. In 15 years he had been able to save nothing. His two kids were hungry, his wife Louella's Sunday dress was seven years old, and yet Albert had some mighty uppity ideas. Wanted to paint his shack white, something no Negro in those parts had ever talked about, much less tried to do.

From fictional materials as simple as these, Mississippi-born Jefferson Young, 31, has spun a completely successful story, as true as it is humble, as convincing as humble truth. A Good Man does unobtrusively what the sordid sharecropper novels of the Erskine Caldwell school have never been able to do: it generates enormous sympathy for the Albert Claytons at the same time that it gives them dignity; it refuses to be defeatist about their future so long as heart and conscience have their say in human affairs.

Everyone knew that painting the shack white went deeper than a paint job. The Negroes knew and were either exhilarated or frightened by Albert's boldness. Albert's boss, Mr. Tittle, knew it, but in his own way he admired his sharecropper's spunk and aspiration. If Albert could buy the paint, he wouldn't stop him. Mathis, the storekeeper, was another kind of white man. Said he to Mr. Tittle: "Every nigger around here knows what he's doing ... If you let this business get out of hand they'll all start thinking they're good as you or me. So I'm going to stop this thing. If somebody don't, a man can't say where it all would end." And he cut off Albert's credit at his store. Albert's own position was simple enough: "A white house let a man be a man."

Albert doesn't get to paint his house white. A whole series of intimidations and threats are too much for his wife Louella, and in a desperate act of family preservation, she kills the calf Albert has been raising to pay for the paint. And Albert understands. But it is one of the strengths of this well-written first novel that Louella understands her husband's need too. Says she: "We get the house painted next year." And life goes on, but as in all good fiction the dimensions have been subtly altered and the simplest meanings enlarged.

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