Blackgum Against Thunder

ALL THE KINGDOMS OF EARTH (249 pp.)--Hoke Norrls--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

Down in the harsh bottom land of Crooked Creek, N.C., the sharecropping Negroes grub and grovel in feudal hardship, sustained only by a Bible-quoting parson and their own passive resistance to death, famine and flood -- the blind resilience peculiar to those with no hope to abandon except that of heaven. To borrow one of their own sayings, they are "blackgum against thunder," and that is something when a man knows that the blackgum tree is "so hard, when lightnin hit it, is a question of who win, the fire or the wood." The many ways in which the lightning of life strikes the country Negroes of Crooked Creek, and the ways in which they burn or win, form the substance of this book by Hoke Norris, a North Caro linian who works as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. As a white man try ing to write about Negroes through Negro eyes and Negro mind, he makes a noble try. All the Kingdoms is presented by its author and its publishers as a novel, but it is more a loose-linked succession of anec dotes and characters. Written with re strained passion and sincere compassion, the book is a sociological blend of feeling and outrage reminiscent of Alan Paton's more powerful hymn to the blacks of South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country.

Old Hen. Of All the Kingdom's twelve chapter-size tales, the best demonstrate how resolutely the Crooked Creekers man age "just keepin on keepin on" until the Lord God calls them home. Depicted in the 30-odd years between World War I and Korea, the Crooked Creekers live in odd isolation from the rest of the U.S., invoke the King James version of the Good Book in rough-hewn English, react to such intrusions as World War II by sending their young men off to fight, not knowingly but instinctively, like "the old mother hen flyin at the chicken hawk that comes swoopin down."

If there is a character who can be called central, he is Crooked Creek's Preacher Prescott, who knows that "all of this short life [is] a leavetaking, while you hang on, saying No, not yet." Preacher Prescott, both a Job and a Jeremiah, is summoned to his church in the dead of one night by the clangorous bell-ringing of a white-hating rabble-rouser and finds his inflamed flock already there, armed with guns and ready to shoot it out with a lynch mob of whites that is cruising around the bottom land. The Preacher heads off an ugly racial skirmish with an impromptu sermon: "Whether old Abe Lincoln live and die in vain depend on you ... I know well's anybody, we got fight back now and then [but] everybody got find their own freedom. Everybody got lead their own selves outen the wilderness . . . Me--I'm goin home and get me some sleep."

Lost Sheep. On another occasion Preacher Prescott averts crisis with sage humor. Facing the task of laying to rest a lost sheep who, by the parson's own count, had smashed every one of the Ten Commandments, Preacher Prescott stands up to deliver a funeral oration over the blackened soul, suddenly bangs shut his Bible and declaims: "Brothers and Sisters, you knowed Charlie. I knowed Charlie. Let's bury him." And so they do.

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