Tragedy out of the News

CALEB, MY SON (125 pp.)--Lucy Daniels--Llppincotf ($2.75).

The news stories made it plain that the Supreme Court's anti-segregation ruling brought both new hopes and old heartaches to the South. It remained for fiction to shape the facts into a form the heart could not ignore. This task might well have been undertaken by Negro writers such as Richard (Native Son) Wright and

Ralph (The Invisible Man) Ellison (but both were living in Europe) or by Southern authors such as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren (but both chose instead to make nonfiction preachments on the subject). So an unknown, 22-year-old girl has done the job, and done it amazingly well.

The story told by Novelist Lucy Daniels concerns the large, respectable and reasonably happy family of a Negro chauffeur in a Southern town. To them, the Supreme Court's decision comes hard. The father, a nonentity in his white boss's house but a patriarch in his own, is simply distressed by the news: "I don' know . . . But I cain't see Saul goin' to school wid white kids ... I cain't see me sittin' side o' Mistah Charles on the bus neitha . . I think they's plenty mo' feel the same way. I hope they don' push 'm."

Only Caleb, the family's proud and promising eldest son, hears a kind of call to freedom in the court's ruling. But he gets it garbled, comes to think of it as a call to arms and, in the book's least effective chapters, answers it by ostentatiously dating an unsavory white girl. This grim and joyless effort to "push things" pulls the family into trouble, and the father into a not altogether plausible tragedy.

Novelist Daniels, a daughter of Author-Editor Jonathan (The Man from Independence) Daniels, has lived almost all her life in Raleigh, N.C., where she works as a reporter on the Raleigh Times. She chose for her first novel a story firmly pegged to the news, and applied her newspaper training to the business of telling it straight and clear. Her brief, softspoken, painful tale is absolutely bare of dramatic flourishes, boasts only a few forlorn buds of poetic feeling. Author Daniels is not sufficiently sensuous a writer to breathe physical presence into her characters; yet they think their narrow-bound thoughts, talk their touching dreams and suffer their private agonies most convincingly. As a result, the novel reads rather like a play --it is all there except the actors and the lights.

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