Reviews

A black man comes to the home of a friend's mother, Mrs. Poole, who also is black. This exchange follows: `` `Ah's in trubble, Mis' Poole.' `W'at you done done now?' `Shot a man . . . ' `White man o' niggah?' `Cain't say.' '' No sooner does Mrs. Poole agree to hide him than the sheriff arrives to inform her that her son is dead--and the chief suspect in his murder is the man to whom she has given sanctuary. `` `You ain't noticed anybody pass this evenin'?' '' inquires the sheriff. Mrs. Poole, at once a bereaved mother and a jury of one, answers: `` `No.' '' This 1930 Nella Larsen story raises peculiarly American questions of justice that recur throughout this anthology, the most comprehensive of its kind in three decades. Can the American legal process be trusted to correctly decide an African American's guilt? Or have two codes of justice--public and private--evolved? In a 1933 tale by Zora Neale Hurston, a husband finds his wife in bed with another man whose promise of a gold coin prompted her unfaithfulness. The husband pockets the coin as a small but torturous reminder of her crime. One morning she discovers the coin under her pillow, his intimate signal of her punishment's end. Two-thirds of this volume consists of stories written after 1962, and these demonstrate how recent writers have not only sustained the stylistic brilliance of Larsen and Hurston but continued to explore these questions of justice. Rich in biblical allusions, Charles Johnson's entry concerns the slave owner Moses's attempt to mold his slave, Mingo, in his own image. When Mingo commits a murder, however, Moses discovers the depth of their connection, telling Mingo: `` `All the wrong, all the good you do . . . it's me indirectly doing it, but without the lies and excuses.' '' Johnson keenly uncovers the irony in the master-slave relationship that Major ( Parking Lots ), in his introduction, sees as emerging when the enslaver, forcing himself on the slave, secretly acknowledges ``the slave's humanity . . . which he officially denied.'' This kinship--and the myriad black-white relations that flow from it--is one of the strongest underground currents in American literature since Twain and the slave narratives. This indispensable collection presents the metamorphosis of this kinship, revealing the true--at times warped--shape of our national values of liberty and justice for all. (Jan.)