NEGRO LITERATURE
211
in
Fisher's
The Walis of Jericho
says she prefers Negroes to whites
because "You see, they have so much color." Margaret Just Butcher,
the Negro author of
The Negro in American Culture,
makes the pun
continually in what I take to be entire innocence: "The Negro ob–
servably colored the general temper and folkways of the American
south"; Negro comedy "richly colored Southern local and regional
culture, and eventually that of the whole nation"; a work typifies
"the well-meaning, somewhat colorless accounts by white authors";
Uncle Tom's Cabin
is written in "sharp blacks and whites, no shad–
ings."
The reality behind the pun is that Negro life in America,
Negro folk literature, and some Negro writing does have color
in
every sense; not only skin pigment, but all the rich pigmentation of
the fullest possible awareness. The best Negro literature and folk
literature extends our perception to a f.ar wider spectrum. "Who
knows," the narrator of
Invisible Man
asks in the book's last line,
"but that, on the lower frequencies,
I
speak for you?" Perhaps, we
can add, on some of the higher, the almost inaudible frequencies as
well?
