The dark side of Hopkinsville : stories /

Knowing, gentle humor marks these tales based on Poston's childhood in the segregated Southern town of Hopkinsville, Ky. Poston (1906-1974) was a pioneering black journalist and member of Roosevelt's ``Negro Cabinet.'' Inspired by a western movie where the Indians won, young Ted and his friends decide to take over the swimming hole they share with a group of white boys--and encounter a young opponent who breaks their stereotypes of size and strength. In a world full of inter- and intraracial color prejudice, Ted gets an unexpected lesson in bigotry when the father of a white friend objects to his son playing not with Ted, but with two Jewish boys. Picaresque incidents abound. When the protests of Hopkinsville's black adults fail to keep Birth of a Nation out of the local movie theater, Ted's pal Rat Joiner comes to the rescue with an ingenious plan that plunges the film into everlasting local obscurity. And Ted wreaks hilarious revenge on the Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School when his dark skin earns him the part of the Evil Fairy instead of the coveted role of Prince Charming in the school play. Included are interviews with longtime residents of Hopkinsville. Hauke is a freelance editor. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Poston, a native of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, became the first black reporter for a major white metropolitan newspaper and a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's ``Negro Cabinet'' in Washington in 1940. He had hoped to publish these ten short stories in a volume as evidence of the life-affirming depth of the cultural experiences he had growing up in a segregated society in the early 20th century. Poston based most of the characters in these stories on actual persons. In the first, ``Mr. Jack Johnson and Me,'' the narrator, a youngster called Big Chief Geronimo, takes on a white boy in a fight over swimming hole rights. Instead of proving his boxing prowess to the other black children present, Geronimo gets ``scalped.'' ``Cousin Blind Mary'' is a story about Hopkinsville's well-to-do black fortuneteller whose reputation for being savvy and shrewd in her dealings with whites makes her an almost legendary figure in the black community. The Dark Side is a fascinating, first-hand portrait of a culture and a time in American life little known or remembered outside Southern black communities. Highly recommended for collections of American literature and African American studies materials.-- Francis Poole, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Poston, a well-known black journalist who died in 1974, has been well served by editor Hauke, who came upon these ten sketches of black children growing up in a southern town at the turn of the century, then edited and annotated them for publication and wrote a useful introduction. Though the quality of the sketches varies, they constitute a good-natured portrait of life in the segregated South. Told by ``Ted,'' a student at the Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the tales range from pastoral pieces (occasionally with some bite) about swimming and fishing to portraits of small-town types. In ``Mr. Jack Johnson and Me,'' for instance, B'Rob serves as mentor to the young narrator, setting him right about the history of slavery, correcting ideas received from the town's white power structure. Likewise, in ``Birth of a Notion,'' the blacks successfully protest the arrival in town of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. In ``Cousin Blind Mary,'' a fortuneteller who seems to know everything after a ``night to consult the spirits'' gets her information from a network of black women who work for the whites. Meanwhile, Rat Joiner is a recurring character--a milder, gentler version of Bigger Thomas who, despite obstacles, devises a plan (``Rat Joiner Whips the Kaiser'') to win the WW I Liberty Bond Contest. In ``The Revolt of the Evil Fairies,'' perhaps the most affecting of the personal sketches, Ted spoils a presentation of ``Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty'' when he realizes he ``couldn't have been Prince Charming'' however obedient he pretended to be. Anecdotes and reminiscences are strung together to create an evocative miscellany--with Hauke's extensive notes linking together real-life counterparts with Poston's semi-fictional creations.