The Other Room

IT WAS a very much surprised young woman who accepted a teacher’s job in a college in Now Orleans, to find on arrival that it was an institution for Negroes, with, for the most part, a Negro faculty. The reader fully shares Nina Latham’s surprise, and once, together with the heroine, he gets over it, he will find the story wholly plausible,and he will follow Nina’s adventure with an absorption which comes only with authentic experience. Nina, it must be borne in mind, came from a good Virginia family which had once owned slaves. Her first reaction was one of horror; she felt tempted to flee.

She had the gumption, however, to stay, and with the passing weeks she was persuaded to revise some Southern preconceptions and traditional prejudices on the Negro. It was Heine who jestingly remarked that the devil is not as black as he is painted, and Nina discovered that the same is true of the Negro. Indeed, in some respects we can learn something from him to our profit. For one thing, “we’re the backward race when it comes to charity,”and by charity the author does not refer to material things.

Nina’s experience gained a peculiar poignancy because she fell in love with Professor Warwick, who could pass for white in more senses than one. She took him for white when he met her at the station, though certain details of his behavior in public astonished her; their meaning became clear later. Even more startling was the discovery that beneath the slightly tinted skin there were an intelligence and a personality which would be exceptional in a white man, Warwick was a gentleman, he was attractive, and his sensitiveness responded to the sensitiveness in Nina. And she simply couldn’t stand Professor Ames, whose unadulterated whiteness did not prevent him from being wholly unattractive to Nina.

Mrs. Hedden poses the problem of the interrelation of the races in terms of fiction which impressively she employs to drive home a lesson in interracial good manners.

JOHN COURNOS