The Storyteller ‘‘Cousin Wash” Series, Volume I and II by Curtis Hunt (review)

Reviews 77 During the first 44 years of his life he was a sharecropper and odd-job man, and worked in a box factory, on a railroad section gang, and in a succession of slaughterhouses. He was also an amateur preacher. He established himself as a full-time preacher in 1928, when, following a divine call to Jacksonville, Texas, he opened the Temple parish of the Church of God in Christ. No Quittin’ Sense is a rich and moving autobiography, tape-recorded from White’s own recollections, and edited by Mrs. Holland into orderly chronological sequence. This is the third piece of writing on his life and work on which Mr. White and Mrs. Holland have collaborated. The others were articles in Ebony and Texas Magazine. All were undertaken to publicize the Temple Church of God in Christ’s charity work. This consists mainly of a project called God’s Storehouse. The Storehouse, a depository for food, clothing and other goods donated for the poor, is a building constructed behind the church in 1935. Its development, Mr. White says, was inspired by Malachi 3:10—“Bring ye the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and prove me if I will not open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing . . . .” Mr. White is a community leader, and by Jacksonville standards is evi­ dently considered a most unusual man. No Quittin’ Sense manages to be a very good book despite the fact that the senior author’s own good opinion of himself is too evident in it too often. For what makes the book meaningful is not the exceptional but the typical aspects of the life it relates. It is detailed, vivid, first-person account of a way of life in which elementary extremes operated powerfully every day. The book’s characters lived in acute and universal poverty, with the threat of disease and the nearness of death counterbalanced by an eternal hope of Christian redemption. It is appalling to realize, despite the mechanical progress that they sampled from the outer world of urban American society, how little human progress occurred for the black sharecropper or small-town factory hand in all the long years since this life-style began after the Civil War. Perhaps improvement is finally on its way, but meanwhile life continues, as it always has. G. Franklin Ackerman, Tong-Du-Chon, Republic of Korea The Storyteller ‘‘Cousin Wash” Series, Volume I and II. By Curtis Hunt. (Black Recording Company, 5451 Bancroft, Oakland, Calif. 94601. 1969. 33 8c 1/3 recordings. $15.00 the set.) Negroes played a prominent role in the opening of the West, as is well known, but, with the prominent exception of J. Mason Brewer’s marvelous contributions, there has been little material available on frontier experience as seen through the eyes of Afro-Americans. Now a small California company has released the first of a series of educational recordings dealing with oral 78 Western American Literature literature in the West by Negroes, and they mark a small, but genuine con­ tribution to our partial American literary mosaic. On the records reviewed here, Curtis Hunt, a native of Belton, Texas, recreates “Cousin Wash,” an itinerant tale-teller who actually lived by his wits in the Belton area when Hunt was a boy, some sixty-plus years ago. The stories, which are related just as though the storyteller is regaling a Texas ranch audience, relate to historical events from the turn of the century, as well as folklore and what Cousin Wash calls “local coloreds.” Of particular interest is side two of Volume II, “Juneteenth,” on which Cousin Wash tells of celebrat­ ing Juneteenth with black ranchers and wranglers—“them white folks don’t tell us nothin’ on Juneteenth, and we don’t tell them nothing on July Fo’ and how cany old Cousin Wash finagles a free meal, as usual. He tells, too, of local turmoils—“the’s a sign outside town says ‘nigger if you can read this sign, get moving. If you can’t read it, get moving anyway.’ ” There is a hilarious discussion of the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries heavyweight championship...