Wild Grape

New York, NY: Whittlesey House, 1947 Whittlesey House, New York. 1947. Hardcover. First Edition. Book is tight, square, and unmarked but for old price written on the front endpaper corner. Book Condition: Very Good; gray cloth boards and spine with gilt titling in a red shadowbox on the spine. 364 pp 8vo. A warm presentation of racial problems, though not a Strange Fruit by any means. This is substantial novel of Uncle Gimme's old time methods of righting wrongs, Dr. Dease's slow awakening to the wrongs that must be righted, and of the long standing white and Negro color lines. Uncle Gimme's daughter, raped by Millowner Newbanks, bears a white daughter, just as Newbanks' wife bears his legal child; it is little Deel, a prisoner in her family's house that all would protect from trouble. Uncle Gimme fights the idea of her being sent North, contrives in every way to provide books, security and happiness for the child, but is forced into yielding. Here is the Georgia of the Ku Klux Klan, the pillory of color, the hatred of the whites for that color in the mass, and the love for the colored individual. Here too is the clash of theory with practice, the attempts to evade the issues on the part of the died-in-the-wool Georgian, the flagrant hypocrisy and lack of justice. For all its picture of the non-progressive attitudes, there is humor and sympathy in the gradual realization of the old timers that things are changing and so must they. A clean very presentable copy.