Books: A Kind of Kansas

THE LEARNING TREE by Gordon Parks. 303 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

“Good gracious me,” exclaims Momma Winger. “What won’t that onery boy do next!” With this kind of talk it is not very surprising that Momma Winger’s sprouting twelve-year-old son Newt turns out to be a high-spirited youth who would rather poke curiously into an anthill than do the family chores. Predictably, too, Newt is a bright lad, and getting on for a strong one. He is chosen to give the speech at his graduation. Put in late in a basketball game, he emerges as a high scorer. He defeats the local bully in a vicious fight.

Anyone who thinks he has read all this before will be right. But no one should therefore write off Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree as just another fictional recollection of an all-American boyhood. For Newt Winger is a Negro. His graduation ceremony is segregated, and the defeated bully (another Negro) is driven to his death by a white cop. His brother-in-law is a dangerous drunk who loads a shotgun whenever he gets loaded himself, and blazes away at the sky shouting “I’m gonna blow the ass off Jesus Christ, the long-legged white son-of-a-bitch.”

Like the young hero of this first novel, Negro Gordon Parks, a talented and successful LIFE photographer, grew up in a small Kansas town in the 1920s. His unabashed nostalgia for what was good there, blended with sharp recollections of staggering violence and fear, makes an immensely readable, sometimes unsettling book—a kind of cross between Penrod and Native Son. Coming out just now, the book will probably be scrutinized by blacks and whites alike for a significance it lays no claim to. But only extremists will disagree with its clear moral—not new but worth repeating: the hate a Negro feels can be almost as destructive to himself as the white cruelty that causes it.