Philip Alexander Bruce (1856–1933)

Being an account of the life of the black man in southern Virginia during the adolescent years of Jim Crow, supposedly based on personal observation, though anecdote or specific descriptions are lacking. The author possesses an extremely negative opinion of the intelligence, personality, and morality of the black man, ameliorated only slightly by the occasional backhanded compliment or blameshifting to Yankees and their emancipation of the slaves. Of course, this viewpoint will quite rightly be considered offensive by the vast majority of contemporary readers.

As for the book, it generates a mild interest because of the author's involuted prose; his combination of circumlocution and euphemism as he describes the horrors lurking within the mind of the black man making a peculiar contrast between the act and the purple prose. For that matter, one could make the same statement about the atrocities, which of course he justifies, inflicted upon the freedmen by whites to impose and enforce Jim Crow. But the author is extremely repetitive; the same themes recur in chapter after chapter and become quite tiresome. The last third of the book veers off into a more concrete description of housing and labor conditions of the freedmen and is slightly less hateful, but is hardly very interesting reading.… (mehr)