Cora James's short walk through life [portrayed in "A Short Walk"] carries her from birth in 1900 through marriage to a dull man of property, flight to the then-forming Northern ghetto, love with a childhood sweetheart involved in Marcus Garvey's black-nationalism movement, middle age as proprietor of a traveling minstrel show and dealer in an illegal gambling house, and finally, death of a heart attack on the streets of New York….

There are fine set pieces here on the off-duty lives of Pullman porters, the rising black bourgeoisie and the maiden voyage of Garvey's flagship, the S.S. Frederick Douglass. Much of this terrain is already well-worked, but here the history of black struggle is enhanced by a meditation on time and change, and in this Alice Childress owes as much to Faulkner and Mann as to Wright and Ellison….

Like every life, Cora's becomes a chronicle of deaths...