The history covered fictionally in A Short Walk is impressive and important: minstrel-show performers in the twenties are shown to have authentic lives behind the masks; the grim years of the Great Depression are drawn with the accuracy of experience; and, best of all, Childress involves her characters in the Marcus Garvey Movement—the first fictional treatment of that movement I have read. And it is utterly engrossing.

One feels great respect for the writer's knowledge of the past and her fidelity to what she remembers and chooses to record. Childress's is a mature intelligence, and the novel is rich with the fullness of her experience as a black woman in America—and as an extremely aware and political person. Nevertheless, the novel disappoints.

The writing has a forced folksiness throughout that makes much of what is said between characters unbelievable, and the very maturity of mind that...