Book Review : A Personal Saga Amid Racial Strife

In the Shadow of the Peacock by Grace Edwards-Yearwood (McGraw-Hill: $17.95; 279 pages)

Although this ambitious first novel opens during the 1943 Harlem riots, when that neighborhood erupted in fire after a black soldier was shot by a New York police officer, racial tension is used primarily to supply the initial thrust that sets the ensuing events in motion.

Despite its violent beginning, “In the Shadow of the Peacock” becomes a novel of personal relationships among a small cast of principal characters whose lives become permanently and inextricably entwined after that terrible night.

Concentrating upon Frieda, a recent arrival from the South, whose baby Celia is born at the height of the terror, and following Celsia’s fortunes and misfortunes through young womanhood in the mid-’60s, the author treats blackness and all its complex social, intellectual and emotional ramifications as the given context in which her people live.

Baby’s Father Killed

Celia’s father, Noel, is killed on the night of her birth, driven back into a blazing tenement by the force of a firefighter’s hose. He had been on his way home from work when a small boy tells him that his crippled grandmother was still trapped in the apartment. Noel dashes into the burning building to save the old woman and both lives are lost. Driven almost mad with grief at the death of her husband, Frieda becomes withdrawn and reclusive, determined to insulate her daughter from all contact with the turbulence surrounding them. She is helped in her struggle by two strong young men who witnessed the tragedy and do their best thereafter to function as surrogate fathers to the child.

Though in time Frieda recovers to some extent, she never relaxes her vigilance where Celia is concerned. Despite her mother’s disapproval, Celia does have one friend, Tessie, an older girl whose way of life epitomizes everything Frieda fears for Celia. The friendship flourishes through triumph and tragedy, sustaining both girls throughout adolescence and thereafter.

It is Tessie who introduces Celia to Jonrobert, a young man whose flamboyant life style arouses deep and well-founded suspicions in Frieda and Celia’s self-appointed “uncles.” These good men, who have always had the best interests of Frieda and her daughter at heart, force Jonrobert to leave the city for reasons even more complex than their knowledge of his underworld activities.

Anguished but unable to defy her mother and her guardians by following her lover, Celia stays in New York to finish college and find a modest job on the staff of a small magazine. There, excruciatingly conscious that she is an experiment in affirmative action in a lily-white enclave, she perseveres with her determination to become a writer, encouraged by her white employer and sustained by the support of the only other black in the shop. Never forgetting Jonrobert, she lives austerely, convinced she will never again love or be loved in quite that way again.

Sent to the Caribbean to do an article on Carnival, she’s reunited with Tessie, who has finally found stability in the West Indies, though at a price. As the wife of a prosperous contractor, Tessie is expected to be grateful for an easy and comfortable life. Often bored and restless, Tessie is delighted to see Celia and introduces her to an equally successful islander, who woos Celia energetically and patiently, almost succeeding in persuading her to marry him and relive Tessie’s life.

All this private drama is played out against a backdrop of the racial ferment of the 1950s and the achievements of the ‘60s, events that have so shaped Celia’s consciousness that she is finally strong enough to resist the lures of emotional and intellectual escape offered to her.

The most remarkable aspect of “In the Shadow of the Peacock” may be the author’s refusal to allow racial anguish to warp and twist what is essentially a classic novel of the passage from childhood to maturity and independence. There are ample opportunities for invective and polemic here, but Grace Edwards-Yearwood wisely lets the events speak for themselves, keeping her focus firmly upon the three women and two men whose personalities so precisely reflect recent history.