As an illustration, one cannot fail to note that while the educated Negroes of the North could not possibly take at the hands of a Negro Union soldier, who had fought for the freedom of the race and gone thro’ the days of Congressional Reconstruction without a stain, as a distinct Legislative leader, a faithful description of the great mass of Negroes in the South, they acclaimed the French Negro author of “Batouala,” whose realistic novel of the Negro in Africa while criticising severely their white French rulers, damns the Negroes, even more so. The book is not only interesting, it is instructive to those who need the instruction; and the increasing numbers of educated Negroes at the North needed just such a book, in order to show them what they were rescued from in Africa. Rene Maran says: “My book is not a polemic. It comes by chance when its hour strikes. The Negro Question is of the present. Who made it that? Why the Americans.” Describing French Colonial Africa, he quotes, the Senegalese, Diagne: “—the best settlers have been not the professional colonials, but the European troops from the trenches.”[406] This is in the preface. The book opens with the awakening of the hero “Batouala” in the hut in which he sleeps with his eighth and favorite wife, Yassiguindjia. It recalls another awakening in another realistic piece of literature, “Old Bram” in “The Black Border.” The only difference is between the awakening of a wolf and the awakening of an old watch dog, “the friend of man,” a tamed wolf. The story revolves around the politics and desires of Batouala, Bissibingui and Yassiguindjia. Batouala is a wolf who cares for the pack; Bissibingui, a young wolf, as fierce, who cares but for himself and his desires. Yassiguindjia can only be described by one of the items with which she was purchased. In “The Black Border” it is true we are in South Carolina, along the coast; but, as has been eloquently stated by a Scotch South Carolinian, in that region “there is Africa in every breath we draw.” With artistic power Maran pictures the sounds of the African dawn. “Daylight broke. Although heavy with sleep still, Batouala—Batouala, the Mokoundji, chief of so many villages—was quite conscious of these sounds. He yawned, shivered and stretched himself. Should he go to sleep again? Should he get up? God! Why get up? He did not even wish to know why....