GILBERT, Mercedes | Aunt Sara’s Wooden God

College Park, MD: McGrath Pub. Co, 1938.

8vo.; clean and tight throughout; finely woven green cloth with black lettering and parallel rules on the front boards; and bright black lettering on the spine; binding has some faint discoloration along the top edges of the rear panel and across the top of the spine. 

First edition, first printing. With an inscription written in blue ink on the front endpaper by Mercedes Gilbert: “To Hall Johnson, The greatest artist the Negro race ever produced. And my friend. For greater success. Sincerely, Mercedes Gilbert, 1939.” Triple underscored; with a few light smudges shadowing a few words of the inscription. Introduction by Langston Hughes.

The actress and poet Mercedes Gilbert’s Aunt Sara’s Wooden God, rooted in African American culture, written in dialect, focuses on the effects of slavery in a small Georgian town. In the forward written by Langston Hughes, he calls it a “kindred novel” to Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine. Gilbert (1894–1952), who was often hailed as “America's greatest Negro dramatic actress,” was a native of Jacksonville, Florida. She attended Edward Waters College, where she originally trained to be a nurse before coming to New York and entering the entertainment profession, first as a songwriter and then as a stage actress. She appeared in many stage productions, including the original touring production of The Green Pastures in 1930; a 1950 Broadway version of Tobacco Road with an all-black cast; and in Langston Hughes’ play, The Mulatto. She appeared on screen four times: first in The Call of His People in 1921, then Body and Soul in 1925, Moon Over Harlem in 1939 as Jackie's mother, and finally in the episode “The Green Dress” of the TV series Lights Out. In the early 1940s, she toured the country performing a one-woman show at historically black colleges and voice-acted on radio shows, playing Sojourner Truth in a 1943 tribute to black women in America called Heroines in Bronze.