Since a generic white woman constitutes white society's totem, Jim Crow ensures that the totem remains undefiled. That all white women are totemic sisters to all white men is problematic for blacks who pass as whites. In the context of this issue, Greene discusses briefly Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , where Emerson Jr.'s homosexuality forges a shared identity with the similarly marginalized invisible man. Similarly, as Greene demonstrates, Waters Edward Turpin's 1957 novel, The Rootless, uses psychosexuality and totemism to deconstruct the plantation myth. White Delaneys, descendants of an English murderer and themselves congenitally diseased, contrast with the black slave Prince, a black Adam-like descendent of African royalty who embodies the textbook values of the American Revolution.
Plantations burn and whites and blacks die in a backward look at a possible future race war in Eden.
Less satisfying is Greene's concluding chapter on Invisible Man. However, the first two categories loom especially large, and one wishes for more specific links to the African American works discussed earlier. In partial explanation, though, Greene argues that the post-World War II African American novelist enjoys a greater freedom than ever before and no longer follows generic rules. Blacks in Eden is a useful and trustworthy survey of the edenic trope in African American literature and a well-written and easily read journey through the literature that is often left out of canonical surveys. What is most striking, though, is how mainstream are the values expressed in these novels.