Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 196 pages. Publisher's release and photo of author laid in. Foxing to top edge. Spine slightly cocked. Else a very clean, tight copy. The author's first work of fiction and his second book to be published (the first being a philosophical work published 1988 under the title "Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970"). Writing of this debut Novel in the New York Times, Anne Gotlieb stated "This is a strange and often wonderful hybrid -- an ebullient philosophical novel in the form of a folktale-cum-black girl's odyssey. It is a book bubbling like a conjure woman's kettle with African lore, preserved intact in the half-magical, half-demeaning world of Hatten County, Georgia."