[Sebestyen's Words by Heart], like life itself for Afro-Americans in the post-Bakke 1970s, is an anguish-provoking experience in backward time travel. Its sincerity is unquestionable, its eloquence seductive—but its message is even more regressive than the many setbacks from the gains of the '60s that blacks have suffered in this Second Reconstruction.

Appropriately, Words by Heart is set during the closing years of the First Reconstruction. In 1910, we travel with Lena, a 12-year-old memory whiz, and her family on a journey from hope to despair….

The most puzzling and distressing aspect of Lena's character development is that she begins as a proud fighter and ends as a model of meek Christian forbearance, exactly, as Claudie observes with resignation, like her saintly father. The Bible contains, along with everything else, counsel for both modes of behavior, making Lena's transformation from sword-wielder to cross-bearer especially difficult for this reader to accept. She has learned her verses under Papa Ben's tutelage, of course, but early in the book, to his reminder that "'The Lord commanded, Thou shalt not kill,'" she responds quickly, "But Papa, in the very next chapter Moses says anybody that smited a man and killed him shall surely die."

How Lena comes to learn Papa's favorite verses and not her own "by heart," in view of all the evils that beset her family, is unaccountable. One threat to their safety is the capricious nature of their employer, Mrs. Chism, a wealthy old dragon of a landowner who suffers unpredictable attacks of decency. She is perhaps the most complex and intriguing character in the book, but if she and people like her were consistently cruel, Lena, her family and the rest of us would be better off. Mrs. Chism is, for instance, too soft-hearted to get rid of her shiftless, dishonest poor white tenant farmers, the Haneys, who are incapable of anything but harm, until too late.

That Lena is able to feel sympathy for the Haneys at points in the novel, in spite of the threat they pose to her family; that, at the grim ending of the final and most suspenseful chapter, she decides to follow her father's dictum to "Love thy enemies and do good to them that hate you" is both appalling and incredible. One of the author's best phrases is: "Something always comes to fill the empty places … Something comes to take the place of what you lose." But if Sebestyen's brand of meek, turn-the-other cheek Christianity is supposed to fill the voids left by [Malcolm X] and, yes, [Martin Luther King, Jr.], then we blacks and our youngsters will be in even deeper trouble.

Kristin Hunter, "Blurred View of Black Childhood," in Book World—The Washington Post, June 10, 1979, p. E3.