THE MYSTIC ADVENTURES OF ROXIE STONER

Snatches in the almost threadbare life of Roxie Stoner of King County, Mississippi which this gentle colored woman -- this was then the world of coloreds and whites -- spent doing and caring for others. Berry Morgan wrote the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship novel Pursuit (1966) and all but one of these stories have appeared in The New Yorker. Finger them and they'll almost disappear. Like the people in Roxie's life -- the widower who moves in for two winters, or the baby, newborn, she takes care of for a few weeks, and finally Mama who dies (""The Passing,"" one of the stronger pieces) while Roxie is looking after other people's troubles. After that she does little jobs ""to keep my daylight busy"" until she is sent away to the ""nerve hospital"" -- they claim that Roxie doesn't know right from wrong. But she does -- after all the Almighty is never more'n a step away and Mama, even after she dies, is backstopping him. . . The slim stories, as plain and humble as burr clover, as plain and humble as Roxie Stoner, are just about flawlessly right.