STEVIE

Easy does it: in his own loose, expressive idiom and a few trenchant paintings, a little black boy first resents and then regrets the loss of a younger boarder who was "kinda like a little brother." The familiar situation of an only child forced to share his mother and his toys, hobbled by a tag-along and teased on his account ("Bobby the baby-sitter"), is heightened by the verisimilitude of the language so that what is a recognizable story for black children is also a more than ordinarily convincing story for all children. (Actually boys in general think and sound more like Bobby than like the color-less characters in most books.) The paintings have the strong contours, glowing colors, tight composition and flat planes of Roualt; they could be displayed independently but, separated by two pages of text, they succeed (except in one case) in solidifying and projecting the emotional undercurrent. In a word, eloquent.