Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DIALOGUE
2
Edited by
Michael J. Meyer
Richard Wrights Native Son
Edited by
Ana Mara Fraile
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2297-3
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in the Netherlands
For Juan Luis and Andrs,
As always
Contents
Introduction xi
Gendered Textualities 37
Spatial Dynamics 73
Index 229
General Editors Preface
The original concept for Rodopi's new series entitled Dialogue grew
out two very personal experiences of the general editor. In 1985,
having just finished my dissertation on John Steinbeck and attained
my doctoral degree, I was surprised to receive an invitation from
Steinbeck biographer, Jackson J. Benson, to submit an essay for a
book he was working on. I was unpublished at the time and was
unsure and hesitant about my writing talent, but I realized that I had
nothing to lose. It was truly the opportunity of a lifetime. I revised
and shortened a chapter of my dissertation on Steinbeck's The Pearl
and sent it off to California. Two months later, I was pleasantly
surprised to find out that my essay had been accepted and would
appear in Duke University Press's The Short Novels of John Steinbeck
(1990).
Surprisingly, my good fortune continued when several months
after the book appeared, Tetsumaro Hayashi, a renowned Steinbeck
scholar, asked me to serve as one of the three assistant editors of The
Steinbeck Quarterly, then being published at Ball State University.
Quite nave at the time about publishing, I did not realize how
fortunate I had been to have such opportunities present themselves
without any struggle on my part to attain them. After finding my
writing voice and editing several volumes on my own, I discovered in
2002 that despite my positive experiences, there was a real prejudice
against newer emerging scholars when it came to inclusion in
collections or acceptance in journals.
As the designated editor of a Steinbeck centenary collection, I
found myself roundly questioned about the essays I had chosen for
inclusion in the book. Specifically, I was asked why I had not selected
several prestigious names whose recognition power would have
spurred the book's success on the market. My choices of lesser known
but quality essays seemed unacceptable. New voices were
unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted with open
viii Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son
arms. Yet these scholars had no need for further publications and
often offered few original insights into the Steinbeck canon. Sadly,
the originality of the lesser-known essayists met with hostility; the
doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight, against their innovative
approaches and readings that took issue with scholars whose authority
and expertise had long been unquestioned.
Angered, I withdrew as editor of the volume, and began to think of
ways to rectify what I considered a serious flaw in academe. My goal
was to open discussions between experienced scholars and those who
were just beginning their academic careers and had not yet broken
through the publication barriers. Dialogue would be fostered rather
than discouraged.
Having previously served as an editor for several volumes in
Rodopi's Perspective of Modern Literature series under the general
editorship of David Bevan, I sent a proposal to Fred Van der Zee
advocating a new series that would be entitled Dialogue, one that
would examine the controversies within classic canonical texts and
would emphasize an interchange between established voices and those
whose ideas had never reached the academic community because their
names were unknown. Happily, the press was willing to give the
concept a try and gave me a wide scope in determining not only the
texts to be covered but also in deciding who would edit the individual
volumes.
The Native Son volume that appears here is the second attempt at this
unique approach to criticism. It features several well-known Richard
Wright experts and several other essayists whose reputation is not so
widespread but whose keen insights skillfully inform the text. It will
soon be followed by volume on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
and Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding. It is my hope that as each title
appears, the Dialogue series will foster not only renewed interest in
each of the chosen works but that each will bring forth new ideas as
well as fresh interpretations from heretofore silenced voices. In this
atmosphere, a healthy interchange of criticism can develop, one that
will allow even dissent and opposite viewpoints to be expressed
without fear that such stances may be seen as negative or counter-
productive.
General Editors Preface ix
My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this
radical concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in
these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for
decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and
our critical discourse.
Michael J. Meyer
2007
Introduction
spans from the mid-forties to the late sixties shows, however, that
Wrights place in the national canon was not secured, as the attacks to
the noveland to his oeuvre in generalduring this period managed
to obscure and diminish his reputation. Still later, in the national arena
the progression of the Civil Rights movement to a more militant
positioning, combined with the advent of Black Powera phrase
coined by Wright himselfand the burgeoning Black Arts movement
of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s initiated a third phase in
which the positive reassessment of Wrights aesthetics led to the
canonization of the novel. Also, the postcolonial era contributed to a
revalorization of Wrights work from a Pan-African perspective.
However, although Wrights position was secured, a fourth phase
can be observed where scholarly attention to his work suffered as a
result of two interrelated developments. On the one hand, the novels
reception was impacted by the upsurge of the new oppositional front
that developed in response to the Black Womens movement as well
as by the rise of black women writers and academics since the late
1970s. Consequently, at a time when an African American literary
canon was starting to develop around major male writers, research
into the overlooked works by African American women evidenced the
existence of an alternative tradition that held black womens
sensitivity and experience at its center. Soon Zora Neale Hurston,
whose writing and political position seemed to be antithetical to
Wrights,1 would be widely acclaimed in the 1980s as the predecessor
of contemporary African American women writers, after being
championed by her sister writers and scholarsan effort epitomized
in the figure of Alice Walker. This trend of criticism that
encompasses the inscription of gender in the literary practice
stimulated a much needed interrogation of Wrights cultural and
historical background, contributing to a more accurate reappraisal of
his work and relating it to our present literary, political, social and
moral concerns.
In spite of the seeming polar positions of both writers, Hurston and
Wright have lately become unlikely partners.2 Both are often paired
and hailed as the two major forerunners of the contemporary African
American novel. This development marks a fifth phase wherein the
African American literary tradition is no longer viewed simplistically
as a game of opposite positions, but rather as an open ground where
multiple perspectives intersect and interact. A clear example of this
comprehensive view is the creation in 1990 of The Hurston/Wright
Foundation, which contributes to support African American literature
xiv Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son
by, among other things, promoting writers of African descent with the
annual Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Other evidence can be found
in the various essays and conferences providing a comparative
approach to the works of both writers. Their coupling is perhaps the
best illustration of how the politics of affirmation and the politics of
social protest may in fact coalesce in spite of their seeming
contradictions.It is within this continuum that the dialogue opened up
in this book is situated.
****
The following coupling of essays, though not arbitrary, does not
preclude different arrangements and combinations since many of the
issues raised are not exclusively dealt with by a pair of scholars, but
are discussed from multiple perspectives by different authors,
therefore offering an interaction on many levels rather than a limited
conversation. The present distribution merely serves to highlight a
series of links between essays, although the reader will undoubtedly
observe many other interconnections.
The first two essays provide an apt introduction to the volume by
focusing on Richard Wright and on the historical reception of his
work. Caleb Corkerys chapter Richard Wright and His White
Audience: How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical
Significance opens the books dialectic exchange with the
controversial argument that Native Sons success and impact on
American culture depended on the audiences identification of the
writers work with his living experiences as a black man. Thus linking
authority and authenticity, Corkery argues that it is this sort of
biographical realism that accounts for Wrights popularity and
eventually became his trademark as an author. Working from the
presupposition that the value of Wrights work relies on his persona
as the source of authoritative writing, rather than on aesthetic
achievement, Corkery proceeds, Wrights works have been more or
less acclaimed depending on the impact of his presence on the
readers minds and on the extent to which his writing reflected the
image his readers had of him. Furthermore Corkery suggests that
when Wright died in 1960 and his presence could no longer reaffirm
his work, his literary reputation also declined. This situation was
overturned when in the 1970s Wrights persona was again thrust to
the forefront by the publication of numerous biographies on the
author which shed new light on his work. Corkery claims that the
current historical context has changed, making his spokesperson
status irrelevant, his message inert and his literature only
historical artifact.
Philip Goldsteins essay From Communism to Black Studies and
Beyond: The Reception of Richard Wright's Native Son both
complements and responds to Corkerys argument. Also engaging the
relation between novel and author and between Wrights political
evolution and the novels reception through time, Goldstein focuses
Introduction xvii
wisdom tradition to which the Book of Job belongs not only accounts
for the charges of didacticism against the last part of the novel but
also explains puzzling aspects of it, such as the rejection of Biggers
guilt or Wrights attempt to reverse the inhumanity of murder into a
sign of righteousness and humanity. Marys and Bessies murders
emerge as sacrificial rites as Bigger eventually succeeds in liberating
himself from being translated into a social symbol, a ritual sacrificial
scapegoat.
The last two essays explore the lasting influence of the novel
through its adaptation to other artistic fields, such as the cinema and
song in the form of hip-hop.
Raphal Lamberts analysis in From Page to Screen: A
Comparative Study of Richard Wrights Native Son and Its Two Film
Adaptations argues that Wright conceived the novel in cinematic
terms in an attempt to enhance the realism of the story and thus insure
that Biggers feelings would be impressed upon the reader as
unmediated by words. However, the novel being a written medium,
Wright found it difficult to translate Biggers inarticulateness onto the
page without resorting to an intrusive authorial narrative voice that
hinders immediacy. The cinema appears as an apt genre to convey
Biggers emotions and inarticulateness through action, rather than
words, adding immediacy and realism to the story. In the second part
of his essay Lambert concludes that in spite of the formal advantages
that the adaptation of the novel to cinema may offer, the novels
thematic audacity has never been reproduced onscreen. The trial
scene, for example, which is key to several of the analyses in this
volume, virtually disappears in the 1951 and 1986 adaptations, as
does Bessies murder. Lambert explores the changing historical
contexts that account for Pierre Chenals and Jerrold Freemans
changes and attributes their decision about omissions as responses to
the political pressure of their times, the decades of the 1950s and
1980s respectively. The very inability to truthfully adapt the novel to
the screen in recent times conveys an idea of its currency and of
Wrights brave breakthrough in 1940.
If the cinema has failed so far to represent the audacity and
complexity of the novels controversial themes, hip hop seems to have
offered a more apt genre to trace Bigger and his environment up to the
present time, according to James Braxton Peterson. In The Hate U
Gave (T.H.U.G.): Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day
Hip Hop Culture Peterson establishes a continuum of African
American expressive culture from Richard Wright and Bigger
xxii Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son
Notes
1
If Wright had criticized Hurstons masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937) as a perpetuation of the stereotyped minstrel image of blacks (in Between
Laughter and Tears), Hurston corresponded by criticizing Wrights Uncle Tom's
Children (1938) for the books display of racial hatred and violence, Wrights deaf
ear to black dialect, his reduction of art to Marxist propaganda, and for ignoring or
stereotyping womens experience.
2
We should be wary, for example, of considering Hurstons oeuvre as apolitical
or not socially engaged. The fact that she was a confessed anticommunist and decried
black social protest as the sobbing school of Negrohood placed her on the opposite
side of Wright on the literary and political spectrum. However, both authors aimed to
have a social impact through literature.
Introduction xxiii
Works Cited
Appiah, K. A. and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives
Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne
1991.
Butler, Robert J., ed. The Critical Response to Richard Wright, Westport, CN:
Greenwood, 1995.
Everett, Percival. Erasure. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Preface in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds.
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad,
1993. (xi-xvi)
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and N. Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature. N.Y.: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982.
Howe, Irving. Irving Howe on Native Son as an Attack on Both Whites and Blacks
in Harold Bloom, ed. Richard Wrights Native Son: Blooms Notes. A
Contemporary Literary Views Book. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1996. (32-35)
Hughes, Langston. The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. and N. Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1997. (1267-1271)
Hurston, Zora Neale. What White Publishers Won't Print in Negro Digest 8 (1950):
85-89.
. Art and Such in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A
Critical Anthology. New York: Meridian, 1990. (21-26)
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
. Critical Essays on Richard Wright's Native Son. New York: Twayne, and
London: Prentice-Hall International, 1997.
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. New York: Atheneum, 1968.
Macksey, Richard and Frank E. Moorer, eds. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984.
Miller, James A., ed. Approaches to Teaching Wrights Native Son. New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 1997.
Rampersad, Arnold, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994.
xxiv Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son
Walker, Alice. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am
Looking Mean and Impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York: The
Feminist Press, 1979.
Weiss, M. Lynn. Review of The Critical Response to Richard Wright in African
American Review 31 (Summer 1997) (Accessed 3-13-2007 in
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_n2_v31/ai_20051233/print)
Wright, Richard. Blueprint for Negro Writing in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and N. Y.
McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. N.Y.: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1997. (1380-1388)
. Between Laughter and Tears in New Masses ( 5 October , 1937): 25-26.
. Native Son. 1940. N.Y.: Perennial, 2001.
Richard Wright and the Reception of His Work
Richard Wright and His White Audience:
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical
Significance
The life of Richard Wright has been a source of interest ever since the
publication of Native Son in 1940. His disturbing depictions of African
Americans profoundly affected his white American audience because he
embodied the meaning of being black to them. Wrights portrayal of
African Americans fit the collective Negro types liberal white society was
generally familiar with. Wright also managed to connect with this
audience through a shared commitment to liberal ideologies. The way he
became constructed as a representative of black people advanced his
message far beyond his expectations. My contention is that Wrights
uncalculated success was brought on by his audiences identification with
him. Wrights vulnerable stance as a Negro could only reach a white
supremacist view point once he became altered to fit their expectations of
a Negro writer. This is a tenuous persona to rely upon. Once the
audiences attitudes change, the ethos is empty, the message inert. In the
end, Wrights significance as an author will be his heroism in addressing
an entrenched national mind set that victimized black Americans and the
fortuitous impact he had on his audience by symbolizing a step toward
recognizing racial injustice.
Examining his life, as Fabre sets out to do, reveals how Wright not
only exemplifies this metaphor, but also explains how Wright
capitalized on a very specific moment in American history: [T]he
wide success of Native Son was largely due to a propitious historical
situation, since other Blacks had through their actions and writings
done the same thing before him with some, though lesser, results
(xxxi). Conscious of how he was stepping through history, Wright
was able to position himself conspicuously by providing white
America a portrait of African American life strategic for his race. As
he puts it, I wanted to voice the words in [oppressed black men] that
they could not say, to be a witness for their living (How Bigger
398).
Richard Wright and His White Audience 5
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance
When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an
awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers
daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself
that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be
so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of
tears. It was this that made me get to work in dead earnest [on Native Son].
(How Bigger 874)
For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a novel in which a Negro
Bigger Thomas would loom as a symbol figure of American life, a figure who
would hold within him the prophecy of our future. I felt strongly that he held
within him, in a measure which perhaps no other contemporary type did, the
outlines of action and feeling which we would encounter on a vast scale in the
days to come. (How Bigger 867)
Seen as the product of a racist society and admired for his use of
language to overcome his circumstance, Richard Wright offered an
emblem of racial struggle, an image that romantically conflated the
man, his race, and his words. His victimized characters were part of
Richard Wright and His White Audience 9
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance
him and he, the poignantly expressive author, was part of the Negro
race. Kinnamons biography of Wright explains that his racial status,
his poverty, the disruption of his family, and his faulty education
collectively and individually left ineradicable scars on his psyche
and deeply influenced his thought, but also provided much of the
subject matter of his early writing. Social reality determined Wrights
literary personality (4).
Wrights status as a man who could speak for black people
satisfied many readers. And Native Son seems to be the moment that
catapults him into this vaunted role. Russell Brignano depicts the
special status Wright earned:
Anyone aspiring to comprehend the ways in which many Negroes have lived
in and responded to their America during this century will be well rewarded
from consulting much of Wrights work. In doing so and in reading the
creative literature of other Negroes, he will also learn that Native Son
occupies a special place among American letters. (ix-x)
All the forces influencing Wright were forces of the white world: he seems to
have been shaped very little by black people. As a matter of fact, black people
were never his ideals. He championed the cause of the black man but he never
idealized or glorified him. His black men as characters were always seen as
the victims of society, demeaned and destroyed and corrupted to animal
status. He was the opposite of what the liberal white man is called: a nigger
lover. He probably never reached the point of hating his black brothers, but he
felt himself hated by many of them. Every positive force he recognized in his
life stemmed from white forces. Intellectually, his teachers and master-models
were all white. He was befriended by whites; he was admired and loved more
by whites than blacks. Hatred of the collective white man as a force against
the collective black man was nevertheless coupled with genuine admiration
and regard for many truly personal benefactors who were white. (Alexander
34)
His distance from the black people he was speaking for makes
sense, though, given the privileged status it provided him among a
white audience. With conscious intention or not, Wright commanded
the attention and company of many whites because he confirmed their
broad sociological theories of the Negro problem through the
representative role he arrogated for himself. It was easy to listen to
what a Negro had to say about race issues if he had elevated himself
from Negro life through exceptional qualities that permitted him into
white society. The New York Sun shows their 1940 audience how easy
it was to provide this exceptional position for Wright:
Richard Wright is a Negro who has had slightly more than eight years of
schooling, who was a bad boy, who has been on relief, on WPA, a street
cleaner and a ditch-digger, and who is now being compared to Dostoeyevski,
Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck. (Kinnamon, Conversations 28)
Wright sought out studies in sociology as one way to fill this gap.
He borrowed books from the University of Chicagos Sociology
Department to learn more about their empirical methods for studying
urban communities. The professor who loaned him the books was
astounded by the thoroughness with which Wright had done the
reading (Rowley 82). These books exposed Wright to an analytical
approach to understanding African American lives, like this work of
Robert Parks, who chaired the Sociology Department:
12 Caleb Corkery
The study of the Negro in America, representing as he does, every type of man
from the primitive barbarian to the latest and most finished product of
civilization, offers an opportunity to study...the historic social process by
which modern society has developed. The Negro in his American environment
is a social laboratory. (qtd. in Raushenbush 50)
Just as one sees when one walks into a medical research laboratory jars of
alcohol containing abnormally large or distorted portions of the human body,
just so did I see and feel that the conditions of life under which Negroes are
forced to live in America contain the embryonic emotional pre-figurations of
how a large part of the body politic would react under stress. [.] Why
should I not, like a scientist in a laboratory, use my imagination and invent
test-tube situations, place Bigger in them, and, following the guidance of my
own hopes and fear, what I had learned and remembered, work out in fictional
form an emotional statement and resolution of this problem? (867)
drop from the readers eyes (9). Wright forces his audience into
seeing a racist America through the very design of the novel. He
challenged his audience to accept a Negros view of the world:
Perhaps the most controversial literary device was the deliberate and exclusive
use of Biggers point of view [until Book 3]. This automatically caused the
black characters to come alive, while reducing the Whites to stereotypes, since
Bigger always remains an outsider to their world. Although it implies a bias,
this limitation is in fact an end in itself, almost a symbol, since no other
technique could have emphasized so effectively the gap between the two
races. (Fabre, Books and Writers 183)
I gave the picture of the world from the point of view of Bigger alone and the
unreality of the white characters was part of the movement of the story, that is,
they formed the motive for Biggers acting towards them in such a strange
way. Had Bigger seen them as people, the deeds, the crimes he committed
would have been impossible. What Ive done is to give the black world at the
expense of the white. (qtd. in Fabre, Books and Writers 188-9)
[O]ur society puts Negro youth in the situation of the animal in the
psychological laboratory in which a neurosis is to be cause, by making it
impossible for him to try to live up to those never-to-be-questioned national
ideals, as other young Americans do. Native Son is the first report in fiction
we have had from those who succumb to these distracting cross-currents of
contradictory nerve-impulses, from those whose behavior-patterns give
evidence of the same bewildered, senseless tangle of abnormal nerve-reactions
studied in animals by psychologists in laboratory experiments. (x)
The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the
hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his won nourishment: having
not been allowed so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! to
recreate his own experience. (33)
Caleb Corkery
Millersville University of Pennsylvania
Richard Wright and His White Audience 19
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance
Works Consulted
Aaron, Daniel. Richard Wright and the Communist Party in David Ray and Robert
Farnsworth, eds. Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1973. (35-46)
Alexander, Margaret Walker. Richard Wright in Richard Macksey and Frank E.
Moorer, eds. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984. (21-36)
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955.
Butler, Robert. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1995.
Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works.
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1970.
Davis, Charles T. Introduction in David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth, eds.
Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
1973. (1-6)
Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: U P of Mississippi,
1990.
. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. 2nd ed. translated by Isabel Barzun.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.
Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Introduction in Native Son by Richard Wright. New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. (ix-xi)
Ford, Nick Aaron. The Ordeal of Richard Wright in. Richard Macksey and Frank E.
Moorer, eds. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984. (139-148)
Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1980.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: U of
Missouri P, 1996.
Hart, Roderick. Modern Rhetorical Criticism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997.
Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and
Society. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.
. and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: U P of Miss,
1993.
Macksey, Richard and Frank E Moorer, eds. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1984.
Maxwell, William. New Negro, Old Left. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.
20 Caleb Corkery
In Fate, the last section of Native Son, Max the lawyer makes a thirteen
page speech arguing that centuries of African-American oppression
explain why Bigger Thomas killed Mary Dalton and Bessie Smears and
why other Blacks may commit equally brutal crimes. Some critics praised
the speech because it urges the judge and the country to break with its
history of hatred and repression. Other critics objected that it throws the
novel badly out of focus. Still other critics praised its liberating effect on
Bigger.
Instead of taking a side, I mean to suggest that the dispute has
meaning: it indicates that the radical politics of Max do not square with
the liberation of Bigger. It echoes, as a result, the political evolution
whereby Wright changes from a communist to a Black Power advocate. In
addition, the controversy parallels evolving critical practices and literary
movements, especially the changing opposition between naturalism and
modernism and the emergence of Black studies. Many critics of Native
Son maintain that its insights transcend ethnic or racial difference and
reveal the universal truths of human nature or capitalist society; however,
those critics who justify the analysis of black culture effectively ally the
community and the university and promote a multicultural society.
In Fate, the last section of Native Son, Max the lawyer makes a
thirteen page speech arguing that centuries of African-American
oppression explain why Bigger killed Mary Dalton and Bessie Smears
and why other Blacks may commit similar crimes. It is well-known
that this long speech proved controversial. Some critics praised the
speech because it urges the judge and the country to break with what
Paul Siegel terms the pattern of hatred and repression (97).1 Other
critics objected that, as Robert Bone says, its guilt-of-the-nation
thesis, throws the novel badly out of focus (151).2 Still other critics
praised its effect on Bigger, who, they say, achieves personal
liberation or psychological freedom because of it.3
22 Philip Goldstein
Bigger to examine the feelings which, for most of his life, he has
repressed. As the narrator points out when, for example, his mother
berates him because he has terrified his sister Vera with the dead rat
or has failed to get a good job and support the family, he knew that
the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his
consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else (14).
Thanks to the spotlight brought about by the trial and Maxs
questioning, Bigger is able for the first time to understand himself,
his family, and his pals.
The trials move both Clyde and Bigger to examine themselves,
but, unlike the resigned Clyde, Bigger follows an existential line of
reasoning. For instance, before the trial, he experienced a new sense
of liberation when he killed Mary Dalton and his girlfriend Bessie:
He had murdered and created a new life for himself (101). That is,
as critics point out, the murders free him from cultural stereotypes or
racial degradation: [H]e could see while others were blind (102; see
Fishburn 99, Jackson 132-33, and Baker 18). During Maxs last visit
to Bigger, Max faults this feeling of freedom: Bigger, you killed.
That was wrong Its too late now for you to . . . work with . . .
others who are t-trying to . . . believe and make the world live again
(390). Shocking Max, Bigger rejects such organized political activity
and defends his killing: What I killed for must have been good
(392).
While Dreisers Clyde is defeated at the end, Bigger feels justified
because, to Maxs amazement, he construes the murders as acts of
liberation. As a result, the analogy of The American Tragedy and
Native Son breaks down but not because naturalism precludes the
novels sensationalist violence or racial protest, as some scholars say
(See Fabre 40, 53, and Baker, Introduction, 5);7 rather, Biggers
homegrown existentialism suggests that, despite the influence of An
American Tragedy and the low status of modernism, Native Son has
what Craig Werner calls a modernist subtext (126; See also Howe
139 and Costello 39-40).
One could argue, for example, that, in addition to An American
Tragedy, Native Son parallels William Faulkners Light in August
because Biggers sense of liberation is more like the existential self-
assertion of Joe Christmas than the defeated sentiments of Clyde. Like
Bigger, Christmas rejects his family, including his fathers implacable
religion and his mothers feminine softness, and, faced with an
intractable Southern racism, grows violent and belligerent. When his
intensely emotional and sexual relationship with Ann Bundren is
From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard 25
Wrights Native Son
exhausted, he kills her while she tries, but fails, to shoot him.
Switching shoes with a Black woman, he successfully evades capture,
yet he returns to Mottstown and allows the authorities to arrest him
because in that way he escapes the long road of his life and, like
Bigger, accepts himself and his death. That is, in an existential
manner, he formulates his life as a long road whose circle is broken or
escaped only when he surrenders to the Mottstown sheriff. Moreover,
he too faces angry racist mobs, who are incited to hang him by Hines,
his racist and misogynist grandfather, but he escapes before his trial
only to let the proto-fascist Grimm butcher him and to acquire,
thereby, an unexpected immortality: in Faulkners terms, while the
blood rushed out of his body, Christmas seemed to rise soaring into
their memories forever and ever (407).
Bigger achieves no such immortality. Moreover, while Native Son
depicts only the viewpoint of Bigger, Light in August allows many
narratives besides that of Christmas. The similarities of Bigger and
Joe Christmas suggest, nonetheless, that Native Son parallels both
Dreisers An American Tragedy and Faulkners Light in August even
though Dreisers naturalism takes social oppression or injustice to
explain the defeat of human aspirations while Faulkners modernism
assumes that the artists imaginationthe I amdefeats lifes
circumstances and preserves its independence.8 Along with Maxs
pro-communist and Biggers existential politics, this incompatibility
of naturalism and modernism, which has grown in status and
influence since the 1940s, explains the incoherence of the last section.
Critics have suggested that Native Son also parallels Zora Neale
Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published in
1936, four years before Native Son, and which also fuses sex and
death and at the end depicts a trial and the hero or heroines
independence (See Cooke 87-8 and Portelli 260). Such parallels of
Hurston and Wright fail to acknowledge, however, that since the
1930s and 1940s not only the status of modernism and naturalism but
also the types of literary criticism have changed greatly. To
summarize these changes briefly, left-wing critics complained that, as
Wright said, Their Eyes carries no theme, no message, no thought
because in a modernist fashion it celebrates the independence of
Janies imagination and the virtues of the Black community, instead
of condemning American racial prejudice and social injustice (Appiah
and Gates 17; see also Gloster and Turner). These critics also faulted
Light In August, whose world, Granville Hicks said, echoes with the
hideous trampling march of lust and disease, brutality, and death
26 Philip Goldstein
modern university would isolate them from the fragile public space of
the traditional realist and man-of-letters; nonetheless, to secure their
position in the university, these intellectuals allied themselves with
the dominant New Critics, turning high modern art into what Lionel
Trilling called a polemical concept.
Moreover, to defend the shrinking public sphere, the New York
Intellectuals promoted the nightmare of cultural decline, what Howe
called [t]he spreading blight of television, the slippage of the
magazines, the disasters of our school system, the native tradition of
anti-intellectualism, the cultivation of ignorance by portions of the
counterculture, the breakdown of coherent political and cultural
publics, [and] the loss of firm convictions within the educated
classes(Notebook 128). Scholars point out that, fearing this
oppressive cultural decline, a broad range of critics justified the
subversive force of modern high art and dismissed protest naturalism
and popular culture (Huyssen 26; Norris 242; Pietz 65; Ross 42-64;
Schaub 17; and Sinfield 102). In the 1960s and 1970s, when student
rebellions initiated campus programs in African-American literature
and culture, the New York Intellectuals repudiated the nationalist
African-American critics reviving the work of Wright (Schwartz, 136-
39), condemning not only African-American Studies but also
Womens Studies and poststructuralist theories as well. Neil
Jumonville rightly suggests, however, that the coldwar
neoconservatism of the New York Intellectuals and other public
critics did not begin in the 1970s and 1980s, when these polemics
took place, but in the 1940s, when Howe, Trilling, and others
abandoned the radical Marxist politics of their youth and, to preserve
the vanishing public sphere and oppose Stalinist communism, joined
the New Criticism in advocating a conservative modernist poetics
(185).
The Black Studies Programs which, despite this opposition,
revalued African-American culture, including the radical naturalism
of Wright, rejected this defense of the public sphere. As Houston
Baker, Jr., says, in the 1970s African-American literary study
experienced a paradigm shift: the Black Power movement gave rise
to a new Black Aesthetics, which dismissed Wrights realist belief
that African-American literature adhered to public, American ideals
(Blues 76-7; see also DeCoste 128). As this paradigm shift implies,
modern black criticism of Native Son breaks radically with the beliefs
and values of Wright and, more generally, the public sphere and
pursues its own aesthetic directions.
28 Philip Goldstein
For instance, formal critics like Robert Stepto and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., claimed that Native Son fails to acknowledge its African-
American cultural contexts or to employ the aesthetic devices of the
Black literary tradition. Gates argues that, unlike Hurstons Their
Eyes, which uses indirect discourse to develop the black traditions
figural or, in his terms, signifyin(g) devices, protest fiction like
Native Son continues what he terms the black drive to justify the
races intelligence, rather than produce great art (30). In addition,
echoing cold war anti-communism, Gates parodies the novels
Marxism, calling it a matter of race and superstructure.
Other critics, who were formulating a professional canon of
African-American literature, claimed that, despite the longstanding
opposition, the modernist work of Hurston and the naturalism of
Wright was compatible because, as June Jordan said, the functions of
protest and affirmation are not, ultimately, distinct (5). I have argued
that the novels radical naturalism is not consistent with its modernist
existentialism, whereas in Jordans fashion Baker assimilates them to
the black experience.11 He claims, for example, that Wrights
existential outlook comes from black culture (The fundamental
conditions of black life in America led him to see that apriori moral
values could scarcely be operating in the great scheme of events (18;
see also Jackson 129). As a result, Biggers development does not
break with communitys traditions and values; it echoes the liberation
depicted in nineteenth-century slave narratives: Biggers movement
from bondage to freedom follows the same course: he repudiates
white American culture, affirms black survival values, and serves as a
model heroa strong man getting stronger (5; see also Gayle 179).
On similar grounds Baker argues that the strong community of Black
cultural life, not the nationalist policies of Comrade Stalin, explains
Maxs pro-communist liberalism.
Other critics also consider the novels naturalism and its modernist
existentialism compatible, but these critics dismiss its black cultural
contexts and defend Wrights aesthetic genius and the novels public
or universal values. On the formal or rhetorical grounds that Wrights
artistry matters more than the novels themes or politics, Joyce Joyce,
for instance, construes the novel as a tragedy with universal
archetypal or mythic import. Since she believes that Wrights
masterful use of language gives the novel classical status, she
dismisses the novels naturalist and existential views as well as
their cultural context.12 As she says, [N]aturalistic and existential
views of Bigger as either a victimized or isolated figure limit the
From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard 29
Wrights Native Son
Philip Goldstein
University of Delaware
Notes
1
See also Davis, Jr., 75, DeCoste 141 and 143, Foley 95-6, Howe 137, and Hynes
96.
2
See also Bell 166, Margolies 72, and Burgum 121.
3
For example, Yoshinobu Hakutani, who appreciates the novel's protest against
racial discrimination (61), says that Max misunderstands Bigger, but that his speech, a
kind of action, enables Bigger to grow (83). Similarly, Jerry Bryant claims that
Bigger is psychologically free in a way that even Max is not Max's failure
suggests that the Communist party, like Mrs. Dalton, like Bigger's family, is blind,
From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard 31
Wrights Native Son
too (24); see also Baker, Introduction 5; Bayliss 5; Butler 55; Fishburn 90; George
504; Gibson; Joyce 24-5 and 103-4, and Kennedy 283.
4
See also Joseph Skerrett, who says that the last section presents an open-ended
or suspended argument in which Wright is refusing to allow Bigger's individuality to
be swallowed up or subsumed by Max's social analyses (37); see also Robert Stepto,
who says that Max, not Bigger, proves articulate and sensitive, but Bigger is clearly
the hero of interest, (64-5). See also Reilly, 58-9.
5
Robert Lee says, Throughout the Depression years and even into the 1940s
[Wright] was regularly taken to reflect the Communist Party view that Marxism
pointed a way beyond race ... Then, during the Eisenhower Tranquil '50s, he
found himself castigated as some kind of literary dissident, an ungrateful black anti-
American voice still enamoured of Soviet Russia In turn, in the 1960s, the
generation raised on Civil Rights and then marches like that into Selma and inner-city
explosions and the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the Panthers seized on him as an
exemplary spokesman for Black Power, an early standard-bearer of either-or black
militancy (111).
6
Critics fault Max for not contesting the assumption that Bigger is guilty;
however, as Algeo points out, Wright modeled Max on Clarence Darrow, who in the
famous Leopold and Loeb case, granted their guilt but argued that their circumstances
warranted lesser punishment (51-2).
7
Donald Pizer rightly suggests that, far from excluding violence or protest,
naturalism derives its energies from them (20).
8
For example, Esther Merle Jackson, who considers Bigger Thomas like Joe
Christmas in the dilemmas he endures, insists that Native Son is not now
primarily a story of racial, political, or social injustice in the America of the thirties
and forties; rather, the novel is a study of the question What is man's
responsibility in a world where everything is possible? (133). See also Fishburn 99
and Portelli 260.
9
Lawrence Schwartz says, for example, that the sharpest definition of Faulkner's
role in the 'vital center' of politics and culture came ... from Irving Howe, in whose
reading Faulkner turned 'the southern myth into a universal vision of the human
condition' (208).
10
Similarly, the New Critic John Crowe Ransom labeled Faulkner the preeminent
postwar American moralist and Cleanth Brooks considered Faulkner the greatest
American novelist and Light in August the greatest American novel.
11
See Portelli, who says that when the time came to rescue the novel for the
burgeoning field of African-American studies Bigger was now most often
described as a heroic self who achieves freedom and full humanity, rather than an
inarticulate victim of his environment (255).
12
See also Charles Scruggs, who argues that Bigger, whose life was one long act
of rebellion against what society officially considers pious (166), deserves the
electric chair and that, far from atheistic communism, Max describes Chicago in
Biblical terms. If Max gives his redeemed city a Marxist bias, Wright makes sure that
readers see it in a more universal light through its archetypal setting (168).
32 Philip Goldstein
13
See also Yoshinobu Hakutani, who argues that, despite the obvious parallels
between Native Son and An American Tragedy, the comparison is of limited value
because, unlike Clyde, who, defeated at the end, never gains any insight into himself
or his position, Bigger achieves liberation (86-8).
14
Like Joyce, Cornel West objects that, in general, Black Studies repudiates the
African American literature of racial confrontation during the four decades of the
forties to the seventies because of the existential needs and accommodating values
of the black and white literary professional-managerial classes (39).
15
See Foley, Marxism in the Poststructuralist Moment 5-37; and Joyce, Black
Woman Scholar, Critic, and Teacher 543-65.
Works Consulted
Stepto, Robert B. I Thought I knew These People: Wright and the Afro-American
Literary Tradition in Harold Bloom, ed. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea
House, 1987. (57-74)
Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search
for Identity. Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois U, 1971.
Werner, Craig. Biggers Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American
Modernism in Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990. (117-52)
West, Cornell. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Wright, Richard. Between Laughter and Tears in K. A. Appiah and Henry Louis
Gates Jr., eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New
York: Amistad P, Inc., 1993. (16-17)
. Native Son. 1940. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
Gendered Textualities
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization
of Bigger Thomas: Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism,
and the Feminine
In his creative writing process and effort, Wright and Bigger become
momentarily the same; emotionally they are the same. Wright not only
becomes involved with Bigger as character; he expresses his own subliminal
desires, and in the creative process of transferring reality into fiction, he
translates these desires into those of his character, Bigger Thomas. (148)
struck him really before he was conscious of doing so (38). Gus falls
to his knees, and this physical attack proceeds with choking.
Afterwards, Gus actually is forced to lick the knife, Guss lips
moved toward the knife; he stuck out his tongue and touched the
blade (39). As tears stream down Guss cheeks, Bigger gives further
orders for Gus to put his hands up and continues to use the knife to
make physical contact with Gus, He put the tip of the blade into
Guss shirt and then made an arc with his arm, as though cutting a
circle (39). In essence, and in street vernacular, Bigger has made Gus
his bitch in the midst of the epitome of the male/macho
environmenta poolroom. Also, Bigger has screwed Gus, whose
fate ends with him flying through the rear door (40) of the
poolroom, resulting in Biggers last and final attack.
Bigger has dramatically emasculated Gus. However, juxtaposed
with Guss emasculation is that of Biggers. When Bigger further
vents his anger by cutting Docs pool table with the knife, the
poolroom owner gets his gun, another phallic symbol, and spews,
Get out before I shoot you! (41). Wright comments, Doc was
angry and Bigger was afraid (41). Reversing the previous role, Doc
has now subjugated and victimized Bigger, thus, threatening his
manhood in the presence of other males. If the rest of the gang only
realized how scared he was, in gang terms Bigger would be
considered feminized, i.e., subjugated to another male and in gang
vernacular considered a bitch.
The emasculation process continues as a result of Mrs. Thomas s
litany of denigrating comments leveled at Bigger, who has yet to be a
resourceful and valued member of his family; he is a nineteen year old
dropout who spends most of his time with his gang buddies. Also, the
accusatory verbiage that comes from Biggers mother reiterates the
conflicting relations of mother and son. Mrs. Thomas exclaims,
Bigger sometimes I wonder why I birthed you; We wouldnt have
to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you( 8); and,
finally, Bigger, honest, you the most no-countest man I ever seen in
all my life (9). To this last assailment, Bigger responds, You done
told me that a thousand times (9).
Socioculturally, Bigger has inherited the role of male protector and
provider in a household of a single mother and younger siblings who
are dependent upon him for their own survival. However, because he
is not able to provide for them as needed, he feels impotent. He
46 Yvonne Robinson Jones
thinks, He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering
and that he was powerless to help them (10). Moreover, Mrs.
Thomass comments exacerbate this impotence that Bigger is
continuously struggling with and trying to break through in order to
find some semblance of self-confidence for his manhood, yet his
feelings of emasculation of being subjugated and feminized are
concretized.
Early in the narrative, Biggers emasculation creates a polemical
characterization of himthe masculine and the feminine. One aspect
of Biggers character demonstrates strength, aggression, and
intimidating behavior, (e.g., the killing of the rat, arguing with his
mother and siblings, and, of course, threatening Gus with the knife)
while another illustrates fear and doubt, which is masked by this
aggression. It is this fearful and doubtful aspect of his personality that
according to male/macho standards, suggests softness, often termed a
feminine side, that must be masked during his socializing with peers.
Bigger enters a homo-social worldmale culturewhen he is
with his buddies, the gang. They role play, mimicking rich white
moguls, discussing the robbing of Blums store and playing pool. It
continues when they decide to go to the movies and are viewing and
commenting on the lives and sexuality of rich white people. In his
introduction to a new edition of Native Son (1998), Arnold
Rampersad reports on Wrights first manuscript submission in which
Wright included one episode in the movie scene that he was required
to cut for the 1940 Book-of-the-Month publication: the masturbation
scene with Bigger and Jack (xviii). In this unabridged version, Wright
gives an overt description of Biggers and Jacks interplay while they
are jokingly masturbating before the movie begins. Wright also
includes their use of the double entendre in street language as Jack
and Bigger are demonstrating what they call polishing my
nightstick (30). This homo-social event develops into a homo-erotic
one even before the movie begins with the presence of a woman on
screena white female they mock and simultaneously desire. While
they sit listening to the pipe organ playing low and soft (30), Wright
images the boys interplay with a type of crescendo dramatic effect,
culminating in a language of orgasm: You gone?, You pull off
fast, and Im gone. . . . God . . . damn (30).
Jack and Bigger, who anticipate heterosexual experiences I
wished I had Bessie here now (30) , are having self-sex within the
close quarters of the movie house, which is akin to the close quarters
of their cramped living quarters where privacy is encroached upon by
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 47
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine
Ah, them rich white womenll go to bed with anybody from a poodle on up.
They even have their chauffeurs. Say, . . . if you run across anything too much
for you to handle at that place, let me know. (33)
The comments that Bigger and his buddies make regarding rich
white folks and the white female are their way of critiquing this
particular class and the historical phenomenon of racism that have
contributed to their bleak existence. While they suggest the bestiality
of the white female, Ah, man, them rich white womenll go to bed
with anybody, from a poodle on up, and the comment that follows,
they even have their chauffeurs (33), they might also be equating
African American males with animals. That is, if white females go to
bed with what is deemed as inappropriate and abhorred animals, then
they will go to bed with African American men.
Since their comments are couched in a mocking and ridiculing
mode, the deprivation of their own lives is only covertly addressed. In
fact, even though there is a chasm between their world and the world
they view on screen, such signifying attests to their ability to cope
regardless of the stark reality of white wealth and black struggle. The
shared deprivation of Bigger and his buddies provides the impetus for
plotting the Blum robbery, and to them, it is an act of empowerment.
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 49
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine
He eased his hand, the fingers spread wide, up the center of her back and her
face came toward him and her lips touched his, like something he had
imagined. He stood her on her feet and she swayed against him. He tightened
his arms as his lips pressed tightly against hers and he felt her body moving
strongly. The thought and conviction that Jan had had her a lot flashed
through his mind. He kissed her again and felt the sharp bones of her hips
move in a hard and veritable grind. Her mouth was open and her breath came
slow and deep. . . . He tightened his fingers on her breast, kissing her again,
feeling her move toward him. (84-85)
One afternoon in midsummer, Wright came into the kitchen, flopped down in
a chair, and said: Jane, Im going to kill Bessie. Jane was horrified. Oh no,
Dick! she thought it unnecessary in terms of the plot. Nor did she think it
would shed new light on Biggers character. But Wright had decided that the
novel had reached a point where something exciting or violent had to happen .
. . . I gotta kill her . . . shes gotta go. (155)
Works Consulted
Engendered Perspectives
taking his side (45). And such a view, I would argue, distorts the
ways in which readers view/see/read women in Native Son.
It is my contention that the global impact of Native Son
restructured the literary and cultural topography of African American
realism and naturalism, especially in the writings of black women.
African American female writers from Zora Neale Hurston to
Gwendolyn Brooks would have to address Wrights architectural
staging of womanist expression given his influence on the field of
African American and American letters.
Firstly, and even prior to the publication of Native Son, Wright had
disparaged a black female perspective of art and life with his scathing
review of Hurstons work. He dismissed Their Eyes Were Watching
Godthe novel that would usher in a new wave of feminist
expression with the unveiling of her revolutionary female character
Janie Crawfordas facile sensuality and minstrelsy in its
exploitations of the quaint Negro life:
Much has been written about the opening scene of Native Son. Its
significance is symbolic of the journey Bigger takes from chattel
bondage to de facto independence. From its staged foreshadowing of
Biggers fate at the hands of Americas judicial system (depicted in
his intimate fight with a frightened black rat), to its tolling of the bells
of Americas racial climate (demonstrated in the sound of the
Brrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnngggggg! that frames the narratives
opening line), Wrights Native Son is, as Arnold Rampersad reminds
us, Americas urgent call to awaken from its self-induced slumber
about the reality of race relations in the nation(ix).
Yet Wrights artistic gesture in the opening few pages has not been
studied fully in terms of the critical dialogue the narrative shapes
concerning not only intra-cultural but also inter-cultural relationships
amongst men and women within the domestic space. As Wrights
opening passages suggest, those relationships have often absorbed
violence in ways that warp human interaction. Centuries of abuse and
exploitation have twisted these relationships with the lethal poisons of
poverty and disillusionment. Anyone reading Native Son senses the
ominous reach of these dynamics as Bigger, his mother, his brother,
and his sister attempt to rebuild their humanity in a narrow space
resembling that that exists between the two iron beds in their tiny one
bedroom apartment. This space, symbolic of the social promise
America bequeaths to this family of four, stands as a startling
reminder of black privilege in the ghetto.
If white privilege means that certain Americans are given the
benefits of wealth, education, and promise, then black privilege is
the denial or lack thereof of such benefits, and Wright demonstrates
these needs in the limited space he designs for the Thomas family in
their one room apartment. With its thinly plastered walls and wooden
plank floors, Wright directs the reader towards a literary strategy that
interposes personal and public discourses. In this way, the voyeurisms
readers and Americans assume are made clear as they watch the
Thomas family navigate their insufferable maze of disillusionment on
their search for remedies to self-annihilation and non-existence.
60 Carol E. Henderson
body (233) that Bigger thinks he hears before he rapes her. Min is a
woman who, by the end of Petrys novel, not only transforms the
distorted figurative signs of domesticity staged in the apartment of her
live-in lover The Super, but also gains agency for herselfand
likewise Bessiethrough a reordering of her living environment that
privileges self-realization and self-valuation.
As Petrys narrative discloses, after Mins meeting with the
prophetwho inspires to act for herself, Min enters the apartment
she and the Super share with a quiet dignity. Instead of timidly
inserting her key in the lock, she thrusts her key in the door and
pushes the door open with sistah girl confidence. Jones frowns as he
listens to her enter the room because on top of that she slammed the
door. Let it go out of her hand with a bang that echoed through the
apartment and in the hall outside, could even be heard going faintly
up the stairs (139). Min is heard. Yet Mins ability to transcend the
hallway space echoes eerily Bessies inability to do so in Native Son.
As we are told in Wrights novel, the space Bessies lifeless body
transcends is the airshaft Bigger throws her out, letting her body hit
and bump[] against the narrow sidesas it went down into
blackness (238). The last sound we hear from Bessie is her body
striking the bottom of the shaft.
This haunting of space and place is what Petry creatively
transfigures in her portrayal of Min. Hence, it would not be hard to
imagine that if Bessie and Min had met, their relationship would
resemble that between Pheoby and Janie Crawford in Zora Neale
Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God. Their friendship, based on
the need to tell and speak for each other, suggests the sort of
interventionist practice Petry, Hurston, and others have engaged with
in refiguring the black female presence in African American and
American letters.
Petry and Hurston are not the only ones to respond to Wrights
misogynistic call. As Malin Walther suggests in Re-Writing Native
Son: Gwendolyn Brookss Domestic Aesthetic in Maud Martha,
Brookss autobio-graphically based narrative signals an alternative
theoretical vision of womanist intuition and domestic aesthetic.
This re-wrighting can clearly be seen in Wrights infamous rat
scene in the opening of his narrative, and in Brookss lesser know
mouse scene in Maud Martha. Whereas Wright has the Thomas
household galvanize[d] into violent action (4) upon the intrusion of
a foreign body whose belly pulsed with fear, and whose voice
62 Carol E. Henderson
emitted a long thin song of defianceits black beady eyes, its tiny
forefeet pawing the air restlessly(6) as if to expose the vulnerability
of this familial bodys frightened members, Brooks has Mauds
interaction with a mouse occurring in an atmosphere of mercya
mercy born out of compassion and a need to acknowledge and respect
the life of one of Gods tinniest creatures.
As if to foreshadow her own impending maternity, Maud wonders
if this mouses foray into her domestic space stemmed from a need to
feed children, thereby introducing the promise of the future that
distinguishes Brooks reassessment of the sacred and the familial.
Brooks vision of family life reshapes the intimacy of Wrights bleak
allegorical representations in ways that underscore Americas failure
to acknowledge this humanity. In Brooks novel, domesticity is staged
as a site of resistance in and of itself that recoups the feminine ideal.
In reaffirming nonviolence as a human value in this space, Brooks
reclaims the maternal as a cultivator of the spirit, thereby recouping
the domestic space for African American people.
Pride and Prejudice suggests the degree to which the gentry of Jane Austens
era was preoccupied with money and marriage, the novels of African
Notes from A Native Daughter: 63
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son
American writers suggest the extent to which black Americans have been
similarly concerned with the social, economic, and erotic arrangements of this
other peculiar institution. (143)
it was the rich people who were smart and knew how to treat people. He
remembered hearing somebody tell a story of a Negro chauffeur who had
married a rich white girl, and the girls family had shipped the couple out of
the country and had supplied them with money. (34)
They ate, drank, and read together. She Of Human Bondage. He read Sex in
the Married Life. They were silent. Five minutes passed. She looked at him.
He was asleep. His head had fallen back, his mouth was openit was a good
thing there were no flieshis ankles were crossed. And the feet!pointing
confidently out (no one would harm them). Sex in the Married Life was about
to slip to the floor. She did not stretch out a hand to save it. (1666)
Brookss humorous foray into the marital bed brings before the
public eye a universal truth about self-revelation. Because this
scene precedes Mauds mouse scene, the reader is left to speculate
about the harm done to Mauds psyche in her interactions with others.
The misfortunes she suffered at the hands of boys of her youth who
called her ugly, and the discrimination she endures at the hands of her
own family and society at large because of her dark skin makes her
uncomfortable in her body, and ill at ease in her role as sexual being
in her marriage. Because of this awkwardness, Mauds mouse scene
must then be read as a symbolic gesture of self-expression that
counteracts this bedroom scene, thereby making Mauds surrogate
maternal role of the mouse an extension of her desire to be.
Familial Ties
In the case of Mrs. Thomas, she forces Bigger to take on the role
of surrogate father as he is made to fill the shoes of his absent father.
You know Biggerif you dont take that job, the reliefll will cut
us off. We wont have any food, exclaims Mrs. Thomas (12).
Biggers downward spiral, and Bubs subsequent demise at the hands
of the Super, who promises Bub that he can make enough money to
help his mother, vividly illustrates the paradox of finding agency
while negotiating the naturalisms of poverty.
While Luties abandonment of her son towards the end of the
novelshe flees town after she murders her attempted rapist Boots,
and Mrs. Thomass bitter remark Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I
birthed you (8) taint the maternal images of these women, one must
consider that, in some cases, motherhood, like marriage, cannot
escape the influence of the menial value placed on black life in a
chaotic city. Motherhood itself is disfigured in this vortex. And, as
cogitative extensions of each other, Biggers fate foreshadows the
awaiting life of Bub, whose absent mother and illusive father
Notes from A Native Daughter: 69
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son
rhetoricizes the extent to which the lack of a family buffer costs him
his life.
It should be duly noted that Biggers family ideal is very much tied
to the ways in which he reads his own budding maturity and emergent
ideals of masculinity. As Native Son relates, Bigger
hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was
powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel
to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be
swept out of himself with fear and despair. (10)
Carol E. Henderson
University of Delaware
Notes from A Native Daughter: 71
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son
Works Consulted
Baldwin, James. Many Thousands Gone in Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1984. (24-45)
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha in Henry L. Gates, Jr. et. al., eds. The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd Edition. New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2004. (1661-1696)
Bryant, Jacqueline. Postures of Resistance in Ann Petrys The Street in CLA
Journal 45.4 (June 2002): 444-459.
Butler, Robert. The Function of Violence in Richard Wrights Native Son in Black
American Literature Forum 20.1/2 (Spring-Summer, 1986): 9-25.
DeCosta-Willis, Miriam. Avenging Angels and Mute Mothers: Black Southern
Women in Wrights Fictional World in Callaloo. Richard Wright: A Special
Issue 28 (Summer, 1986): 540-551.
Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Reprint. New York: Bantam Books,
1989.
duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention. New York: Oxford U P, 1993.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1947. Reprint. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Grier, William H. and Price M. Cobbs. Black Rage. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. On Women, Teaching, and Native Son in James A. Miller,
ed. Approaches to Teach Wrights Native Son. New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1997. 75-80.
Harris, Trudier. Native Sons and Foreign Daughters in Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New
Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1990. (63-84)
Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York:
Anchor Press, 1987.
hooks, bell. Talking Back. Boston: South End Press, 1989.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1992.
Mootry, Maria K. Bitches, Whores, and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies
in the Art of Richard Wright in Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer, eds.
Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1984. (117-127)
Petry, Ann. The Street. 1946. Reprint. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Rampersad, Arnold. Introduction to Native Son. Reprint. New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 1993. (ix-xxii)
72 Carol E. Henderson
Reilly, John M. Giving Bigger a Voice: The Politics of Narrative in Native Son in
Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1990. (35-62)
Tuitt, Patricia. Law and Violence in Richard Wrights Native Son in Law and
Critique 11 (200): 201-217.
Walther, Malin Lavon. Re-Wrighting Native Son: Gwendolyn Brookss Domestic
Aesthetic in Maud Martha in Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 13.1 (Spring
1994): 143-145.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. Reprint. New York: HarperCollins Publishers,
1991.
. Between Laughter and Tears in New Masses 25 (5 October 1937): 22, 25.
Spatial Dynamics
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: A
Transnationalist Interpretation
Richard Wrights Native Son and Black Power denounce the impact of
slavery and colonization on Blacks and other formerly colonized people
living in different parts of the world. Native Son gave Wright the
opportunity to describe the impact of Western enslavement, subjugation,
and plundering of Blacks in an African American context, before he was
able, years later, to examine these themes in African and Third World
contexts. By placing Native Son, Black Power, and the Color Curtain in
the international contexts in which Wright decries the consequences of
Western oppressions on the formerly enslaved or colonized populations of
the United States and the Third World, one can see the connection
between the three works, which is Wrights condemnation of racism in the
United States in his global repudiation of oppression in Africa and the rest
of the Third World. These aspects unravel the radicalism in Wrights work
and overshadow his ephemeral Eurocentrist, elitist, and condescending
views on Africans and other formerly colonized people.
of the relations between Wright and Bigger, this essay will explore
how Wrights or Biggers Black nationalisms are weakened not just
by their unsettled Americanism, but also by their unresolved
Africanism, the latter being a term that describes their conflicting
relationships with Africa.
The closest attempt to analyze Native Son from trans-national
perspectives is Joko Sengovas Native Identity and Alienation in
Richard Wrights Native Son and Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart:
A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Sengova states:
Native Son derived from the difficult historical context of the first
quarter of the twentieth century in which Wright learned what it
meant to be Black in America. Faced with the painful legacy of Jim
Crow racism, segregation, economic exploitation, and the
impossibility to achieve equality in America, African American men,
like Bigger and Wright, were forced into poverty and even faced
death (Kinnamon 120). Moreover, Native Son emerged out of the
excruciating social turmoil Wright witnessed before he finished
writing the book. For example, on May 27, 1938, when Wright was
halfway through the first draft of the novel, Robert Nixon and Earl
Hicks, two Black men from Chicago, were accused of having beaten
78 Babacar MBaye
Rough justice was enacted no longer through lynching but through legal
executions that combined legal forms, symbolically charged and arbitrary
retributive justice, and white supremacy and through racially motivated,
lethally excessive urban policing. (150)
While constituting ten percent of the total population, Negroes are left outside
of most American institutions. They are confined to the black ghettoes of our
large cities and they live in a Jim Crow world. They receive inferior wages,
are restricted from participation in government throughout the country, and in
most of the South they are not allowed to vote. The total effect of this
discrimination has been to retard the Negros penetration into American
civilization. (12)
and those of the Daltons, Bigger develops irrational hatred and fear of
Whites, which leads him to accidentally suffocate Mr. Daltons
daughter (Mary) to death.
Slavery is one of the strongest themes in both Native Son and Black
Power. In Native Son, the theme of slavery appears when the
character of Max, one of Biggers two White lawyers, asserts that
White Americans need to come to terms with the consequences of
slavery on African Americans. Max says:
Let us not banish from our minds the thought that this is an unfortunate victim
of injustice. The very concept of injustice rests upon a premise of equal
claims, and this boy here makes no claim upon you. If you think or feel that he
does, then, you too, are blinded by a feeling as terrible as that which you
condemn him, and without as much justification. The feeling of guilt which
has caused all of the mob-fear and mob-hysteria is the counterpart of his own
hate. (358)
80 Babacar MBaye
I do not say this in terms of moral condemnation. I do not say it to rouse pity
in you for the black men who were slaves for two and one-half centuries. It
would be foolish to look back upon that in the light of injustice. Let us not be
naive: men do what they must, even when they feel they are being driven by
God, even when they feel they are fulfilling the will of God. Those men were
engaged in a struggle for life and their choice in the matter was small indeed.
It was the imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others. (359)
texts show how the Atlantic slave trade allowed Europeans to develop
economically and politically at the expense of Africans whose natural
resources and human capital were tragically exploited by this trade.
Yet, even if he recognizes the Africans role in the development
of modernity, Wright represents Africans in condescending and
pathetic ways that reveal his Western and patronizing biases towards
them. For example, in Black Power, he introduces a named Justice
Thomas of the Nigerian Supreme Court, whom he represents as a
descendant of a slave from the West Indies who had managed to make
his way back to Africa and settle in Freetown (16). Wright suggests
that Mr. Thomas is, like him, the product of enslaved Africans who
had succeeded in breaking the chains of servitude that prevented them
from benefiting from the progress of mankind (understood here as
modernity) and putting it to good use. He writes:
His enslaved grandfather had desperately pulled himself out of servitude, had
lifted himself above the tribal level, and, in doing so, he had been akin to the
millions of Europeans and Americans of the nineteenth century who had so
valiantly overthrown the remnants of feudalism. Mr. Justice represents the
victory of enlightenment: he could read, he could vote, he was free; but he
was adamant against the hungers of the new generation. (32)
What if ones roots are in Mississippi but every intricate fiber in the social
fabric conspires to conceal this bond? What if ones rootedness in America
goes back four centuries but a racist society accepts Africa as the only
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 83
A Transnationalist Interpretation
legitimate homeland for black Americans? How can the African American
honor his/her African origins when that identity is rooted in a profoundly
racist ideology? (57)
If you killed her [Mary] youll kill me, she said. I aint in this.
Dont be a fool. I love you.
You told me you never was going to kill.
All right. They white folks. They done killed plenty of us
That dont make it right. (168)
84 Babacar MBaye
The excerpt shows that Bigger does not know the full consequence
of his violence on Blacks. By rationalizing Marys death as revenge
for the genocides Whites have perpetrated on Blacks, Bigger
unconsciously perpetuates the murderous instinct of the White
slaveowners who committed heinous crimes during slavery. Luckily,
Bigger is compelled to realize the inappropriateness of his reasoning,
as the Blacks around him stand against violence that recapitulates the
blind cruelty of the White slave traders. Referring to Bessie, Baker
points out:
One example is the scene in which Bigger goes to the theater with
Gus, Jack, and G.H. in order to watch The Gay Woman and Trader
Horn. The Gay Woman is about a rich white woman whose lover is
killed by a communist who mistakes him for her husband. Trader
Horn is an exotic film showing stereotypical scenes of dancing
African men and women. Bigger likes The Gay Woman, because it
shows attractive scenes of cocktail drinking, dancing, golfing,
swimming, and spinning roulette wheels (33). In short, Bigger enjoys
the Western lifestyle in the film. By contrast, he dislikes Trader Horn
because it exposes an African culture that he views as tribal and
backward. The narrator says:
He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and
women whirling in wild dances and heard drums beating and then gradually
the African scene changed and was replaced by images in his own mind of
white men and women dressed in black and white clothes, laughing, talking,
drinking, and dancing. Those were smart people; they knew how to get hold
of money, millions of it. (35-36)
Wrights encounters with Africans usually underscore his distance from them,
especially when the encounter takes place in the context of a religious
tribal/traditional ritual. Wright did not expect his skin color to make Africa
more accessible to him. (This would be the assumption of his American
readers). And he was genuinely surprised when certain aspects of Ghanaian
culture reminded him of Mississippi. . . Wrights resistance to the Africans
religious worldview is related to a personal conviction that such traditions had
put millions of black men and women in bondage. (24)
Just how African traits could have survived after several hundred years of
transplantation in a new cultural area such as the United States is a question
that surfaced in his mind in the motorcade with Nkrumah. He noticed many of
the African women along the route performing a kind of foot-shuffling dance
that struck him as very familiar: Id seen these same snakelike, veering
dances before . . . in America, in storefront churches, in Holy Roller
Tabernacles, in Gods Temples, in unpainted wooden prayer-meeting houses
on the plantations of the Deep South. . . . How could that be? (12)
Evidently, Wright recognized his cultural ties with Africa even when
he perceived religions and traditions as potentially antithetical to
modernity. In this sense, the superficial nature of Wrights relations
with Africa stemmed, not from his hatred of Africans or his denial of
his African heritage, but from his problematic concept of modernity
which compelled him to question the significance of his own African
American religious heritage. Wrights views about religion are
apparent during one of the last and most intense moments of Biggers
trial when Max says:
In religion it is the story of the creation of man, of his fall, and of his
redemption; compelling men to order their lives in certain ways, all cast in
terms of cosmic images and symbols which swallows the soul in fullness and
wholeness. In art, science, industry, politics, and social action it may take
other forms. But these twelve millions Negroes have access to none of these
highly crystallized modes of expression, save that of religion. And many of
them know religion only in its primitive form. The environment of tense urban
centers has all but paralyzed the impulse for religion as a way of life for them
today. (365-366)
In the 1920s and 30s black literary intellectuals (especially those who
participated in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance) turned more
openly to a celebration of their African identitya gesture with which Wright
sympathized, but which he suspected of self-delusion and accommodation to
the prurient white taste for the exotic. (142)
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 87
A Transnationalist Interpretation
I have spent most of my adult life and most of my waking hours brooding
upon the destiny of the race to which I belong by accident of birth and by
accident of history . . . . My position is a split one. Im black. I am a man of
the West. These hard facts condition, to some degree, my outlook. (Chapman
27)
Babacar MBaye
Kent State University
88 Babacar MBaye
Notes
1
Donald Wright says that between 1450 and 1850, over 11.5 million Africans
were forcefully brought to the Americas and nearly ten million of these people arrived
in the New World (17). In his speech The Case for Black reparations (2000),
Randall Robinson asserts:
2
Weiss refers to a document in which Wright argues that the African Americans
experience, from slave to sharecropper to industrial worker, was the prototypical
American, and by extension, modern, experience. After many years abroad he
believed that this experience was the sole redeeming feature of American slavery
(25). The quotation suggests Wrights conception of modernity as an archetype of
resistance and development in the Western world.
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 89
A Transnationalist Interpretation
Works Consulted
Baker, Houston. Jr., On Knowing Our Place in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.
Anthony Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present.
Amistad: New York, 1993. (200-225)
Bakish, David. Richard Wright. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974.
Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. Introduction to American Studies. New York: Longman,
1981.
Butler, Robert J, ed. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, CN:
Greenwood P, 1995.
Chapman, Abraham. Concepts of the Black Aesthetic in Contemporary Black
Literature in Lloyd W. Brown, ed. The Black Writer in Africa and the Americas.
Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973. (11-43)
Delbanco, Andrew. An American Hunger in Keneth Kinnamon, ed.Critical Essays
on Richard Wrights Native Son. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. (138-146)
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P,
1983.
Ellis, Aim. J. Where is Biggers humanity? Black male community in Richard
Wrights Native Son in ANQ 15.3 (2002): 23-30.
Ellison, Ralph. Native Son. in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah, eds.
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Amistad: New York,
1993. (11-18)
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. Anthony Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical
Perspectives Past and Present. Amistad: New York, 1993.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G.K. Hall,
1982.
Inikori, Joseph E and Stanley L. Engerman. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on
Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham:
Duke UP, 1992.
Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American
Novel. Princeton, NJ : Princeton UP, 2001.
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wrights Native Son. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1997.
. Native Son: The Personal, Social, and Political Background in Yoshinobu
Hakutani, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co,
1982. (120-127)
Landry, Bart. The New Black Middle Class. Berkeley: U California P, 1987.
90 Babacar MBaye
Miller, Eugene E. Voice of A Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright. Jackson: U
Mississippi P, 1990.
Mudimbe, V.Y. ed. The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of
Otherness. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992.
Pfeifer, Michael J. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947.
Urbana: U Illinois P, 2004.
Ranson, Edward and Andrew Hook. The Old South in Introduction to American
Studies. New York: Longman, 1981. (86-103)
Robinson, Randall. The Case For Black Reparations Transcript Proceedings in
http://www.transafricaforum.org/reports/reparations_print.shtml (Accessed
October 21, 2005).
Sengova, Joko. Native Identity and Alienation in Richard Wrights Native Son and
Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart: a Cross-Cultural Analysis in The
Mississippi Quarterly 50 (Spring 1997): 327-51.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Tolentino, Cynthia. The Road Out of the Black Belt: Sociologys Fictions and Black
Subjectivity in Native Son in Novel 33.3 (2000): 377-405.
Walter, Wendy W. At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis :
U Minnesota P, 2005.
Weiss, M. Lynn. Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of
Modernism. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1998.
Wright, Donald. African-Americans in the Colonial Era: From Origins through the
American Revolution. Wheeling, IL: Harland Davidson, 1990.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harpers,
1954.
Vortical Blues:
Turbulence, Disorder, and the Emplotment of
Surplus Meaning in Native Son
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight
of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
property, along with the systems in place to insure those rights are
always in danger of falling into a random state of chaos.
I do wish to bear in mind Terence Whalens insistence that this
should not, of itself, be read as a sign of overt racial animus in Poes
fiction.6 But readers should nonetheless take note that the publication
dates for each of the story fall after the Haitian Revolution of 1789, in
proximity to the slave rebellions led by Nat Turner and Gabriel
Prosser, and the escalation of sectional discord between North and
South around the issue of re-colonization, and it is therefore difficult
to disregard the literary sleight-of-hand Poe uses to create a gloss of
ahistoricity in his work. Whalen continues, What matters about Poe
is not so much his reticence on slavery, nor even his use of racist
stereotypeswhich are as infrequent as they are offhanded. Instead,
the case of Poe matters because both his utterances and his silences
were part of a coherent strategy to expel politics from the literary
commodity. (34) Indeed, most of Poes stories take place in foreign,
exotic settings, which serve to de-politicize the vortex, to close off
critical access to the notion that it stands as an allegory for white
Americas racial anxieties. And yet readers must consider the manner
in which vortical power renders property meaningless. In order to
save his life, the sailor must abandon his ship, his main source of
income, and his brother. The House of Usher and the Palace
Metzengerstein are consumed by the whirlwind, which recalls the
manner in which the vortex can serve as a symbol of divine intrusion
into the world. (11) In each instance, the vortex often involves the
eradication of blood ties alongside the loss of property. As Joan
Dayan observes, By a negative kind of birthright, bad blood blocked
inheritance, just as loss of property meant disenfranchisement. Yoked
together as they are, these terms loosely but powerfully define types
of slavery (118). The manner in which the vortex represents an
irresistible force likewise suggests that to fall under its influence is
akin, not only to losing ones freedom, but having that freedom
rendered moot in a disorderly system that resists regulation.
In light of Wrights observation in How Bigger Was Born, that
the novel is at once something private and public by its very nature
and texture,7 it is not so difficult to make the leap from Poe to
Wright, especially if readers consider the ways that the naturalist
novel often portrays the antinomical collision of sensibilities across
lines of race, gender, and class. Certainly it can be said that Bigger is
characterized, as Sheldon Brivic has argued, by a split personality.
And one might argue, alongside David Demarest, that Native Son is
96 Herman Beavers
status as a free agent roam[ing] the streets of our cities make him a
figure of random energy, capable of destroying everything in his path
or, turning that energy inward, to engage in acts of self-destruction.
The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all. But also with a cruel
instinct of he budding artist that he already was, he was beginning
to meditate on the character of the story it would makethe color,
the pathos. The knowledge now that it was not always exact justice
that was meted out to all and that it was not so much the business of
the writer to indict as to interpret was borne in on him with
distinctness by the cruel sorrow of the mother, whose blame, if any,
was infinitesimal. (367, my emphasis)
which can only be redeemed within the white family, through the
maternal concern she directs at white children. What this means is
that the black brute is the product of an immaculate conception, his
circumstance detached from black motherhood, leaving the mammy
in place to incubate Davies artistic potential as she redeems the value
of the black race. Once again, the 1st law of thermodynamics is in
play: the reader can retain their view that black men deserve their fate
when they transgress racial (and sexual) boundaries, but they can also
retain their affection for the black mother who may give birth to
brutes, but whose redemptive potential lies in her allegiance to the
white community.
Nigger Jeff serves as a kind of critical mise en scene through
which I can make an argument regarding Wrights novel. Native Sons
reliance on naturalist tenets is reflected by the fact that in Book
Three: Fate, Wright reproduces in Mrs. Thomas and Vera, the
grieving mother and sister of Nigger Jeff. Like Jeff Ingalls mother,
Mrs. Thomas is equally guiltless in the eyes of Mrs. Dalton who tells
her, Theres nothing I can do nowIts out of my hands. I did all I
could, when I wanted to give your boy a chance at life. Youre not to
blame for this (302). Mrs. Daltons words echo Davies absolution of
Mrs. Ingalls. But in addition, Wrights novel emphasizes regulation
alongside dissipation and conservation. Mrs. Dalton declares herself
incapable of saving Biggers life but she also determines Mrs.
Thomas to be free of blame for Biggers actions, as if to suggest that
there are instances when maternal power, as it regards the black brute,
is inadequate to the task of regulation and discipline.
Regulation functions in Native Son in very literal ways. As I have
noted, Wrights novel reflects thermodynamic principles, its plot
emphasizes regulation alongside dissipation and conservation. In light
of the horrific dimensions of Biggers crime, enabled by the
regulatory function he plays in the Dalton home, the reader will
remember that one of Biggers tasks is to tend the furnace. Just after
Bigger arrives for his first day of work, Peggy, the family cook, takes
him to see the furnace and the family car. She informs him that his job
involves burning trash, feeding coal into the furnace, cleaning out the
ashes, and announcing when more coal is needed. Biggers
relationship to the furnace is regulatory; his efforts insure that the
Dalton home maintains a level of warmth and comfort consistent with
their preferences. But the furnace, and to a lesser extent the Dalton
family car, demonstrates the ways black bodies are directly involved
with the quotidian requirements of the wealthy. Like Lucious
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 101
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son
I could only do that. As Bigger and Gus stand watching the street,
they notice a truck driving past, lifting scraps of white paper into the
sunshine. Caught up in the vortex created by the trucks
mechanically produced force, the paper briefly mimics the flight of
the bird only to settle back to earth to become, once more, trash on the
street. It is at this moment when Bigger asks Gus where the white
folk live in relation to the Black Belt. Gus offers a geographical
setting (over there on Cottage Grove Avenue), but Bigger corrects
him, doubling his fist, striking his solar plexus, and declaring that
they live, Right down here in my stomach. Biggers act works on
two levels. Certainly, it performs an act of revisionist mapping,
insisting that the physical space whites inhabit is localized in his
body. But his declaration reflects the ways the vortex signifies
stochastic forces are at work; by locating whites at the center of his
body, Bigger articulates white supremacy as a blockage that he can
feel. It also insists that whatever happens where the white folk live
by definition negates life in the Black Belt, which leads to Biggers
declaration, Nothing ever happens.
But it is the presence of these two opposing states, motion and
stasis, that signals the conditions for turbulent flow. As Gordon
Slethaug argues, turbulence results as equilibrium, here in the form of
the contrast that inheres between black and white, gives way to
bifurcation. When Bigger and Gus look up to see the plane overhead,
it represents an instance where vortical energy begins to increase.
This is signaled by the plane, which is notably engaged in the act of
skywriting the phrase USE SPEED GASOLINE. After they read the
words, Bigger and Gus experience a quickening of consciousness that
leads them to decide to play white, a game where they imitate the
ways and manners of white folks (17). In essence, the game proceeds
as the flow increases. But what has made this possible is the manner
in which Bigger and Gus assume the identity of the very thing that
blocks their motion. Playing the roles of movers and shakers like
J.P. Morgan or the President of the United States or an Army general,
Bigger and Gus put forward a political critique where they link the
spoils of capitalism to their plight.
Consider that point in the imaginary exchange between Morgan
and the President which ends with Bigger declaring that Morgans
presence is required at a cabinet meeting because the niggers is
raising sand all over the country (19). Bigger ends the game when he
asserts, They dont let us do nothing. The games conclusion is
likewise important because it imagines a moment when local acts of
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 103
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son
movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back
in a seat and keep his eyes open (14). Though Bigger believes the
movie represents the removal of an important blockage, it represents
instead the act of trading in his dreams for those produced by the
cultural machinery of Hollywood which is why Biggers idea of
dreaming is not a product of sleep. In slumber, where dreams occur at
random, the subject cedes control of the dream narratives trajectory.
As Slethaug insists, too high a concentration of order paradoxically
leads to a certain kind of entropy or disorder, hence when Bigger
begins to watch the newsreel featuring Mary Dalton, this paradox
reinitiates the positive feedback loop.
Because Wrights intent, in keeping with the naturalist project, is
to dramatize a system in a state of disequilibrium, the movie theater
becomes that place where Biggers actual nature as a figuration of
instability determines that disorder is manifest. As Minahen points
out, the vortex is the result of oppositional forces coming into a state
of sustained contact. Had Bigger simply watched Mary Dalton on the
movie screen, she would simply function as the proverbial dream-
wish, unattainable because she would never be present as flesh and
blood, regulatory force would remain inviolate. But once Bigger
realizes that she is the daughter of his employer, the desire he
expresses to Jack collides with the hatred he harbors for whites. As
the unabridged version of Native Son makes clear by restoring the
scene where Bigger and Jack masturbate while waiting for the movie
to begin, Mary Dalton, as the embodiment of a sexual and social
taboo in cinematic form, represents the illusion of laminar flow, 17 but
her physical presence, where Biggers hatred toward her (and by
implication, her parents) functions in direct proportion to her attempts
to be kind to him, constitutes a blockage that must be removed.18
What makes this important is that the masturbation scene
represents the cyclical shape nihilism can assume, where the subject
moves from stimulation to release. Also note how Jack and Bigger are
engaged in what might be construed as a shameful act but which they
view as friendly competition. What prevents it from becoming
shameful is that their actions are contained within the context of what
is known as the zeroth law of thermodynamics (two systems in a state
of thermal equilibrium with a third will remain so with each other).
The movies, as the enactment of a visual form of masturbatory power,
require Bigger and Jack to enter into a state of equilibrium. The pipe
organ playing low and soft, (presumably steam powered once again
a nod to naturalisms fascination with the steam engine), invites the
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 107
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son
boys to reach the state on the other side of release, the satiation that
signals that energy has been expended. This leads to an important
consideration. By the time the film begins, the boys are prepared for
the films surrogate function: substituting their response to the image
for the self-stimulation they utilized to reach equilibrium.
But the zeroth law of thermodynamics is often paraphrased to
mean that one has to play the game.19 Thus, when the film, Trader
Horn begins, Biggers thoughts turn to his job working for the
Daltons. Watching the images in the film, which assume the vortical
shape of black men and women whirling in wild dances leads
Bigger to replace the films images by images in his own mind of
white men and women dressed in black and white clothes, laughing,
talking, drinking, and dancing. The substitution of social ritual for
the distorted images of African religious ritual connote Biggers place
inside the game. Sure it was all a game, he observes, and white
people knew how to play (33).
Wrights fusion of thermodynamic and stochastic principles
enables us to grasp the role the movie plays in Biggers violent
humiliation of Gus afterward. But it also requires us to understand the
gender politics inherent in the situation.20 Hegemonic masculinity,
with its privileging of arousal (e.g. potency, the constant availability
of force) and domination, is distinguished by how it aspires
rhetorically to be understood as a positive feedback loop (manhood is
synonymous with an increase in force). Governed, though, by
conservation, dissipation, and entropy (the first, second, and third
laws of thermodynamics), the performance of masculinity ultimately
embodies the demands of the negative feedback loop. Here, we might
paraphrase Allen Ginsbergs famous restatement of thermodynamic
laws: masculinity is a game one cant win, in which one cant break
even, and which one cant quit.21 Hence, when Bigger reaches the
conclusion that working for the Daltons is analogous to tapping into
whites ability to amass capital, it signals the false consciousness that
renders the game of playing white, with its characteristic signifying
and its inherent political critique, void.
Bigger confronts Gus because the movie has helped him reach the
subconscious conclusion that the job of robbing Blums
Delicatessen, with its high level of risk and potential for serious
punishment, represents turbulence that should be avoided because it
contains far too many variables to run smoothly. The collaborative
energy they used to produce the game of playing white, is totally
expended. Thus, Bigger finds working for the Daltons preferable
108 Herman Beavers
because the film has led him to understand interaction with rich
whites such as the Daltons as a laminar circumstance, free of the
friction that creates turbulence and risk. But the effect of the film, its
surrogate function of arousal completed, has given way to the need for
more stimulation. When Bigger and Jack arrive at Docs Pool Hall, he
feels a swelling in his chest that requires release. His entire body
hungered for keen sensation, something exciting and violent to relieve
the tautness (36). But this vortical force is local in its consequences:
it is what Bigger requires to loose himself from the Blum robbery and
position himself within the respectable game of working (as
opposed to playing) white.
One might conceptualize Bigger Thomas journey through Native
Son as one involving his transition from a life characterized by the
negative feedback loop to one in which the positive feedback loop
reigns supreme. Here, let me speculate that one reason so many critics
argue that nothing happens in Book Three of Native Son might be
that they have failed to understand Wrights intent. For in looking at
Bigger Thomass struggle to articulate what his acts of violence mean,
what we notice is the ways that Wright uses the vortex not only to
describe the inner turmoil he feels but also as a way to insinuate the
notion of narrative instability. The discomfort created by Bigger
Thomas has to do, on one level, with the sense that he was an
inadequate exemplum.22 But it also has to do with the ways that, as
Kenneth Knoespel insists, examples are frequently used to
demonstrate a closed system (115).
Knoespel argues that chaos theory shares with deconstruction the
crucial importance not of axiomatic or systemic statements but of
examples. And he continues:
For each, examples provide a stable means for exploring instability.
Their stability, however, is not conventional in the sense that it
would enforce allegiance. Rather, it is stability that accompanies
anything used as a heuristic device. Examples become
phenomenologically rich sources, a means not only of simple
affirmation but also of extending inquiry.
grips Max when he hears this, the way he gropes for his hat like a
blind man, is meant to suggest that Biggers death, like Babos at the
end of Melvilles Benito Cereno may insure the equilibrium of the
status quo, but it is, in fact, anything but an assurance of stability. It
may well be that the end of Native Son represents Wrights inability
to loose himself from the politics of outcomes (80). But as Poes
vortex reminds us, Wrights novel demonstrates the ways impending
doom that should arrest our attention, but the process of our descent.
Herman Beavers
University of Pennsylvania
Notes
1
Joan Dayans fine work on Poe is persuasive on this point, particularly when she
insists upon the importance of a rereading of Poe that depends absolutely on what
has so often been cut out of his work: the institution of slavery, Poes troubled sense
of himself as a southern aristocrat, and finally, the precise and methodical transactions
in which he revealed the threshold separating humanity from animality (241). Dayan
explicates Poes gothic fictions as crucial to our understanding of the entangled
metaphysics of romance and servitude (241).
2
As Louis Menand points out in his essay, The Hammer and the Nail, Wright
measured himself as a writer against American masters like Hawthorne, Melville,
James, and Poe. He likewise asserts that Wrights turn toward protest fiction, far from
being a declaration of his desire to tell his readers what to think was actually his
attempt to locate himself among the white writers he saw as his models (81).
3
While I do not wish to overstate the case, it is most certainly true that Wrights
novel functions in the cultural imaginary as a script helping us to navigate a variety
of cultural events. For example, Bigger Thomas was resurrected in the form of O.J.
Simpsons darkened face, as it appeared on the cover of Time magazine after he was
accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson. Moreover, the medias
representation of a nation divided along racial lines, with blacks rejoicing when
Simpson was exonerated of all charges and whites bemoaning the verdict as a gross
miscarriage of justice, one which demonstrated the ways that blacks received
preferential treatment. But we could also see Wrights influence in the rise of a
number of cinematic narratives, perhaps most notably Menace to Society and Boyz
N the Hood, which depict black male lives in late 20th Century America as being
synonymous with nihilism.
4
Charles Minahen recounts a lecture by Richard Wilbur, who chronicles the
abundance of vortical symbols in Poes work, from the aforementioned vortex in
Descent to MS. Found in a Bottle, to the vortical forces that destroy the House of
Usher, to the whirlwind of chaotic fire in Poes first story, Metzengerstein, and
concludes that Poe deploys vortical symbolism as a way to represent the descent of
the mind into sleep. Minahen suggests that the vortex actually represents a way for
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 111
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son
the subject to step out of linear time, as if crossing the event horizon of a black hole,
where oppositionality reigns supreme. pp. 102, 111.
5
Minahen, 103.
6
As Whalen asserts, The way white people relate to each other: this is what
haunts Poe, this is what motivates his fantasies of a neutral culture, and this, to an
extent seldom acknowledged, is what burdens the current critical discourse on
raceThis is why attempting to read politics back into Poes work have proven so
vexing. (34)
7
Indeed, one way to think about the gothic novel is as an expression of the
turbulence that results when private terrors erupt into public space. Wrights
description of the South as a delicately balanced state of affairs, intimates that those
terrors were in danger of erupting at any given moment, which required the South to
be a space controlled by such rigid regulatory practices.
8
As Jonathan Elmer points out the history of slavery, in creating the African
Diaspora, most often induces meditations about trauma (768) that lead us to ponder
larger truths.
9
It is well known that Wright utilized the journalistic accounts of the trial of
Robert Nixon, an eighteen-year-old black man who broke into a white womans home
and murdered her with a brick in 1938, while he was engaged in the planning of
Native Son (152). Wright was also fascinated as well by the Leopold and Loeb case in
which two Jewish teenagers, both students at the University of Chicago, both from
wealthy backgrounds, kidnapped a 14-year-old boy, murdered him, and burned his
clothes in the furnace of the Loeb home. They sent the boys father a ransom note
asking for $10,000. It is clear Wright incorporated many of these details into the plot
of Native Son.
10
The reader may remember that Wright begins How Bigger Was Born by
suggesting that the character took shape from social observation rather than pure
imagination. The model for Bigger Thomas, Wright suggests, was distilled from five
different iterations, referred to as Biggers 1-5, all of whom he remembers from
growing up in the South, each more rebellious and violent than the one before.
According to Wright, they are nothing if not transgressive, ignoring the strict
boundaries established by Jim Crow laws meant to consign blacks to a world separate
from whites. As solitary figures living by their own set of codes, they terrorize black
and white alike; fulfilling their own desires constitutes their highest priority. Wrights
grudging admiration for these young men confirms as well his sense that these
prototypical Biggers live lives rendered tragic by their unwillingness to conform to
social dictates. The problem, of course, is that their resistance is directed to the sole
purpose of self-gratification. True, they embody a kind of proto-nationalism in that
they opt for death or incarceration over a spirit broken by the likes of Jim Crow
racism, but their hubris is destructive, as if the cost of their resistance is borne at the
communitys expense. That none of these proto-heroic black men escapes from their
oppressive circumstances unscathed is, Wright suggests, the price each pays for
rebellion. We can also understand Biggers 1-5 as figures of turbulence, which means
that Wrights impulse to create a racial exemplar rested on local agents of disturbance.
11
The danger, Elmer reminds us, is that Wrights novel can never be entirely free
of the suspicion that its representations are repetitions rather than revisions,
112 Herman Beavers
contributions to racial impasse and the violence of stereotype rather than exposes of
them (772).
12
An example of this, more recently, is to be found in the city of Los Angeles in
1992, which spun out of control after residents of South Central Los Angeles learned
that six white policeman had been exonerated of charges in the assault of black
motorist Rodney King. What may have begun as an instance of politically motivated
civil disobedience quickly transmogrified into looting and random violence that
destroyed millions of dollars in property and caused extensive loss of life.
13
As Gordon Slethaug points out, equilibrium, creating it and sustaining it, are
important aspects of social systems. If we use the science of fluid dynamics as an
analogy, turbulence results as the flow of a liquid around an obstacle is, at a slow
speed, nearly steady, regular, and orderly, but which gathers speed to create what is
known as turbulent flow.
14
As N. Katherine Hayles describes it, turbulence results when: microscopic
fluctuations within a flowing liquid cancel each other out, as when a river flows
smoothly between its banks. In this case, each water molecule follows the same path
as the one before it, so that molecules starting close together continue to be close.
Sometimes, however, microscopic fluctuations persist and are magnified up to the
macroscopic level, causing eddies and backwaters to form. Then molecules that began
close together may quickly separate, and molecules that were far apart my come close
together. As a result, it becomes extremely difficult to calculate how the flow will
evolve (154-55).
15
Wright suggests as much in How Bigger Was Born, when he asserts, But
keeping the ballot from the Negro was not enough to hold him in check:
disfranchisement had to be supplemented by a whole panoply of rules, taboos, and
penalties designed not only to insure peace (complete submission), but to guarantee
that no real threat would ever arise (438).
16
This is underscored by Wrights feeling, after the publication of Uncle Toms
Children, that his failure lay in allowing his readerwhich he constructs as a white
female (the bankers daughter)to view black life as a catalyst for sympathy. In
opting to produce an anti-hero, Wright sought to immerse his reader within a moral
vortex, where the disorientation would produce a greater sense of what sort of nation
America actually was; not the Land of the Free, but instead a swirling mass of
contradictions.
17
By laminar I refer to that circumstance where flow is stable and uninhibited
because there exists a minimum level of drag on a surface. Cf. Turbulence in
Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence
18
Let me credit here Jonathan Elmers essay, Spectacle and Event in Native Son.
Elmer reaches the same conclusion that I do regarding Marys murder. Though he
does not describe it as such, his description: Marys murder answers just this
description; we have there a blockage and bottleneck building up pressure, which
results in the change of state figured in Deleuzes metaphors of fusion, condensation,
and boiling. Where we differ is that Elmers description tends toward a
thermodynamic emphasis, whereas mine is stochastic.
19
The zeroth law of thermodynamics states that thermodynamic equilibrium is an
equivalence relation. For my purposes, it means that the film leads Bigger to the
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 113
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son
conclusion that he can play the game with the same results as whites, the film
produces the false sense that he is equivalent to the Daltons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics#_ref-Perrot_
20
Space does not allow me to elaborate fully, but let me suggest that the feminist
response to Wrights depiction of women in Native Son, most notably in the work of
Trudier Harris and Sherley Anne Williams, identifies the manner in which Wright
employed a stochastic model of gender hierarchy. If we look, for example, at the way
that Bigger comes to see Bessie as a liability, we see that Bigger feels herand
indeed, all black womenas a drag that inhibits motion. As dangerous burden,
Bessie cannot assume a more three-dimensional shape in Wrights narrative because
to do so invalidates the need for black men to seek their place in the mythic construct
of American masculinity which foregrounds acts of rugged individualism and
backgrounds interdependency. Cf. Harris, Native Sons and Foreign Daughters, and
Williams, Papa Dick and Sister Woman, as well as David Ikards forthcoming
study, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism, which signals
the emergence of a sustained critique of black mens adherence to hegemonic
masculinity, seeing it, in fact, as a drag on the black communitys prospects.
21
Laws of Thermodynamics. Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thermodynamics#Third_law.
accessed 9/15/06.
22
As Hazel Rowleys recent biography makes clear, Wrights novel was received
with a brand of ambivalence which began as privately expressed discomfort but
quickly swelled into a more overt distaste. For example, the novelist Nelson Algren,
who had been a friend to Wright while he lived in Chicago, congratulated Wright on
the novels conceptual and structural brilliance but concluded, What does get me is
that its such a threat. I mean a personal threat (202). And among black intellectuals,
there were similar sentiments. Shirley Graham, soon to become the wife of W.E.B.
DuBois, wrote her mentor and future husband that the novel turned her blood to
vinegar and made her heart weep for having borne two sons. And by 1946,
Langston Hughes would declare in print, Its about time some Negro writer wrote a
good novel about good Negroes who do not come to a bad end (193).
23
Knoespel defines surplus meaning as complex psycho-lingual phenomena
which are generated by interpretive acts but which remain unacknowledged in the
formulation of a response. Surplus information pertains to data which may be
quantified but not necessarily comprehended through a single formulation
Works Consulted
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Demarest, David P. Jr. Richard Wright: The Meaning of Violence in Negro
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Dreiser, Theodore. Nigger Jeff in Francis E. Kearns, ed. The Black Experience: An
Anthology of American Literature for the 1970s. New York; Viking Compass
Books, 1970. ( 341-367)
Elmer, Jonathan. Spectacle and Native Son in American Literature 70.4.
(December, 1998): 763-798.
Erkkila, Betsy. The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary in Gerald
Kennedy and Lilliane Weissberg. Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race. Oxford:
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Goddu, Teresa. The Ghost of Race: Edgar Allan Poe and the Southern Gothic in
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1995. (230-250)
Harris, Trudier, Native Sons and Foreign Daughters in New Essays on Wrights
Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. (63-84)
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature
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JanMohamed, Abdul. Negating the Negation as Form of Affirmation in Minority
Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as Subject. in Arnold
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Race. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001
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Knoespel, Kenneth J. The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrator Disorder
in N. Katherine Hayles, ed. Chaos and Order. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1991. (100-
124)
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Wrights Native Son in Callaloo. 28.3 (Summer, 1986): 501-506.
Minahen, Charles. Vortex/t: The Poetics of Turbulence. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State U P, 1992.
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Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Owl Books, 2001.
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 115
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son
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Negro American Literature Forum. 9.2. (Summer, 1975): 55-56.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1992.
Siegel, Paul N. The Conclusion of Richard Wrights Native Son in PMLA. 89.3.
(May, 1974): 517-23.
Slethaug, Gordon. Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Meta-chaotics in Recent
American Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
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Whalen, Terence. Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary
Nationalism. in J Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, eds. Romancing the
Shadow: Poe and Race. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2001. (3-40)
Williams, John A. The Man Who Cried I Am. 1967. New York: Thunders Mouth
Press, 1992.
Williams, Sherley Ann. Papa Dick and Sister Woman: Reflections on Women in the
Fiction of Richard Wright in Arnold Rampersad, ed. Richard Wright: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper Collins Books, 2005.
. Uncle Toms Children. 1937. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
A Polyphony of Genres
Native Sons ideology of form: The (African)
American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism
culture. However, the prominent position that Native Son holds in the
American and African American literary traditions stems, I would like
to contend, from the inscription of the novel in the national cultural
continuum of the American jeremiad. The novel presents the
indictment of both blacks and whites for the roles they play in
perpetuating an unjust society, thereby forever deferring the
fulfillment of the American promise and eventually forecasting both
the explosion of the American Dreamto allude to Langston Hughes
poem What happens to a Dream Deferred?and the final
damnation of the Chosen People.
Thus, Native Son emerges as an American novel that
simultaneously partakes in and corrects the traditional ways in which
Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a
sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked
representation of an Africanist presence (Morrison 17). In the vein of
the African American tradition, Wright undertakes the task of
addressing the nation by talking about Americansboth black and
whiteas an American by making use of the allegorical and
metaphorical tradition Morrison mentions, but above all, by bringing
that choked representation of an Africanist presence to the forefront
in the form of the inarticulate Bigger Thomas. In his essay How
Bigger Was Bornincluded as a preface to the novel since 1942
(Kinnamon 2)Wright identified the black race as the background
against which Americans analyze human nature and their own identity
as individuals and as a people, inscribing Native Son in the context of
the American literary tradition when he asserts:
Above and beyond all this, there was that American part of Bigger which is
the heritage of us all, that part of him that we get from our seeing and hearing,
from school, from the hopes and dreams of our friends; that part of him which
the common people of America never talk about but take for granted. Among
millions of people the deepest convictions of life are never discussed openly;
they are felt, implied, hinted at tacitly and obliquely in their hopes and fears.
We live by an idealism that makes us believe that the Constitution is a good
document, that the Bill of Rights is a good legal and humane principle to
safeguard our civil liberties [...] I dont say that Bigger knew this in the terms
in which Im speaking of it [...] But he knew it emotionally, intuitively, for his
emotions and his desires were developed, and he caught it, as most of us do,
from the mental and emotional climate of our time. (xxiv-xxv) (Emphasis
added)
an indescribable city, huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal; a city of
extremes, torrid summers and sub-zero winters, white people and black
people, the English language and strange tongues, foreign born and native
born, scabby poverty and gaudy luxury, high idealism and hard cynicism.
(How Bigger xxvi)
Had he [Wright] spoken to the whites alone, he might have turned out to be
more prolix, more didactic and more abusive; to the Negroes alone, still more
elliptical, more of a confederate, and more elegiac. In the first case, his work
might have come close to satire; in the second, to prophetic lamentations.
Jeremiah spoke only to the Jews. But Wright, a writer for a split public, has
been able both to maintain and go beyond this split. (qtd. Gilroy 146)
We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things
and we aint. They do things and we cant. Its just like living in jail. Half the
time I feel like Im on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole
in the fence. [....] Sometimes I feel like something awfuls going to
happen to me. (23)
He stood with his knees slightly bent, his lips partly open, his shoulders
stooped; and his eyes held a look that went only to the surface of things. There
was an organic conviction in him that this was the way white folks wanted
him to be when in their presence. (50)
For Biggers tragedy is not that he is cold, or black or hungry, not even that he
is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life,
that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained,
therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria
bequeathed him at his birth. (Everybodys Protest Novel 1659)
all his life (108). Indeed, were it not because Ralph Ellisons
Invisible Man was published twelve years after Wrights novel,
Bigger would seem to be following the advice offered by the Invisible
Mans grandfather to live with his head in the lions mouth and
overcome em [whites] with yeses, undermine em with grins, agree
em to death and destructionof course, both Biggers attitude and
that of the Invisible Mans grandfather are engrained in the multiple
trickster figures of African American folklore.
However, when Biggers mask is finally lifted by the white
journalists, the police and the State attorney Buckley, it only reveals
another racist stereotype: that of the Bad Nigger. Though endowed
with self-asserting qualities in African American culture, the Bad
Nigger confirms the embodiment of pure evil in the Manichean
mentality of white America. This is the image of Bigger that Buckley
tries to instill as he turns Bigger into a half-human black ape (373),
likened to the devil himself in the shape of the Biblical snake when he
calls white men to crush with their heels the wooly head of this black
lizard (373). Hence, Bigger illustrates unequivocally how American
racism works against American exceptionalism, affecting the psyche
and the actions of the individual, and eventually putting the whole
national dream at risk. Wright shapes Bigger as a monster created by
the American republic, a social symbol revelatory of social disease
(Baldwin, Notes 41, 34), precisely to involve white Americans in the
so-called Negro problem by presaging their own destruction.
Nevertheless, some whites, such as Jan and Max, envision the
possibility of an American identity that lives up to its ideals. As a
result, they resist the received construction of blacks as essentially
inferior by identifying the racist and capitalistic forces at work in such
a construction. For the sympathetic characters who support Bigger, he
is both a victim and a symbol of redemption, not of an external evil
that Americans must annihilate. This is made patently clear in Maxs
plea in Bigger Thomas behalf in Book three. For Max, like for
Wright, Bigger hold[s] within him the prophecy of our future
(Wright xx), and his speech turns into a jeremiad as he equates
Biggers fate to that of the nation:
I know that what I have to say here today touches the destiny of an entire
nation. My plea is for more than one man and one people [...] for if we can
encompass the life of this man and find out what has happened to him, if we
can understand how subtly and yet strongly his life and fate are linked to
oursif we can do this, perhaps we shall find the key to our future, that rare
vantage point upon which everyman and woman in this nation can stand and
Native Sons ideology of form: 131
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism
view how inextricably our hopes and our fears of today create the exultation
and doom of tomorrow. (354)
Richard Wright was a man with a mission and a message: his mission was to
overwhelm the sensibilities of the white world with the truth of his naturalistic
vision and the power of his craftsmanship; his message was that the Afro-
American was Americas metaphor. (154)
The last section of the novel particularly overshadows the fact that
Americas denial of Biggers social, economic, and political freedom
has a crippling effect on those who control Biggers life as well as
on Bigger (Joyce 63). Toni Morrison reiterates this notion when she
132 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos
There is guilt in the rage that demands that this mans life be snuffed out
quickly! There is fear in the hate and impatience which impels the action of
the mob congregated upon the streets beyond that window! All of themthe
mob and the mob-masters; the wire-pullers and the frightened; the leaders and
their pet vassalsknow and feel that their lives are built upon a historical
deed of wrong against many people, people from whose lives they have bled
their leisure and their luxury! Their feeling of guilt is as deep as that of the
boy who sits here on trial today. Fear and hate and guilt are the keynotes of
this drama! (357)
Did I not have my character, Britten, exhibit through page after page the
aberrations of whites who suffer from oppression? [...]Did I not make the mob
as hysterical as Bigger Thomas? Did I not ascribe that hysteria to the same
origins? The entire long scene in the furnace room is but a depiction of how
warped the whites have become through their oppression of Negroes. (Reply
to David L. Cohn 66)
Wright has Max construct his defense speech upon the three main
phases outlined above as characteristic of the jeremiad. In the
appropriately woeful tone of the genre, Max first reminds his
audience of the promise, recurring to the mythic past and linking it to
the presentWe found a land whose tasks called forth the deepest
and best we had; and we built a nation, mighty and feared. We poured
and are still pouring our soul into it (363). Then, he likens the plight
of blacks and other oppressed or marginalized people alike, to that of
the white forefathers and points to the difficulty the former encounter
because, having been excluded from white society, they are
nevertheless allured by and made to believe in its ideals, which
inevitably results in a feeling of resentment and the balked longing
for some kind of fulfillment and exultation (368). This, Max argues,
Native Sons ideology of form: 133
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism
Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between
social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in or cities
toppling? Does that sound fantastic? I assure you that it is no more fantastic
than those troops and that waiting mob whose presence and guilty anger
portend something which we dare not even think! (368-9)
Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you
make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but,
failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without
too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in
them the condemning sense of guilt. And this is true of all men, whether they
be white or black; (360)
the most serious flaw in Native Son (Bell 165)is also Wrights
most important asset to build the apocalyptic vision that can more
effectively lead to change. And the possibility of change is not only at
the basis of Wrights Marxist and naturalist inclinations (Gibson. 88),
but at the core of the jeremiad, because, following the pattern
established by the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, the (African) American
jeremiad never questions Americas destiny and promise. The essence
of the jeremiad, argues Sacvan Bercovitch, lies in its unshakable
optimism (6), that is, in the faith that repentance and reform will
bring about a future golden age and the eventual fulfillment of
Americas mission.
As in the jeremiad, hopefulnessand not determinismlies at the
center of Wrights literary effort as he wished the novel to move the
nation to face its moral decline and responsibility without the
consolation of tears (xxvii). For him, America stands suspended at
that moment of declension when the prophecy for the future may
result in redemption or in damnation, depending on Americas will to
admit responsibility for the current state of affairs. The possibility of
a national redemption is lost in the novel after Bigger is sentenced to
death, but it seems to be Wrights hope that the reader may be
shocked into recognition and into action after having read this
cautionary tale. Ideally, whites should be moved to return to an
inclusive version of their foundational dream and blacks to recognize
and actively claim their own humanity after Biggers cue. If both of
these occur, Biggers life and death would certainly hold the promise
of a better future.
Notes
1
The history of the United States has been molded by the ideology of
exceptionalism, a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. This ideology did
not only claim the USAs difference with respect to the rest of the worldand more
specifically to the metropolitan European center represented by England, but the
nations unique moral value and responsibility, thereby asserting its superiority. The
United States emerges, thus, as a model society which offers opportunity and hope for
humanity based on a unique balance of public and private interests governed by
138 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos
constitutional ideals that are focused on personal and economic freedom (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism; consulted November 27
2006). The American Revolution boosted the exceptionalist mythos by severing the
ties with the British mother land and instilling the republican belief that sovereignty
belongs to the people, not to a hereditary ruling class, as Thomas Paines Common
Sense made clear. The rejection of the past linked to the freedom of choice and to the
metaphors of the clean slate, the Frontier and the American Adam; individualism, and
the concept of a uniform human nature with its ascription of universality to particular
social traits (Appleby 34), became the cornerstones of an exceptionalism that set the
United States up as the pilot society for the world (35). Among the works dealing
with the concept of American exceptionalism and its revaluation, the following stand
out: Byron Shafers Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism,
David K. Adams and Cornelius A. van Minnens Reflections on American
Exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipsets American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged
Sword; Deborah L. Madsens American Exceptionalism, and Dale Carters Marks of
Distinction: American Exceptionalism Revisited.
2
George E. Kent undertakes the study of Wrights identification with and
rejection of the West (Kent 91-2) in his book Blackness and the Adventure of
Western Culture (1972). He identifies the West as the symbols, rituals, and
personalities of the white culture (94), or the System. Robert Shulmans
Subverting and Reconstructing the Dream: The Radical Voices of Le Sueur, Herbst,
and Wright (1994), while articulating more precisely Wrights engagement with the
national mythos, focuses on the writers early piece Fire and Cloud.
3
See Annette Kolodnys Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a
New Literary History of the American Frontiers.
4
According to Robert Bellah, who stimulated much of the discussion on civil
religion with his seminal essay of 1967, civil religion in America is an understanding
of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality. The
widespread use of the term, however, prompted Russell Richey and Donald Jones in
1974 to offer a useful five-category schema for the organization of civil religion
literature. These categories were folk religion, transcendent religion of the nation,
religious nationalism, democratic faith and Protestant civic piety.
5
Obviously, the impact of the African has not only been felt in the Americas, as
Morrison herself recognizes, and a European Africanism also exists. James Baldwin
called for a study in depth of the American Negro in the mind and life of Europe, and
the extraordinary peril, different from those of America but not less grave, which the
American Negro encounters in the Old World (qtd. in Gilroy 146). This is an
enterprise that has recently been undertaken by studies in the African Diaspora,
boosted by perceptive analyses of the impact of Africans on the development of
Western modernity by critics such as Paul Gilroy.
6
Among those influential blacks who rejected American exceptionalism, in
contrast with its common acceptance among African Americans, are Marcus Garvey
and Malcolm X. See Howard-Pitney, 14-15.
7
See Craig Werners Biggers Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-
American Modernism.
Native Sons ideology of form: 139
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism
8
See David Howard-Pitneys The Afro-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice
in America.
9
Some of the most noteworthy African Americans who master the jeremiad
rhetoric are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson.
Works Consulted
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP,
1982.
Shafer, Byron, ed. Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New
York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Stepto, Robert B. I Thought I Knew These People: Richard Wright & the Afro-
American Literary Tradition in The Massachusetts Review 18.3 (Autumn, 1977):
52541.
Shulman, Robert. Subverting and Reconstructing the Dream: The Radical Voices of
Le Sueur, Herbst, and Wright in Gert Buelens & Ernst Rudin, eds. Deferring a
Dream: Literary Sub-versions of the American Columbiad. Basel: Birkhuser,
1994. (24-36)
Werner, Craig. Biggers Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American
Modernism in Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990. (117-152)
Wright, Richard. Blueprint for Negro Writing 1937 in Ellen Wright and Michel
Fabre, eds. Richard Wright Reader. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. (36-49)
. Native Son. 1940. New York: Perennial, 2001.
. Reply to David L. Cohn in Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, eds. Richard Wright
Reader. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. (62-67)
. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941 in Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, eds. Richard
Wright Reader. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. (144-241)
Genre in/and Wrights Native Son
Ever since Native Sons initial publication in 1940, critics and audiences
have held wide-ranging views on the novels generic classification. Native
Son has been labeled as a work of social protest fiction, a crime fiction, a
courtroom drama, and a bildungsroman. Ultimately, though, the novel
resists any easy generic classification, precisely because Wright violates
all of these genres as they are traditionally understood: Native Son is a
protest novel with a not wholly sympathetic protagonist (in fact, Bigger
Thomas is an anti-hero, of sorts), a crime novel/courtroom drama where
justice does not prevail, and a bildungsroman without any of the
traditional outcomes (Bigger is ultimately incapable of either flight or
escape and he does not reach maturity, at least in any traditional sense of
the word). By examining the diverse ways that Native Son has been
characterized over the past six and a half decades, this essay analyzes the
complexity of genre in Native Son and explores how genre itself is
complicated by how readers approach texts.
Since Wrights own view of life during the thirties was strongly influenced by
the Communist Party [] his style of writing shows the mark of its
spokesmen, the proletarian novelists, who themselves drew on the realistic
and naturalistic traditions in literature to express party dogma. Using detailed
physical descriptions and concentrating on the common man as their subject,
the communists protested shrilly against the injustices inherent in a capitalistic
country. Meeting with these writers at the Chicago John Reed Club, Wright
became excited by their ideas and their passionate commitment to a new
order. (63-64)
To flee or not, to move or not, it is all the same; his doom is written on his
forehead, it is carried in his heart. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas stands on a
Chicago Street corner watching the airplanes flown by white men racing
against the sun and Goddam he says, the bitterness bubbling up like blood,
remembering a million indignities, the terrible rat-infested house, the
humiliation of home-relief, the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, hating it;
hatred smolders through these pages like sulphur fire. All of Biggers life is
controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to
murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we
are told, for the first time, to a kind of life, having for the first time redeemed
his manhood. (22)
most of them are depicted as representative types of the social class to which
they belong. Fourthly, despite his brutally conditioned psychology, there are
moments in the novel when Bigger, like the heroes of other proletarian fiction,
appears to be on the verge of responding to the stereotyped Communist vision
of black and white workers marching together in the sunlight of fraternal
friendship. Finally, Wright succumbs too often to the occupational disease of
proletarian authors by hammering home sociological points in didactic
expository prose when they could just as clearly be understood in terms of the
organic development of the novel. (104-105)
So, even though Margolies argues that the novel functions as a social
protest, he still recognizes that there are aspects of the novel that this
classification fails to account for, including important questions about
how choice and agency factor into Biggers story. It is precisely these
notionschoice and agencythat Native Son leaves unresolved
if we view it solely as a work of social protest.
Reading the novel as a bildungsroman will allow for some of the
concerns that emerge in my reading of Margolies and Baldwins
criticism to be addressed, but this categorization, too, brings with it
some problems. In his book, The Way of the World: The
Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco Moretti analyzes the
bildungsroman as a genre. Though Morettis discussion seems
interested primarily (perhaps even solely) in the European
bildungsroman, the disclaimer he gives about why his remarks do not
apply to American novels does not seem to pertain to Native Son. In a
Note, Moretti provides a disclaimer that explains one reason why he
sees his characterization as applicable to European novels but not to
148 Heather Duerre Humann
Gus: If you wasnt black and if you had some money and if theyd let you go
to aviation school you could fly a plane. (17)
All Bigger wants is to be accepted as a human being, wishing once and for all
to shed his cloak of invisibility and to be respected as a man among men. He
succeeds in forcing the world to admit his existence, but he comes into being
only as a criminal. (62)
What would prison mean to Bigger Thomas? It holds advantages to him that a
life of freedom never had. To send him to prison would be more than an act of
mercy. You would be for the first time conferring life upon him. He would be
brought for the first time within the orbit of our civilization. He would have
an identity, even though it be a number. (404)
inherent in the idea of a contract between author and reader is the fact that a
novel is collaborative. Existing only as it is read, the novel makes writer and
reader more or less equal partnersthe readers subjectivity becomes as
significant as the objectification of the writers imagination in the text. (49)
Notes
1
I would like to thank Fred Whiting (for looking at an early draft of this essay)
and Madison Humann (for his support).
2
In this article, the crux of Perezs argument is that Wrights Bigger Thomas and
various Chicano adolescents (all from Chicano Urban narratives) function as
nihilistic figures. Moreover, Perez likens these contemporary Chicano adolescents
to Bigger Thomas.
3
To this end, Holman looks at various canonical American novels including
Melvilles Moby Dick, Jamess Daisy Miller and The Ambassador, Cathers My
Antonia, and Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, among others.
Works Consulted
Werner, Craig. Biggers Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American
Modernism in Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990. (117-152)
Wright, Richard. How Bigger Was Born in Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper
Collins, 1998. (vii-xxxiv)
. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper Collins, 1998.
Biggers Rebellious Complaint:
Biblical Imagery in Native Son
Many critics have traced back the origins of Native Son and the impact of
scientific discourses on Wright. He is recognized as the unquestionable
champion of black literary protest and naturalistic fiction, the author who
bluntly exposed a belief in art as a crucial arena to debate political and
social questions. Ralph Ellisons condemnation of Wrights defense of
novels as weapons as well as his opinion that true novels, even when
most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human
life (114) are well-known. As such, many readings of the novel have
capitalized on Wrights negative view of the black community. Yet, what
seems to have drawn little, if any, interest about Native Son is the deeply
religious nature of Bigger Thomass plight. I want to argue in this paper
that Native Son is firmly rooted in biblical models of narration and theme
indicated by the protagonists spiritual isolation and despair. Bigger
realizes most bitterly the breach existing between himself and others
(family, friends, society in general) in scenes which recreate his alienation
and show the corruption that white America inscribed on blackness.
I did not know what my story was, and it was not until I stumbled upon
science that I discovered some of the meanings of the environment that
battered and taunted me. I encountered the work of men who were studying
the Negro community, amassing facts about urban negro life, and I found that
sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the
other. [] It was from the scientific findings of the late Robert E. Park,
Robert Redfield, and Louis Wirth that I drew the meanings for my
documentary book, 12,000,000 Black Voices; for my novel, Native Son; it was
from their scientific facts that I absorbed some of that quota of inspiration
necessary for me to write Uncle Toms Children and Black Boy. (xvii-xviii)
If, in reading my novel, Native Son, you doubted the reality of Bigger
Thomas, then examine the delinquency rates cited in this book; if, in reading
my autobiography, Black Boy, you doubted the picture of family life there,
then study the figures on family disorganization given here. (xx)
Michel Fabre explains what it meant for the young Richard Wright
to live with his grandmothers strict Adventist beliefs. The theological
basis of this religion placed a heavy burden on the boy:
Granny intimated boldly, basing her logic on Gods justice, that one sinful
person in a household could bring down the wrath of God upon the entire
establishment, damning both the innocent and the guilty, and on more than
one occasion she interpreted my mothers long illness as the result of my
faithlessness. (Black Boy 60, qtd. in Fabre 34)
every meal was an opportunity to recite verses from the Bible, and every
reprimand a pretext to call upon the Almighty. Even if Richard could get out
of reading prayers, using homework as an excuse, and merely pretended to
kneel, he could not escape the Saturday worship. While all his friends were
playing or working, he grouchily followed his grandmother and Aunt Addie to
church. (34)
although Richard was revolted by this faith which seemed meaningless to him,
completely opposed to immediate joys of life, he was not impervious to the
force of religion. The dogmas of the church did not succeed in breaking his
spirit, but their form did leave their mark: I responded to the dramatic vision
of life held by the church, feeling that to live day by day with death as ones
sole thought was to be so compassionately sensitive toward all life as to view
all men as slowly dying, and the trembling sense of fate that welled up, sweet
and melancholy, from the hymns, blended with the sense of fate that I had
already caught from life. (Black Boy 60, qtd. in Fabre 35, my emphasis)
the extraordinary stories in the Bible were also bound to capture his
imagination, in the same fashion as fairy tales and horror stories. Although the
austere Adventists did not go in for dramatic sermons, the elders in the parish
often preached with direct inspiration from the Bible: The elders of her
church expounded a gospel clogged with images of vast lakes of eternal fires,
of seas vanishing, of valleys of dry bones [] A cosmic tale that began before
time and ended with the clouds of the sky rolling away at the Second Coming
of Christ; chronicles that concluded with the Armageddon; dramas thronged
with the billions of human beings who had ever lived or died as God judged
the quick and the dead (Black Boy, qtd. in Fabre 89)
160 Carme Manuel
learned to decipher the system of representation set forth in these sermons and
parables [and he l]ater borrowed some of his most beautiful images from these
preachers, while many a symbol in his work is taken directly from the biblical
mythology with which he became so familiar. (35, my emphasis).
offered by the idea of America. This promise is the deeply romantic one that
in this land, untrammeled by history and social accident, a person will be able
to achieve complete self-definition. Behind this promise is the assurance that
individuals come before society, that they exist in some meaningful sense
prior to, and apart from, societies in which they happen to find themselves.
(71)
The black myth narrates a confrontation of the black American individual, the
not pure American self not divorced from specific social circumstances,
without the promise offered by the idea of America. This promise is not the
deeply romantic one that in this land, trammeled by history and social
accident, a black person will be able to achieve complete self-definition.
Behind this promise is not the assurance that black individuals come before
society, or that they exist in some meaningful sense prior to, and apart from,
societies in which they happen to find themselves.
First, through some quirk of circumstance, he had become estranged from the
religion and the folk culture of his race. Second, he was trying to react to and
answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter came to him through
the newspapers, magazines, radios, movies, and the mere imposing sight and
sound of daily American life. (xiii)
There was in the back of their minds, when they said this, a wild and intense
longing (wild and intense because it was suppressed!) to belong, to be
identified, to feel that they were alive as other people were, to be caught up
forgetfully and exultingly in the swing of events, to feel the clean, deep,
organic satisfaction of doing a job in common with others. (xiv, my emphasis)
What has received little attention is the fact that these feelings of
dispossession and disinheritance are recreated in the book through
biblical imagery. In 12 Million Black Voices Wright paints a picture
where exists
a fragile black family possessed of a kinship system of its own and sustained
by institutions (patterns of behavior) that include codes of conduct vis--vis
whites and standards of life, hope, and value that find objective correlatives in
the Afro-American church and in Afro-American sacred and secular song.
(Baker 94)
inspiration from one of the most enriching of the sacred books. The
words, taken from the 1901 American Standard Version of the Bible,
belong to the Book of Job 23:2. Chapters 23 and 24 are considered to
be Jobs expression of his deepest problem. At this point of his
narrative, he does not even attempt to answer the arguments of his
counselors, but simply cries out, heavy with bitter complaint and
groaning in their presence; he also reasserts his longing to find God
and presents his case with these words to find an answer. The citation
encapsulates, then, Wrights intention in Native Son: how to expose
and analyze black suffering in twentieth-century America.
Many commentators have debated the question of the specific kind
of literature that the Book of Job represents. This debate is no doubt
motivated by the fact that the book is not contained by history,
philosophy, rhetoric, epic, drama, or lyric, but rather includes all these
genres within its aesthetic boundaries. As Walter L. Reed explains,
in Bahktins terms, this would make Job a special case of
heteroglossia, an encyclopedic or Menippean aggregation of genres
(118).1 In the same way, Native Son could also be considered a
heteroglossic text where Bigger Thomass quandary consists of
achieving a sense of self independent from the racialized American
white texts which define his ontological and epistemological status.
Similarly, Sabine Sielke thinks that Native Son constitutes an
ultimate form of mimicry, parodically enacting the racist projections
of black masculinity (103). James Baldwins view that Wright
reduces character and theme to simplistic formulae might be correct
if we understand that the biblical Job has to struggle in the same way
to liberate his sense of self where dominant theology has fixed itin
the realm of orthodox Judaism (the sufferer is justly punished because
he has sinned). Bigger Thomas has, thus, to come to terms with a new
understanding of a self different from the one dictated by white
American culture which identifies male blackness with savagery and
rape. This process of self-understanding will be dramatized fully in
Book 3, a reenactment of the Book of Job and, as such, a black
revision of the initial biblical citation.
Biggers spiritual alienation, however, has to be traced back to the
two previous books, especially to those moments in which he displays
his estrangement from his religion and folk culture in Chicago, an
urban space used to create a symbolic geographical map, a culturally
significant migration site in which white American conventions on
blackness could be explored. Biggers immersion in the whiteness
of the White city (Chicago) might be evocative of Expressionism, as
164 Carme Manuel
developed in the visual arts, where line and color were given
independence from nature, manipulated freely to express emotional
response, and, consequently, had symbolic meanings which tried to
shock the viewer and which were linked to the subjectivity of the
artist and the expression of his inner life. Although Wright uses color
similarly to Eugene ONeill in The Emperor Jones, he suffuses the
text with whiteness to emphasize the perversion of one of the most
often mentioned colors in the Scriptures, where it serves as a symbol
of righteousness and spiritual cleanness. White people are a sort of
great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep
swirling river stretching suddenly at ones feet in the dark, (109)
thereby making the white snowstorm that falls on Chicago after
Biggers murder symbolic of the hostile white world (Siegel 520).
For Joyce Anne Joyce, snow symbolizes the malevolence of the
white world and by implication identifies Biggers animal-like will to
survive. But snow is also used as an introduction to Biggers
entering his struggle to comprehend his irrational world. In the same
way, God shows Jobs ignorance by telling him: Have you entered
the treasury of snow, Or have you seen the treasury of hail, Which I
have reserved for the time of trouble. For the day of battle and war?
(Job 38: 22-23).
Book 1 is titled Fear and clearly several books of the Bible
distinguish between a proper fear and an improper fear. The former
may be wholesome and cause the individual to proceed with due
caution in the face of danger, thereby avoiding disaster. The latter
may be morbid, destroying hope and weakening a persons endurance,
even to the point of bringing about death. It is this gruesome fear
which pervades Biggers mind and soul throughout his life. His desire
to be recognized as a native son with the same inalienable rights in
the mythic American community and his deep awareness of his
exclusion by racism and classism, and therefore of his spiritual
maiming, are deeply rooted in his fear-ridden life.
Robert Butler believes that Wrights conscious use of Christian
motifs in his major fiction is for ironic purposes (94). Yet, it may be
conventional religious imagery is repeatedly undercut by irony
throughout the novel not because it reminds Bigger of his familys
resignation and his impotence, but because it brings home the sense of
his own alienation from the only world which might offer him
affirmative images. There are three moments in which he is made
painfully conscious of his estrangement within the black community,
what the narrator describes as living with them but behind a wall, a
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 165
curtain (14). The first two are tied to the singing of his mother, the
character that incarnates his link to his racial origins. The first one
takes place only some time after he has killed the rat. Mrs. Thomas is
making breakfast and sings: Life is like a mountain railroad/ With an
engineer thats brave/ We must make the run successful/ From the
cradle to the grave (14). Biggers reaction to this gospel song is
one of displeasure: The song irked him and he was glad when she
stopped and came into the room (14). His mothers attitude towards
lifetrust in the Almightycontrasts sharply to his utter despair and
hopelessness. This is so because in Biggers valley of shadows God
has been replaced by a white face staring at its inhabitants from a
poster which is, in Houston A. Bakers words, a parodic sign
invented for black territories (87).
The image of Buckley, the candidate for State Attorney, is
introduced in the first pages of the book foreshadowing his ominous
and determining presence in Book 3. The posterreminiscent of the
image of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsbyis described in
this way:
The white face was fleshy but stern; one hand was uplifted and its index finger
pointed straight out into the street at each passer-by. The poster showed one
of those faces that looked straight at you when you looked at it and all the
while you were walking and turning your head to look at it it kept looking
unblinkingly back at you until you got so far from it you had to take your eyes
away, and then it stopped, like a movie blackout. Above the top of the poster
were the tall red letters: IF YOU BREAK THE LAW, YOU CANT WIN!
(16)
eyes to the light (2 Peter 1:5-9). Bigger lives among blind and hating
Christians. As to his family, He felt in the quiet presence of his
mother, brother, and sister a force, inarticulate and unconscious,
making for living without thinking, making for peace and habit,
making for a hope that blinded (102). As for the rest, Jan was blind.
Mary had been blind. Mr. Dalton was blind. And Mrs. Dalton was
blind; yes, blind in more ways than one (102). In Book 3, Max brings
together all these images of blindness in a final vision of Americans
proceeding to their fate like sleepwalkers.
The second moment when Bigger feels deep isolation comes some
time later. After he has been planning the Blum robbery with his
friends, he walks back home drenched in fear. He goes up the steps,
inserts the key in the lock and again he hears his mother singing
behind the curtain: Lord, I want to be a Christian,/ In my heart, in my
heart,/ Lord, I want to be a Christian,/ In my heart, in my heart He
tiptoes into the room, lifts the top mattress of his bed, pulls forth the
gun and rushes into the street feeling that ball of hot tightness
growing larger and heavier in his stomach and chest (37). Mrs.
Thomas song is a prayer, in which the singer aspires to become a
follower of Christ on the inside, which means that her thoughts must
originate from the heart. These feelings must be sincere since whats
on the outside is a reflection of what is in the inside, the true
character. In 1 Peter 4:16, we find: Yet if anyone suffers as a
Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this
matter. As a Christian the singer is expected to suffer and to bear that
suffering without protests and complaints, while continue to praise
God. This singing, then, establishes a link between the first scenes of
the novel and Book 3 as a black revision of Jobs suffering and his
defense of the absolute glory and perfection of God and Biggers
challenging reconsideration of Christianity as defined by white law.
The third moment in which Bigger feels alienated from his own
people appears in Book 2, Flight, when he tries to dodge his
pursuers. After raping and murdering Bessie and hiding in the empty
apartment, he overhears other blacks talking about the consequences
of his murders. He falls asleep and when he wakes up, goes to the
window and looks out. He sees a dimly-lit church, where a crowd of
black men and women stood between long rows of wooden benches,
singing, clapping hands, and rolling their heads. Ironically his watch
has stopped running because he had forgotten to wind it. In this
timeless image
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 167
The singing from the church vibrated through him, suffusing him with a mood
of sensitive sorrow. He tried not to listen, but it seeped into his feelings,
whispering of another way of life and death, coaxing him to lie down and
sleep and let them come and get him, urging him to believe that all life was a
sorrow that had to be accepted. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the
music. How long had he slept? What were the papers saying now? He had two
cents left, that would buy a Times. He picked up what remained of the loaf of
bread and the music sang of surrender, resignation. Steal away, Steal away,
Steal away to Jesus He stuffed the bread into his pockets; he would eat it
some time later. He made sure that his gun was still intact, hearing, Steal
away, Steal away home, I aint got long to stay here It was dangerous to
stay here, but it was also dangerous to go out. The singing filled his ears; it
was complete, self-contained, and it mocked his fear and loneliness, his deep
yearning for a sense of wholeness. Its fulness contrasted so sharply with his
hunger, its richness with his emptiness, that he recoiled from it while
answering it. Would it not have been better for him had he lived in that world
the music sang of? It would have been easy to have lived in it, for it was his
mothers world, humble, contrite, believing. It had a center, a core, an axis, a
heart which he needed but could never have unless he laid his head upon a
pillow of humility and gave up his hope of living in the world. And he would
never do that. (237-238)
The charges of didacticism against the last part of Native Son find
justification in the fact that, similar to the Book of Job and the other
four works of wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclessiastes and two
books in the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus and The Wisdom of
Solomon), it takes the form of something like a classroom lecture in
which the instructors in wisdom undertake three tasks: to describe
what they have observed in life, to advise their hearers/readers how to
live, and to praise wisdom as a quality (Gabel et al. 142). In one way,
the Book of Job seems a parable, in another way, a drama. Schneidau
explains that Helen Gardner places the book and the Suffering
Servant songs of Deutero-Isaiah, very close to tragedy in feeling;
indeed, she concludes that it is not wholly improper to set [Job]
beside Greek tragedy as a work of literary art,5 not only because of
its quasi-dramatic form but because it preserves the tragic
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 169
burning among you, which is happening to you for a trial, [] you are
sharers in the sufferings of the Christ, that you may rejoice and be
overjoyed also during the revelation of his glory (1 Peter 1:6,7 and
4:12, 13). Such suffering for righteousness has a beneficial effect, and
a person who faithfully and successfully passes through a difficult
burning trial is stronger and more solidly established as a result of
his endurance (Acts 14:22). Fear and shame rise hot in Bigger on
many occasions (67, 85, 108, 141).
As mentioned above, Wright has Bigger Thomas suffer through no
fault of his own. Here is where the book parts from the naturalistic
mode and delves into a symbolic and metaphysical understanding of
the protagonists existence. In the same way that Job argues that there
is no relationship between the good or evil a man does and what
happens to him in life, Wright argues that the fate of the black man in
America is determined well before he is even born. If Bigger were
guilty of sin, his suffering could be understood as Gods way of
reproving and chastening him for his own good. This is the principle
defended by the friends who gather around Job in his time of trouble
and by some of the white counselors who confront Bigger in Book
3. But what makes Native Son more difficult to understand is the fact
that that is not the answer to account for Biggers existential malaise
in the narrative.
On a naturalistic level Bigger is guilty of his crimes, though he has
been driven to them by deterministic circumstances. He has murdered
two women with his own hands, but what has driven him to commit
these heinous acts? In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich
Nietzsche states that one of the tragedies of humanity is that blood
and cruelty is the foundation of all good things. Sacrifice becomes
necessary to affirm a few primal postulates of social intercourse
that the group considers crucial to its way of life:
The milk on the stove boiled over. Bessie rose, her lips still twisted with sobs,
and turned off the electric switch. She poured out a glass of milk and brought
it to him. He sipped it slowly, then set the glass aside and leaned over again.
They were silent. Bessie gave him the glass once more and he drank it down,
then another glass. (214)
The hidden meaning of his lifea meaning which others did not see and
which he had always tried to hidehad spilled out. No; it was no accident,
and he would never say that it was. There was in him a kind of terrified pride
in feeling and thinking that some day he would be able to say publicly that he
had done it. It was as though he had an obscure but deep debt to fulfill to
himself in accepting the deed. (101)
He felt that he had his destiny in his grasp. He was more alive than he could
ever remember having been [] he was moving toward that sense of fullness
he had so often but inadequately felt in magazines and movies. (141)
he felt that one way to end fear and shame was to make all those black people
act together, rule them, tell them what to do, and make them do it. Dimly, he
felt that there should be one direction in which he and all other black people
could go whole-heartedly; that there should be a way in which gnawing
hunger and restless aspiration could be fused; that there should be a manner of
acting that caught the mind and body in certainty and faith. (109)
not only had they resolved to put him to death, but that they were determined
to make his death mean more than a punishment; that they regarded him as a
figment of that black world which they feared and were anxious to keep under
control. The atmosphere of the crowd told him that they were going to use his
death as a bloody symbol of fear to wave before the eyes of that black world.
(257)
familiar images which his mother had given him when he was a child at her
knee; images which in turn aroused impulses long dormant, impulses, that he
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 175
had suppressed and sought to shunt from his life. They were images which
had once given him a reason for living, had explained the world. Now they
sprawled before his eyes and seized his emotions in a spell of awe and
wonder. (263)
agonized words ringing out in the courtroom to the judge echo this
understanding of condemnation: Your Honor, I ask in the name of all
we are and believe, that you spare this boys life! With every atom of
my being, I beg this in order that not only may this black boy live, but
that we ourselves may not die! (370).
At the end of Book 3, Bigger finds his voice and an understanding
of himself. However, this entails bitter consequences. Max is not
willing to talk to Bigger about the significance of his life, but
Biggerss insistence forces him to do so. However, he does not turn
out to be the receptive listener Bigger once felt he was. When the
black man reminds the lawyer of the questions he asked him, Max
does not remember. Nor does he remember the night Bigger opened
up to him, and he treated him like a man. Biggers bitter
disappointment is shown in his reaction to the lawyers forgetting:
Bigger felt he had been slapped (387). And recalling Matthew 7:24-
27, the narrator comments: Oh, what a fool he had been to build
hope upon such shifting sand! (387). But Max does not know and
does not understand because his words show Bigger that the white
man was still trying to comfort him in the face of death. Maxs last
wordsyouve got to b-believe in yourself (391)ironically
launch Bigger to go deeper into his search for his self and liberate him
from the stereotypical image that Max had also created of him. In fact,
Biggers reaction is one of derision: Bigger laughed (391).
For Laura E. Tanner,
with Biggers laugh, the delicate, philosophical world that Max (and the
narrator) have constructed around the skeletal framework of Biggers actions
comes tumbling down like Wittgensteins house of cards, felled by one breath
of the man who committed those actions, who knows he is to die, who stands
firmly on the ground beneath him. (145)
In fact, the black mans disdain applies to his rejection not only of
racism but also of Maxs liberal condescending attitude. In his trial
speech, Max turns Bigger into a social symbol which in the end is not
very different from the white fossilization of black manhood which
had defined, commanded and appropriated his self-image all his life:
Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what
they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be
quite of them; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He
was their property, heart and soul, body and blood; what they did claimed
every atom of him, sleeping and waking; it colored life and dictated the terms
of death. (307)
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 179
Bigger has been forced to read images and is further made by Max
to read himself from the point of view of whites as, through
dissociation, he has been made into a representational object.
Throughout slavery, the slave was no longer a man because to credit
him with human attributes would have jeopardized the justification of
the institution. According to Patterson, it is this dissociation that made
the ex-slave the most exquisitely appropriate representational object.
As Patterson continues he explains that, in his analysis of Ndembu
rituals, Victor Turner
But what I killed for, I am! [] What I killed for mustve been
good! [] I didnt know I was really alive in this world until I felt
things hard enough to kill for em (392), is, then, Biggers
paradoxical assertion of his humanity against the burden of
representation with which Max categorizes him. Moreover, his
statement is a verbal signification of his subjectivity that repeats,
with a difference, Gods statement to Moses is Exodus 3:14: I AM
WHO I AM (Greene 187).
Harold Cruse thinks that
Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain
truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of
the Negro better than the Negros white radical allies. They understood it
instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright
could not see was that what Negros allies feared most of all was that this
sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution
all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status.
(184)
But this is exactly what happens at the end of Native Son. Max, the
Negros ally, tries to comfort Bigger with a vision which can place
him inside American society, but when Bigger laughs at his words in
mockery and shows him that he has finally come to grips with a new
sense of identity on his own terms, Max recoils in terror because he
realizes that the Negro stands now on a path that leads to greater
power and independence than the black man has ever dreamed for
himself.
180 Carme Manuel
The Book of Job calls into question the counsel of the wise. Jobs
three friends or comforters grossly mistake proverbial truth. Job
speaks as a half-outsider and, according to Reed,
the fact that Job can speak what is right (42:7) of God and receive corrective
instruction from him face to face apart from the dialogic apparatus of law and
prophecy is unsettling enough. But the fact that he does so in the generic
mode of a Babylonian lament is a distinct challenge to the requirements of the
Law and the Prophets. (119)
Carme Manuel
Universitat de Valncia
Notes
1
Robert Alter explains that what the Bible offers us is an uneven continuum and
a constant interweaving of factual historical detail (especially, but by no means
exclusively, for later periods) with purely legendary history; occasional enigmatic
vestiges of mythological lore; etiological stories; archetypal fictions of the founding
fathers of the nation; folktales of heroes and wonder-working men of God; verisimilar
inventions of wholly fictional personages attached to the progress of national history;
and fictionalized versions of known historical figures. All of these narratives are
presented as history, that is, as things that really happened and that have some
significant consequence for human or Israelite destiny. The only evident exceptions to
this rule are Job, which in its very stylization seems manifestly a philosophic fable
(hence, the rabbinic dictum, There was no such creature as Job; he is a parable) and
Jonah, which, with its satiric and fantastic exaggerations, looks like a parabolic
illustration of the prophetic calling and of Gods universality (Art 33).
2
The complete text for this spiritual is: Steal away, steal away, /steal away to
Jesus! / Steal away, steal away home, /I aint got long to stay here. /1 My Lord, He
calls me, / He calls me by the thunder, /The trumpet sounds within-a my soul, /I aint
got long to stay here. /2 Green trees a-bending, /po sinner stand a-trembling,
3
See Siegel 517-518.
4
For Schneidau, to an involuted Puritan like Herman Melville, the concept of
truth hidden under the surface of words became so ominous that it seemed capable of
holding a vast cosmic secret, that of innate depravity not only in man but in the power
that ordained the world. Melville turns Christianity against itself, appositely using the
Job story in Moby Dick to imply his message. But this tactic only shows the depth of
his indebtedness to the Bible (283). This would explain Wrights debt to Melville via
the Book of Job. For an analysis of Melvilles influence on Native Son, see Elizabeth
Schultz, The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick in African
American Review 33.4 (Winter 1999): 639-654.
5
Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (London: Faber, 1971), 58-60.
6
Mary conforms also to other patterns established by Hubert and Mauss. They
believe that there were always certain sets of ideas about the victim. He was symbolic
of good or evil, depending on the objective of the sacrificial ritual. The victim
mediated between the sacred and the profane Killing the victim involved not just the
182 Carme Manuel
gift of a valued object but the liberation of his life-spirit and the creation of a compact
between the sacrificers and God or some transcending entity. For this reason, there
was usually some form of physical contact made with the victim (qtd. in Patterson
183). Biggers contact is established through kissing.
7
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1967), 105.
Works Consulted
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
Alter, Robert and Frank Kermode eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible. London:
Harper Collins, 1997.
Baym, Nina. Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction
Exclude Women Authors in Elaine Schowalter, ed. The New Feminist Criticism:
Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985. (63-80)
Bigsby, C. W. E. The Self and Society: Richard Wrights Dilemma in The Second
Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature. Westport, CN: Greenwood P,
1980. (54-84)
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Richard Wright and the Dynamics of Place in Afro-American
Literature. in Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990. (85-116)
Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1958.
Brignano, Russell C. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works.
Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1970.
Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. New York:
Twayne, 1991.
Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The
Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 1984.
Cruse, Harold. Richard Wright in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual from its
Origins to the Present. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1967.
(181-189)
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. 1964. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club,
1994.
Fabre, Michel. The Poetry of Richard Wright in Yoshinabu Hakutani, ed. Critical
Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. (252-272)
. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1993.
Gabel, John B., Charles B. Wheeler and Anthony D. York. The Bible as Literature:
An Introduction. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 183
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K. A. Appiah eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives
Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor P/Doubleday, 1976.
Girard, Ren. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.
Greene, J. Lee. Blacks in Eden: The African American Novels First Century.
Charlottesville: UP Virginia, 1996.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston, Mass.: G. K.
Hall & Co., 1982.
Harris, Trudier. Native Sons and Foreign Daughters in Keneth Kinnamon, ed. New
Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. (63-84)
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge UP, 1990.
. How Native Son Was Born in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and K. A. Appiah, eds.
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad,
1993. (110-131)
Johnson, Barbara. The Re(ad) and the Black in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and K. A.
Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York:
Amistad, 1993. (149-155)
Joyce, Anne Joyce. The Figurative Web of Native Son in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and
K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New
York: Amistad, 1993. (171-187)
Nietzsche, Friederich. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Patterson, Orlando. Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American
Centuries. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Reed, Walter L. Who Is This That Darkens Counsel? Cross-Talk in the Book of Job
in Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin. New
York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. (114-138)
Schneidau, Herbert N. Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1976.
Schultz, Elizabeth. The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick
in African American Review 33.4 (Winter 1999): 639-654.
Siegel, Paul N. The Conclusion of Richard Wrights Native Son in PMLA 89.3:
517-523.
Sielke, Sabine. Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American
Literature and Culture, 1790-1990. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002.
Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New
York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.
Tanner, Laura E. Uncovering the Magical Disguise of Language: The Narrative
Presence in Richard Wrights Native Son in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and K. A.
184 Carme Manuel
Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York:
Amistad, 1993. (132-148)
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.
. Introduction in St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, eds. Black Metropolis: A
Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 1945. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993. (xvii-
xxxiv)
Native Son Beyond the Page
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard
Wrights Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations
put up with the political pressure of their time. Hence the second
parts goal will be to contextualize both films and to show what
elements of the novel were edited in each and to what ends.
but when doing this I always made an effort to retain the mood of the story,
explaining everything only in terms of Biggers life and, if possible, in the
rhythms of Biggers thought (even though the words would be mine). (458)
190 Raphal Lambert
I wanted the reader to feel that Biggers story was happening now, like a play
upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen. Action follows action,
as in a prizefight. Wherever possible, I told of Biggers life in close-up, slow-
motion, giving the feel of the grain in the passing time. (459)
Earlier in the essay, Wright describes his own craft, and what he
experienced during the writing of Native Son bears a striking
resemblance to the qualities attributed to film. As images springing
out of the screen, Richard Wright tells there are meanings in my
book of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the
paper (434) (Emphasis mine). In Wrights imagination, Bigger often
appears as a mere constellation of sensations, and he intends to draw
Bigger trusting his own feelings. Then, describing the varieties of
Bigger Thomases that inspired him, Wright comments: their actions
had simply made impressions upon my sensibilities, and as he set out
to write, these things came surging up, tangled, fused, knotted,
entertaining me by the sheer variety and potency of their meaning and
suggestiveness (457).
Richard Wrights writing of Biggers story becomes the decoding,
then the rationalization of mental images, of impressions which
crystallized and coagulated into clusters and configuration of
memory, attitudes, moods, ideas (457). This semantic play with
cinematic terms leaves no doubt as to Wrights understanding of the
power of persuasion that film images carry. And this may explain why
Native Sons plot seems to have been designed for the screen, as
scholar Laura L. Quinn suggests in a recent essay:
Voice does not seem to be the source of Native Sons power. We find that
source, rather in the novels scene-making capacity, in the elaboration of such
moments as the rat-killing opener, the arduous movement up the stair with
drunken Mary Dalton to her bedroom and her death, that very long interval
with the gentleman of the press in the furnace room when the burnt body is
discovered, Biggers capture on the roof, and the family reunion or gathering
at the police station that culminate in Biggers shame and rage as his mother
kneels before Mrs. Dalton. Bigger is delivered to us not orally so much as
visually or viscerally; the novel is cinematic rather than voiced. (46)
(Emphasis mine)
The first hurdles Chenal faced when he decided to make Native Son
into a film were of political order. His intention to shoot in France
was turned down by French officials for reasons dictated by
international policy (Fabre 337). In other words, in the context of
postwar relations, with the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) spurred by Senator McCarthys anti-Communism, the
country that had rescued Europe from Fascism would not accept being
pictured as racist. Furthermore, France was under the Marshall plan
and ethics were brushed aside for obvious reasons of state. State funds
were removed from the project, and Chenal moved to Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Once in Argentina, the movie could hardly be shot in
optimum conditions, not only because resemblance between sunny
Buenos Aires and snowy-windy Chicago was slight, but also because
the unpropitious situation favored a number of financial irregularities
that heightened tensions between the people involved. However,
Native Son premiered in Buenos Aires under the title Sangre Negra
(Black Blood) in March 1951 and was, in spite of all its
imperfections, a success. Once ready for the American market, the
New York State Board of Censors cut about 25 minutes out of the
original. As expected, Richard Wright, author of the novel, co-author
of the screenplay, and screen incarnation of Bigger Thomas, reacted
bitterly, as a letter to his agent shows:
People everywhere know that the film was cut, that the killing of the rat was
cut, that making of the home gun was cut, that the real heart of the boys
attempt at robbery was cut. [] But the cut that did the greatest damage was
the cutting of the trial. [] The trial is shown with arms waving and mouths
moving, but nothing is heard. (qtd. in Fabre 348)
McCarthy years and therefore cannot account entirely for the deletion
of the trial in Freedmans adaptation. The lack of action in Book
Three (Fate) may be invoked on the count that it is not good film
material, but the frequency of trial scenes in American movies
indicates otherwise2. The absence of trial in the 1986 version does not
seem to correspond to any rational decision. It should be noted,
however, that even if Diane Silver, the producer of the 1986 version,
had wanted to have the trial scene reproduced in the movie, she could
have only offered a very modified version of it since she deleted
Bessies murder from the story. In doing so, Silver somehow
reproduces the attitude of the Court in the novel who never shows any
concern for Biggers inexcusable raping and slaughtering of his black
girlfriend.
Yet the murder of Bessie Mears by Bigger Thomas is central to
Native Son. Bigger commits his first murder out of fear. Scared by
blind Mrs. Dalton, who has just entered the bedroom where he has
just carried the unconscious, inebriated Mary Dalton, Bigger
accidentally smothers Mary to death while trying to silence her with a
pillow. Bigger has become a murderer, but readers understand the
strong extenuating circumstances. In contrast, readers find no such
solace for the murder of his girlfriend, Bessie. It is brutal, calculated,
and unjustifiable. This second murder is Wrights stratagem to force
readers to confront their own prejudices, and above all, to force them
to reflect on the cause of Biggers violence, instead of contemplating
in disgust the consequences of his actions. As a reviewer of the 1986
version put it, Wrights Native Son is characterized by a furious
absence of sentimentality (Hoberman 64) and therefore any attempt
to soften Biggers character goes against the spirit of the novel. Thus,
in the 1951 adaptation of Native Son, Bessie is murdered, but the
circumstances of the crime are quite altered. Bigger kills Bessie in
their hideout on the assumption that she has snitched (sic) on him. In
other words, he is given a motive for his second killing, and in fact, he
even repents later when he learns that he was wrong, stating that
after all, there is love in this world. Biggers cruelty is significantly
mitigated by this re-interpretation of the second crime.
It may seem odd that Richard Wright would accept such an
infringement of his story, but Chenals project was the best offer
Wright had been made so far: earlier, in 1947, Hollywood producer
Harold Hecht had offered to make an adaptation of Native Son in
which Bigger Thomas would be white, but Wright refused. In 1941,
Wright authorized Paul Greens stage adaptation in which Clara
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 195
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations
The book had more layers than you could explore in a two-hour film. Once
the terrible accident has taken place, Bigger has this giddying sense of control
over his life for the first time, and his freedom causes him to kill Bessie. Even
when we were reading the screenplay, we asked ourselves many times, Why
is an audience going to want to attempt to understand this man if he goes this
step further? (Harmetz 14)
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 197
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations
As Wright was writing Native Son at the end of the 1930s, he was
betting on American peoples willingness to tackle a challenging
novel and to question themselves about their racial prejudices. Almost
five decades later, Law, a producer for PBSthe brain channel on
American TVtook the exact opposite view of Wright, assuming that
American audience did not possess enough intellectual capacity to
follow a somewhat complex story. Why would people attempt to
understand? asks Law. Indeed, why would they, when the media can
serve them a rationalized and sanitized version of an otherwise
disturbing story? Why should the American movie industry stimulate
the supposedly dormant intellect of its audience when all this
audience asks for is to consume superficial, feel-good products?
Behind Laws good intentions lies a genuine contempt for movie-
goers, as well as the seeds of an Orwellian world where peoples
every move is monitored, their thoughts controlled, and their critical
mind kept undeveloped via the use of cheap pleasures.
What happened in the years separating Wright from Law? Wright
was an idealist and a fighter. Law seems to have succumbed to the
sirens of political correctnessa social phenomenon whereby any
painful social issue or tension is anaesthetized, so that everyone can
ignore the problem with impunity. The force of political correctness
confronts us with a paradoxical dilemma. On the one hand, it does
better than solving problems by pretending there is no problem. On
the other hand, political correctness is not considered wrong. People
who are politically correct are proud to be so. This is why, of her
adaptation of Native Son, Silver says:
The most important thing is that the movies out there. There was no other
reason to do this movie, except to have people see it, discuss it, and discuss
poverty, racism, the intricacies of white and black people knowing each other,
and the dangers of our not knowing each other. (McHenry 17)
story that even bankers daughters could read and weep over and feel
good about (How Bigger 454).
Both Lindsay Laws and Diane Silvers points of view reveal the
problems at the heart of political correctness. However, what can be
inferred from their statements might just be the tip of the iceberg; in
fact, Silvers justification for the cut of Bessies murder may
dissimulate and mask much more serious motivations for the excision.
In Cinematic Censorship and the Film Adaptations of Richard
Wrights Native Son, Ruth Elizabeth Burks reminds us that
Wrights Bigger exploded the myth of black male sexuality visually
exploited by Griffith and subsequent Hollywood filmmakers by
showing them to be racist and stereotypic constructions used by
whites to deny blacks their humanity (1). Burks implies that both
adaptations of Native Son, by deleting such scenes as Marys
responsiveness to Biggers overtures,4 Biggers rape of Bessie,
Biggers trialall scenes concentrating on Biggers sexuality
perpetuate the Hollywood pattern.
Otherwise, explains Burks, why neglect the newspapermens racial
slurs and conviction that Bigger raped Mary (to the point of asking
him to re-enact the rape for them)? Why ignore Buckleys cross-
examination of Bigger based on Biggers alleged animalistic sexuality
and possible rape of Mary (whose skin color is strongly emphasized
for the occasion)? Why not reproduce Maxs speech, which exposes
Buckleys blatant bigotry? Could Silver dream of better scenes to
have people discuss the dangers of racial prejudices? Considering the
choice to remove the trial from the movie, Burks comments: To
include Buckleys prosecution of Bigger in the film adaptations of
Native Son [] is to reveal the extent to which the white race is
absorbed with the idea that black men are bent on defiling white
women (7). Burkss analysis unmasks what really lurks behind
Silvers professed goals: the worst kind of racism because it is almost
impossible to detect. Anchored in each individual, it is part of the
culture, and comforting good intentions are not enough to uproot such
intolerance because it is often unconscious.
The unexpurgated version of Chenals Native Son is presently
unavailable and cannot be assessed with fairness. Yet, if we judge by
the success of the Buenos Aires premiere as well as by Wrights anger
in the letter to his agent, we come to the paradoxical conclusion that
there must have been less hypocrisy regarding racial injustice in 1951
than in 1986. The turmoil of the Civil Rights in the 1960s and 1970s
has generated undeniable improvements, but it seems that by the
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 199
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations
1980s this good spirit has been thwarted. The fight for racial equality
has not been forgotten but it has been turned, as Silvers words
demonstrate, into a discourse alone. This discourse is not even
negative. It is simply dull, meant to numb, and Silvers reductionist
adaptation of Native Son is a perfect illustration of such a
phenomenon.
Raphal Lambert
Tsukuba University, Japan
Notes
1
See for instance, Laura L. Tanners The Narrative Presence in Native Son, and
Klaus Schmidts Teaching Native Son in a German Undergraduate Literature Class.
2
The fascination with the dispensation of justice in America has been particularly
virulent lately. Some TV series invariably end up in a courtroom (Law and Order for
instance), some sitcoms revolve around judicial cases (Ally Mc Beal for instance), and
some shows simply feature real cases (Judge Judy, Divorce Court, etc.).
3
See section Notes in Richard Wright: Early Works: Lawd Today! / Uncle
Toms Children / Native Son. (New York: The Library of America, 1991), 915-936.
4
For Chenals defense, it must be said that American censorship not only cut a
scene where Mary Dalton kisses Bigger, but even most likely destroyed the footage,
since it is nowhere to be found in the extant film copy on file at the Library of
Congress (Brunette 136).
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 201
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations
Works Consulted
Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: The Library of America, 1998.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Major Literary Characters: Bigger Thomas. New York,
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990.
Brunette, Peter. Two Wrights, One Wrong in Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin,
eds. The Modern American Novel and the Movies. New York: Ungar, 1978. (131-
142)
Burks, Ruth Elizabeth. Cinematic Censorship and the Film Adaptations of Richard
Wrights Native Son. Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1993.
Canby, Vincent. Rage Unleashed in The New York Times (24 December 1986):
C.14. Col 2.
Chenal, Pierre. Native Son (1951). With Richard Wright and Jean Wallace.
International Film Forum, 1988.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. 1953. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club,
1994.
Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. 1973. Translated by Isabel
Barzun. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Freedman, Jerrold. Native Son. With Matt Dillon, Elizabeth McGovern and Oprah
Winfrey. Diane Silver Productions, 1986.
Harmetz, Aljean. Problems of Filming Native Son in The New York Times (23
December 1986): Sec. C14, col. 4.
Harrington, Richard. Diluted Native Son, Based on Wrights Novel in The
Washington Post (16 January 1987): Sec. B8, col. 1.
Hoberman, J. Bigger Than Life in The Village Voice (30 December 1986): 64.
Mc Henry, Susan. Producer Diane Silver and the Making of Native Son in Ms.
(March 1987): 15-17.
Miller, James A., ed. Approaches to Teaching Wrights Native Son. New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 1997.
Quinn, Laura L. Native Son as Project in James Miller, ed. Approaches to Teaching
Wrights Native Son. New York: The Modern Language Association of America,
1997. (42-47)
Schmidt, Klaus. Teaching Native Son in a German Undergraduate Literature Class
in James Miller, ed. Approaches to Teaching Wrights Native Son. New York:
The Modern Language Association of America, 1997. (28-34)
Smith, Valrie. Alienation and Creativity in Native Son in Harold Bloom, ed. Major
Literary Characters: Bigger Thomas. New York, Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1990. (105-114)
202 Raphal Lambert
Tanner, Laura E. Narrative Presence in Native Son in Harold Bloom, ed. Major
Literary Characters: Bigger Thomas. New York, Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1990. (127-142)
Wright, Richard. How Bigger Was Born in Native Son. 1940. New York:
Perennial Classics, 1998. (431-462)
. Native Son. 1940. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998.
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.):
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day
Hip Hop Culture
The image of black men that sells to the rest of America wasnt
mapped out by Biggie Smalls, but Bigger Thomas.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
actual lives of some of these gangsta rappers serves the dual purpose
of authenticating their lyrics and enhancing the retail consumption of
their records by a predominantly young white male buying audience.
This shift took place in the late 80s through the early 90s and is
most readily represented in the career peak of late 80s politically
conscious group Public Enemy (PE) and the subsequent meteoric rise
of the much more nihilistic gangsta rap vanguard, Comptons NWA
(Niggaz With Attitude). Just as the marketing and retail potential of
rap music was coming into prominence (both PE and NWA were
early beneficiaries of rap musics now legendary platinum selling
potential), the music industry media clamored to find the terminology
to report on this new, powerful and vulgar phenomenon. Since the
challenges of gang warfare in Los Angeles (and gangster narratives in
generalconsider The Godfather Saga and Scarface especially) were
already journalisticand cinematiclegend, the term gangsta rap
was coined and it stuck.
Gangsta Rap forced scholars, journalists and critics to confront the
cruel realities of inner city livinginitially in the South Bronx and
Philadelphia with KRS ONE and Schooly D and almost
simultaneously with Ice-T and NWA on the west coast. The whole
point of a rapper rapping is to exaggerate through narrative in order to
represent ones community and ones culture in the face of violent
social invisibilityconsider our collective shock at the rampant
poverty in New Orleans. According to De Genova, The lyricists and
performers of gangster rap are also intellectuals; indeed, as non-
academic but highly articulate cultural practitioners, they are
extraordinarily public intellectuals (94). It is not surprising then that
gangsta rap was a radical wakeup call to the aforementioned social
ills. Yet, only the very general realities of poverty, police brutality,
gang violence, and brutally truncated opportunity were subject to any
such literal hearings /comprehension.
Thus the popularity of gangsta rap is more a reflection of pop
cultures insatiable appetite for violent narratives than it is a reflection
of any one individual rappers particular reality. The relationships
between author and narrative or rapper and rap lyric are not
necessarily autobiographical, but these narratives in their most
authentic forms do tend to be representative of certain post-industrial
inner city realities. This point is much more clearly articulated by
Perrine and Arp:
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 207
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture
Christopher Wallace
Marshall Mathers
about the time at which he returned home and his experiences with his
new job. Even as he tries to contain his guilt and anger he responds to
his mothers questions by thinking the following: He knew that his
mother was waiting for him to give an account of himself, and he
hated her for that (100). Earlier at the onset of the novel Bigger
confronts a huge rat that has been harassing his family, seemingly for
some time. After Bigger squares off with the over-sized vermin and
before he disposes of the body, he causes his sister Vera to faint from
the disgusting spectacle of it all. Biggers mother responds
immediately: Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you . . . To
this Bigger responds: Maybe you oughtntve. Maybe you ought to
left me where I was. The natal alienation of this scene underscores
the expressed alienation in Eminems ongoing feud with his own
mother, in reality as well as in the film 8 Mile and in his music.
Dark Man X
As the experiences with the women in the film Never Die Alone
render a distinct portrait of DMX/King as a Bigger figure within Hip
Hop culture, DMXs portrayal of King updates the experiences of and
the ideological considerations found in Wrights Bigger narratives,
Native Son and How Bigger Was Born.
Tupac Shakur
More so than any other Hip Hop generational Bigger Figure, Tupac
Shakur embodies the socio-economic challenges and frustrations of
Wrights classic anti-hero. Tupac Shakurs binary star shone so
brightly in the popular public spheres that his constituents and the
broader pop cultural audience still struggle to separate his gangsta rap
narratives and film performances from his real life collisions with the
criminal justice system and lethal inner city violence. He is a classic
Bigger figure in the sense that his alienated interactions with an
oppressive racist and classist society end ultimately in his demise, the
circumstances of which are utterly exacerbated by his counter-
hegemonic instincts and extraordinary verbal expressions. In this
instance, Tupacs representational Bigger narratives became an
impending reality that he was unable to survive.
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 219
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture
Though over a decade has passed since his death, Tupac Amaru
Shakur (b. 1971, d. 1996) is a figure who remains vibrantly alive in
the minds of many people. His status as one of the most visible
figures in Hip Hop culture remains undiminished nearly a decade
after his unsolved murder. Perhaps his fans still wrestle with Tupacs
memory and continue to consume his posthumously released music
because of his lifes elusive implications. He was murdered in a very
public drive by shooting after an extraordinary life and career. As a
child of Black Panther revolutionaries, Pac was poised and primed to
become one himself. He said as much in interviews during his pre-
teen years. His lyrics and poetry are also thoroughly informed by his
varied regional experiences. Born in New York City, his family
moved to Baltimore City, where he attended the school of performing
arts, and then to Marin City, California. Although this migratory
pattern from Northeast to South to West does not mirror that of
Richard Wright from South too Midwest to Northeast and beyond,
certainly, Pacs movements reflectively continue the tradition of
migration as one of the touchstones for certain representational
experiences and authorial certitude in African American narratives.
As Walter Edwards explains,
He had lived the life of a poor young Black male in inner cities on
the East and West coasts; he understood the struggles, temptations,
triumphs and strength of the urban poor; and he knew the sense of
oppression that racial and economic discrimination engenders in
most members of these communities. (63)
The social and literary elements of the Bigger figures are nearly
ubiquitous in Tupacs life and lyrics. Tupacs life was riddled with
contradictions; he was at once a gangsta and a brilliant poet, a
conscious leader and a gun-wielding menace, a feminist and a
misogynist. As an extraordinary figure of popular culture, Tupac
consistently resists categorization. It is for this reason that he was and
remains so profoundly significant to his fans and so profitable to
those who have commercially released his music.
Tupacs early career, reflected in his first solo album 2Pacalypse
Now released on a major label, was the portrait of a revolutionary son-
as-artist. He poignantly chronicles the plight of teenaged motherhood
in Brendas Got a Baby and challenges us to understand the new
slavery of the prison system in Trapped. His angst in narrative and
real life situations reflected a troubled and dangerous upbringing
plagued by surveillance, poverty and drug addiction: You know they
got me trapped in this prison of seclusion/Happiness, living on tha
220 James Braxton Peterson
If only we could pause to hear the pain in the voice of Tupac Shakur
and the chorus of Bigger Figures reflected upon in this essay, we
might direct our critical attention to the social, racial and economic
forces that collude not just to diminish the drive for selfhoodwhat
Wright might refer to as the individualbut to challenge as well the
very existence of young Black inner city men. As violent,
misogynistic and powerful as these creative narratives are, they
should not obscure the environments upon which they are attempting
to report. As readers become aware of the current reflections of
222 James Braxton Peterson
Notes
1
This essay is dedicated to the loving memory of my late best friend, David
Lamont Holley.
2
I realize that Baldwin, amongst many others, argued the exact antithesis of this
statement, as he suggested in his essay Everybodys Protest Novel, that Bigger
Thomas is not representative at all.
3
By authentic here, I merely mean to gesture toward the various discourses about
authentic black (male) identity and whether or not Bigger Thomas is a representative
figure of certain (potentially) essentialist African American experiences.
4
Please note here that according to Voletta Wallace, Christopher Wallace actually
was a model child until his HS school years when the allure of the streets simply
overwhelmed her domestic influences (16).
5
The rest of these dehumanizing references are found on pages 409, 410 and 411
respectively.
6
Note here also that some of the most compelling passages in Native Son that
reveal a news media all too eager to dehumanize and condemn Bigger Thomas are
based on actual cases that developed in Chicago in the midst of Wrights writing
process. Professor Kinnamon asserts that this case involved Robert Nixon and Earl
Hicks, two young blacks with backgrounds similar to that of Bigger (Kinnamon
121).
7
The People Who Could Fly is a traditional African American folktale in which
field slaves with dormant powers of flight escape the brutal lashings of an evil
overseerand the institution of slavery itselfwhen a mysterious African whispers
to each of them an unknown word that triggers their ability to fly.
8
This argument regarding Biggers existential relationship to both Mary and
Bessie is made convincingly by Robert James Butler.
9
I argue elsewhere (Dead Prezence . . . Callaloo Fall 2006) that the high rates
of Black on Black homicide elide the suicidal nihilism that haunts many young,
violent perpetrators.
10
See Cornel Wests classic text, Race Matters, Chapter One, Nihilism in Black
America, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Works Consulted
Wallace, Voletta and Tremell McKenzie. Voletta Wallace Remembers Her Son,
Biggie. New York: Atria Books, 2005.
Williams, Saul. The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip Hop. New York:
MTV Books, 2006.
West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940.
. How Bigger Was Born in Houston Baker, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations
of Native Son: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, Inc., 1972. (21-47)
Notes on Contributors
African American folklore, xii, 102, Bible, xx, 131, 157-165, 168-169,
125, 127, 130, 134, 138, 161, 163, 171-172, 174, 177, 181, 182, 183,
204, 205, 207, 217 227; Book of Job, xx, 96, 115,
African American music: blues, vi, 157, 162-164, 166, 168-170, 174,
xviii, 27, 32, 35, 91, 103, 125, 176-177, 180-181, 183; Elijah, 96;
127, 133, 138, 141, 152, 156, 189, Exodus, 179; Genesis, 165, 172,
207; gangsta rap, 204-211, 215, 175-176; Jeremiah, 125, 128, 137,
218, 220-223; hip hop, vi, xxi, 141; Moses, 125, 167, 177, 179;
203-227; jazz, 193, 207; spirituals, Old Testament, 125, 168;
167, 207 Revelation, 165; Scriptures, 164,
Africanism, xix, 76, 122-124, 127, 177; typology, 139
131, 136, 138 Biggie Smalls, xxii, 203, 204, 207,
Alger, Horatio, 160 208, 209, 211, 212
Alter, Robert, 181, 182 bildungsroman, xix, xx, 143-155
American Adam, 135, 138, 160 biography, vii, 3-4, 8-9, 40-42, 113,
American Dream, 67, 123, 128, 135 207
Anderson, Sherwood, 11 Black Arts, xiii, 227
Appiah, K. A., xiv, xxiii, 25, 32-33, Black Metropolis, 157-158, 184
35, 89, 183-184 Black nationalism, xii-xviii, 125-126
Appleby, Joyce, 121, 135, 138-139 Black Nationalism, 76, 119-120
archetype, 28, 31, 39, 88, 181 Black Power movement, v, xiii, xviii,
Aswell, Edward, 15-16 21-22, 27, 31, 75- 77, 79, 80-82,
authenticity, xv-xxii, 131, 190 84, 87, 90
Black Studies, v, xvi, 21-22, 27, 30,
32, 223, 227
Baker, Houston, xiv, 24, 27-32, 34, Black Womens movement, xiii, 26
43, 54, 83-84, 89, 120, 139, 162, Bloom, Harold, xiv, xxiii, 32, 34-35,
165, 172, 182, 204, 223-224 131, 139-140, 201-202
Baldwin, James, 7, 17-19, 26, 40, 54, Bone, Robert, 21, 23, 29, 32, 182
71, 122, 129, 130, 138, 139, 146, Brignano, Russell Carl, 8-9, 19, 182
147, 155, 163, 188, 201, 222, 226, Brivic, Sheldon, 95, 113
227 Brooks, Gwendolyn, xviii, 31, 55, 56,
Baym, Nina, 120-121, 139, 160-161, 58, 59, 61-63, 65-67, 70-72; Maud
182 Martha, xviii, 56, 61, 63, 67, 71-
Bell, Bernard W., 22, 30, 32, 128, 72
131, 137, 139 Brown, Sterling, 13, 62, 89, 110, 113,
Bellah, Robert, 138-139 205
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 125, 137, 139- Brunette, Peter, 193, 200-201
140 Bryant, Jacqueline, 30, 70-71
230 Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son
Burks, Ruth Elizabeth, 198, 201 Du Bois, W.E.B., 57, 71, 81, 126,
Butler, Robert, xii, xiv, xv, xxiii, 8, 139-140, 227
13, 14, 16, 19, 31, 57, 71, 89, 139, duCille, Ann, 62, 71
164, 182, 218, 221-223
Byers, Thomas B., 122, 139
Edwards, Walter, 219-221, 223
Eliot, T.S., 11, 22
Canby, Henry Seidel, 8, 196, 201 Elliott, Emory, 126, 140
Canby, Vincent, 196 Ellis, Aim J., 76, 89
canon, viii, xiii, 3, 28, 29, 119-122, Ellison, Ralph, xv, 16, 26, 54, 63, 71,
127, 155, 160, 225 78, 89, 91, 101, 119, 122, 123-
capitalism, 102 124, 127, 130, 133, 140, 157-158,
Cather, Willa, 155 182-189, 201; Works; Invisible
censorship, 193, 195, 200 Man, 54, 63, 71, 91, 101, 130;
chaos theory, 91, 96, 104, 108 Shadow and Act, 182, 201;
Chenal, Pierre, xxi, 187, 192-194, Twentieth-Century Fiction and
198, 200-201 the Mask of Humanity, 123
Chicago School, 76 emasculation, xvii, 41, 43, 45, 46, 53,
City upon a hill, 121 67
Civil Rights movement, xiii, 31, 131, Eminem, xxii, 203-204, 207-208,
195, 198, 221 212-215, 223
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 203, 223 Erkkila, Betsy, 92, 114
Cohn, David L., 132, 134, 141 ethos, 3, 5, 6, 16, 18, 103
colonial, 75, 80, 121 Everett, Percival, xv, xxiii
Communism, v, xvi, 11, 19, 21, 22, exceptionalism, vi, xix, 119-122, 124,
30, 31, 34, 145, 147, 181, 188, 130, 135, 137-141
192, 193 existentialism, xii, 22, 24, 28, 41,
Conrad, Joseph, 134 119, 125, 135
courtroom drama, xix, xx, 143-144,
153-154
Crane, Stephen, 23 Fabre, Michel, xiv, 4, 6, 9, 11-12, 14-
crime novel, xix-xx, 143-144 16, 19, 24, 32, 128, 140-141, 159-
Cummings, E.E., 11 160, 180, 182, 192, 201
Fanon, Frantz, 135, 140
Faulkner, William, 11, 22, 24, 25-26,
Dayan, Joan, 95, 110, 114 31, 33-34, 122; Light in August,
De Genova, Nick, 206, 223 24-25, 31, 33
Dee, Kool Moe, 210, 223 Federal Writers Project, 10
Demarest, David P. Jr., 95, 114 feedback loop concept, 103-108
diaspora, 76, 89, 90, 111, 138, 225 Felgar, Robert, 7-8, 10, 13-14, 19
didacticism, xxi, 29, 103, 109, 128, film, xix, xxi, 46-48, 63-64, 85, 103,
147, 168, 190 104-107, 112, 161, 165, 173, 187,
Dixon, Melvin, 65, 71 190-200, 208, 213, 215, 217-218
DMX, xxii, 203, 204, 208, 215, 216, Fishburn, Katherine, 24, 31, 33, 145,
217, 218 152-153, 155
domestic space, xviii, 56, 59, 60, 61, Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 7, 15, 19,
62, 65 167
Dreiser, Theodore, xix, 11, 23, 24, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 122, 155; Works;
25, 32, 98, 99, 114; Works; An The Great Gatsby, 155, 165
American Tragedy, 23, 24, 25, 32, Foley, Barbara, 29, 30, 32, 33
33, 34; Nigger Jeff, xix, 98, 100, Freeman, Jerrold, xxi
114 Freud, Sigmund, xii
Index 231
Gabel, John B., 168, 180, 182 Kinnamon, Keneth, xiv, xxiii, 4, 5, 8,
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., xi, xiv, xxiii, 9, 11-14, 17, 19, 34-35, 54, 71-72,
xxiv, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 71, 77, 89, 114, 123, 140-141, 155-
89, 139, 183 156, 169, 182-183, 208, 222-223
Gayle, Addison, 162, 169, 172 Kitwana, Bikari, 209, 223, 227
gender, xix, 140 Knoespel, Kenneth J., 108, 113, 114
Gibson, Donald B., 31, 33, 137, 140
Gilroy, Paul, 120, 128, 129, 138, 140
Ginsberg, Allen, 107 Landry, Bart, 78, 89
Goddu, Teresa, 94, 114 Law, Lindsay, 196, 198, 199
Gothic, xii, 114 Lewis, Sinclair, 11
Green, Paul, 193, 194 Library of America, xiv, 140, 195,
Greene, J. Lee, 165, 174, 176 200-201
Grier, William H., 69, 71 literay genre, xx, 143-144, 147, 154,
Griffin, Farah, 63, 64, 71 180
Murray, Albert, 5, 20, 114 Rampersad, Arnold, xiv, xxiii, 34, 46,
mysoginy, 61, 209, 221 50, 54, 59, 71, 114, 115
Ransom, John Crowe, 26, 31
realism, xvi, xxi, xxii, 32, 58, 144,
naturalism, xvii, 16, 21-22, 24-25, 188, 190
27-28, 30-31, 58, 91-93, 98-99, rebellion, 31, 111
101, 103-104, 106, 119, 136, 205, Reed, Walter L., 163
218 Reilly, John M., 31, 34, 57, 72, 150,
New Criticism, 26-27, 30, 33 154-155
New York Intellectuals, 26-27, 30, 34 religion, 24, 86, 125, 138, 159, 161,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 170, 183 163, 176, 214; Adventist, xx, 159;
Norris, Frank, 27, 98 African religions, 86; Christianity,
Notorious B.I.G., xxii, 203-204, 207, 121, 164-166, 169, 171, 173-175,
210, 223 214; civil religion, 121, 125, 138,
176; Judaism, 111, 128, 131, 163,
172
ONeill, Eugene, 164 Robinson, Randall, 79, 88
Rowley, Hazel, 6, 11-12, 15-16, 20,
23, 34, 39, 42, 51, 54, 113-114
Paine, Thomas, 138
Pan-African, xiii, 76-77, 227
Park, Robert, 3, 11-12, 20, 114, 141, Sangre Negra, 192
158 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 128
Patterson, Orlando, 171, 173, 176, Savory, Jerold, 96, 115
179, 182-183 Schneidau, Herbert M., 168
Perez, Vincent, 148, 155 Sedgwick, Eve, 39, 40, 42, 44, 53-54
Perrine, Laurence, 206, 223 Wallace, Christopher, 204, 207-209,
Petry, Ann, xvii, 56, 59-71; The 222-223
Street, xviii, 56, 60, 67-71 feminism, 40, 51, 58, 67, 113, 196,
Pfeifer, Michael J., 78, 90 219, 226
Poe, Edgar Allan, xviii, 91-95, 105, Simmons, Earl, 204, 215
110-111, 114-115, 123; Works; Mathers, Marshall, 204, 207, 212,
A Descent into the Maelstrom, 213, 223
93, 94, 105; Metzengerstein, 93, Seltzer, Mark, 98, 101, 115
95, 110; MS Found in a Bottle, Sengova, Joko, 77, 90
93; The Fall of the House of sexuality, xvii, 39, 40-46, 53, 100,
Usher, 93 198
Portelli, Alessandro, 25, 31, 34, 146, Siegel, Paul, 21, 34, 115, 164, 177,
155 181, 183
postcolonial, xiii Sielke, Sabine, 163, 172
primitivism, 12, 64, 84-87, 171 Silver, Diane, 194-199, 201
propaganda, xxii, 146 slave narrative, 28, 29, 131, 227
protest, xii, xiv, xviii, xxii, 143, 144, slavery, v, xviii, 28-29, 69, 75-88, 94-
145, 147, 151, 153-154 95, 110-111, 115, 121, 124, 126,
protest novel, xix-xx, 143-144, 146 131, 167, 179, 183, 219, 222, 227
Proust, Marcel, 11 Slethaug, Gordon, 96, 102, 104, 106,
112, 115
Smith, Valrie, 189
Quinn, Eithne, 205
Snicket, Lemony, xv
Quinn, Laura L., 191, 201, 207, 223
sociology, 3, 10-13, 62, 66, 70, 76,
90, 147, 160, 203, 205, 208, 220
Sollors, Werner, 134, 141
Index 233
Stepto, Robert B., xiv, 17, 20, 28, 31, Weiss, M. Lynn, xiv, xxiv, 81, 82, 85,
35, 119, 126-127, 141 88, 90
stereotype, 5, 7-8, 14, 17, 24, 84, 95, Werner, Craig, 24, 35, 127, 134, 138,
112, 124, 128, 130, 152-153, 178, 141, 152, 156
189, 216-217 Wesley, Richard, 196
stochastics, 96, 103 West, xv, xviii, 4, 32, 35, 75, 80-88,
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 18 105, 115, 119-120, 138, 140, 183,
symbolism, xii, xviii, 91, 93-94, 96, 205, 210, 219-224
103, 110, 119, 181 Williams, John A., 103
womanism, 55, 58, 61
Wright, Richard: Works; American
Tanner, Laura E., 178, 183, 200, 202 Hunger, xiv, 86, 89; Between
terrorism, xv, 133 Laughter and Tears, xxii, xxiv,
thermodynamics, xix, 98, 100, 103, 35, 72; Black Boy, xiv, 33, 40, 41,
106-109, 112-113; entropy, xix, 70, 146, 155, 158-159, 213; Black
91, 97, 104, 106-107 Power, v, xiii, xviii, 21-22, 27, 31,
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 137 75-77, 79-84, 87, 90; Eight Men,
Tolentino, Cynthia, 76, 90 40, 52, 54; How Bigger Was
Trilling, Lionel, 26, 27 Born, 4, 6-7, 12, 20, 39, 120,
Tuitt, Patricia, 57, 72 123, 125, 128, 151, 152, 156, 160,
Tupac Shakur, xxii, 203-204, 208, 161, 187-190, 198, 202; Lawd
218, 221, 223 Today, xiv, 32, 40, 54, 200; Rite of
Twain, Mark, 122, 148 Passage, 40, 54; The Ethics of
Living Jim Crow, 97; The Long
Dream, 16, 40, 50, 52, 54, 160;
universalism, xii The Outsider, xiv, 41, 52, 54;
Uncle Toms Children, xiv, 6, 22,
40, 50, 54, 92, 112, 115, 158, 188,
Walker Alexander, Margaret, 39, 40-
200; White Man, Listen!, 4, 20
43
Walker, Alice, xiii, 26, 225
Wallace, Voletta, 222, 224 Zola, Emile, 23
Walther, Malin, 61, 66, 70, 72
Ward, Jerry W., xiv, 42-43