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Richard Wrights Native Son

DIALOGUE
2

Edited by

Michael J. Meyer
Richard Wrights Native Son

Edited by
Ana Mara Fraile

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007


Cover Design: Pier Post

Cover photo: Antnio, Statue dialogue

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

General Editors Preface vii

Introduction xi

Richard Wright and the Reception of His Work 1

Richard Wright and His White Audience: How the Authors


Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance 3
Caleb Corkery

From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The


Reception of Richard Wright's Native Son 21
Philip Goldstein

Gendered Textualities 37

Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of


Bigger Thomas: Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the
Feminine 39
Yvonne Robinson Jones

Notes from a Native Daughter: The Nature of Black


Womanhood in Native Son 55
Carol E. Henderson

Spatial Dynamics 73

Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: A Trans-


nationalist Interpretation 75
Babacar M'Baye
vi Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, and the Emplotment


of Surplus Meaning in Native Son 91
Herman Beavers

A Polyphony of Genres 117

Native Sons ideology of form: The (African) American


Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism 119
Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 143


Heather Duerre Humann

Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in


Native Son 157
Carme Manuel

Native Son Beyond the Page 185

From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard


Wrights Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations 187
Raphal Lambert

The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): Reflections on the Bigger


Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture 203
James Braxton Peterson

Notes on Contributors 225

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 I was unpublished at the time and was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

On the eve of Richard Wrights centennial celebration, the timing for


the publication of this collection of essays on Native Son (1940) could
not be more propitious. Wright (1908-1960) was born, black and
poor, on a Mississippi plantation near Natchez. He was the son of a
sharecropper who would later desert his family and of a schoolteacher
whose poor health and precarious economic situation forced her to
place him and his brother in an orphanage. Later on they would be
constantly on the move from one relatives place to the next. These
inauspicious beginnings in the racist and segregated South of the
United States prepared Wright to become, nevertheless, through self-
determination and voracious, thoughtful reading, the writer that would
mark a breakthrough in the literary representation of race relations in
the twentieth century. Among his unprecedented achievements,
Wright was the first African American author to get substantial
revenues from his writing and the first to gain an international
reputation. Central to Wrights success was the publication in 1940 of
Native Son, the controversial novel that would establish him as a
major figure in American literature and as the first African American
writer to produce a number one best-seller.
In order to convey a sense of the enormous impact of the novel,
Irving Howes (over)statement that the day Native Son appeared,
American culture was changed forever (32), is often cited in critical
studies. Indeed, Native Son exploded like a bomb in the post-
Depression and pre-World War II America, bringing the entire US
racial history of violence and crime to the forefront and also
determining the course of African American literature for decades. Its
reputation is such that noted black scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has
not hesitated to claim that If one had to identify the single most
influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would
probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son
(Preface xi). The novels influence has been impossible to elude or
ignore, forcing later black writers either to adhere to or to contest
xii Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

Wrights aesthetics and ideology. His thematic and stylistic concerns


compound a particularly powerful mixture of seemingly contradictory
elements, elements that accommodate the Modernism of his lyrical
symbolism, Freudianism, universalism and existentialism while still
residing within the frame of a large array of genres, trends and
political and philosophical ideasGothicism, Marxism, naturalistic
social protest, integrationist aspirations and black nationalism,
African American folk culture and contemporary scientific interests,
among the more cited features. Given its multilayered quality, over
the sixty-odd years since its publication, the novel has elicited a
steady flow of criticism from diverse perspectives, highlighting
Wrights mastery as well as his shortcomings. As the present volume
confirms, current readers continue to find in the thematic and
aesthetic complexity of the novel material that speaks to them,
illuminating in new ways Americas past and present realities.

Coinciding with the preparations for the celebration in 2008 of


Richard Wrights 100th birthday, this new collection of critical essays
on Native Son attempts to extend a tradition of literary discussion that
attests to the importance and endurance of Wrights controversial
work and his reputation as a major figure in American Letters. The
essays collected in this volume engage the objective of Rodopis
Dialogue Series by creating multidirectional conversations in which
senior and younger scholars interact with each other and with
previous scholars who have weighed in on the novels import. Their
dialogue is based upon perceptive and incisive analyses which, in
keeping with contemporary literary trends and concerns, not only
break new ground for innovative interpretations but also expand the
current understanding of Wrights work, his artistry and his thought.

The four phases in the criticism of the novel established by Robert


Butler in Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero (1991) are
helpful in understanding the novels current status. Fifteen years of
critical practice after his proposal, though, it is possible to venture a
fifth phase in which Wrights status in the African American literary
tradition is definitely acknowledgedamong other similarly
important cornerstones. Butler pointed at a period of initial reviews
which capture the lasting controversy about the themes and form of
the novel, as well as the realization that Native Son was a landmark
work in American literature (Emergence 12). A second phase that
Introduction xiii

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.

Following the seminal work on Native Son of a select elite of African


American scholarsincluding Edward Margolies, Michel Fabre, Dan
McCall, Keneth Kinnamon, Houston Baker, Robert Stepto, or George
Kent, among otherslater decades of criticism reflect continued
conversations about controversial issues. The decade of the 1990s has
proven particularly fruitful. The publication in 1991 of the Library of
America unabridged and unexpurgated editions of Lawd Today!,
Uncle Toms Children, Native Son, Black Boy, American Hunger and
The Outsider prompted, in a critics words, a Richard Wright
renaissance (Weiss). The number of important monographic studies
and of collections of essays attest to Weisss assessment. Among the
latter, and with special focus on Native Son, the following
publications are amongst the most influential: Keneth Kinnamons
New Essays on Native Son (1990) and Critical Essays on Richard
Wright's Native Son, (1997), K. A. Appiah and Henry Louis Gatess
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993),
Arnold Rampersads Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays
(1994), Robert Butlers Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black
Hero (1991) and The Critical Response to Richard Wright (1995),
Harold Blooms Richard Wrights Native Son: Blooms Notes. A
Contemporary Literary Views Book (1996), and James A. Millers
Approaches to Teaching Wrights Native Son (1997).
Moreover, interest in Wrights work continues to flourish into the
twenty first century. For example, the Richard Wright Circle is
proving to be a very active agent in the on-going examination and
appraisal of Wrights oeuvre. Among its many fruitful efforts are the
panel on Emerging Scholarship on Richard Wright, at the American
Literature Association conference held in San Francisco in May 2006,
as well as the preparations for Wrights centennial celebration in his
hometown, Natchez, MS. These involve a series of events, including
public discussions about Wrights works presented by Jerry W. Ward
Jr., the staging of a play version of Native Son by the Natchez Little
Introduction xv

Theatre, and the issuance of a Richard Wright stamp by the U.S.


Postal Service. Furthermore, the forthcoming Richard Wright
Encyclopedia, co-edited by Jerry Ward and Robert Butler (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press) will undoubtedly become a powerful and
comprehensive tool for future generations to understand the
magnitude of Wrights impact.
In the creative arena, Wrights presence can also be felt. Central,
for example, to Percival Everett's novel Erasure (2001) is Everetts
commentary on authority and authenticity in connection with African
Americans and African American literature by employing a parody of
Native Son. With his updated rendition of Wrights bleak urban novel,
the protagonist Thelonious Ellisonalias Monkmanages to prompt
a scathing critique of the current publishing and academic industries
which mold African American literature into a monolithic stereotyped
commodity. His novel My Pafologya title Monk eventually changes
to just Fuck!completes Everetts exercise in postmodern self-
reflexivity and metafiction.
In addition, Native Son, a novel both hailed and banned, seems to
be finding its way even into childrens books as in Lemony Snickets
best-seller The Penultimate Peril, which informs the young reader of
Wrights ominous prophecy about his native land at the end of his
novel when Max states: Who knows when some slight shock
disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty
aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling? As the
New York Twin Towers tumbled down on September eleven, 2001,
these words seem to reverberate with the uncanny definitiveness of a
fulfilled prophecy, a prophecy that overarches the specific racial
history in the United States to expose the international dimensions of
inequality. Thus, also in the light of international fundamentalist
terrorism targeting major Western and non-Western centersNew
York, Washington, Madrid, London, Paris, Mumbai, Algiers, Casa
BlancaNative Son now has new currency as cautionary tale of
racial bigotry.
Out of these experiences, the present volume speaks from different
and distant corners of the world and reflects a keen interest in
Wrights unique combination of literary strategies and social aims. It
is with great pleasure that I present the reader with a dialogue on
Native Son that offers new and original readings of the novel in
eleven essays, and, at the same time engenders potential new
approaches to the work which will further stimulate continued
original critical responses.
xvi Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

****
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

on Maxs controversial long speech at the end of the novel and


declares it incompatible with Biggers final liberation. The author
points out the incoherence between Maxs radical politicswhich
represent Wrights intellectual commitment at the time as well as a
naturalistic stanceand Biggers final individual liberationwhich
represents Wrights emotional commitment and turn towards a
modernist and existentialist view of the individual, in anticipation of
his later work. Instead of relying completely on Wrights persona to
explain the different cycles of popularity, oblivion and eventual
canonization of Native Son, as Corkery proposes, Goldstein traces the
changing status of naturalism and modernism through the twentieth
century and asserts the notion that the rise of Black Studies and
multiculturalism have become the deciding factors that now determine
most critical assessments of the novels success.
In Sexual Diversity in Wrights Characterization of Bigger
Thomas: Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine
Yvonne Robinson Jones exposes, like Corkery, the identification of
Richard Wright with his male characters, and with Bigger in
particular. However, Robinson Joness aim is to bring to the forefront
the way in which Wrights personal experiences imbued his male
characters with a sexual consciousness which is rooted in the
feminization of the black male by the oppressing forces of a racist
America and the authors rejection of such feminization. Robinson
Jones points to the creation of a homo-social context, a bond between
black males, that results in homo-erotic relationships between the
writer and Bigger, as well as among the black male characters in the
novel. Finally, she argues that the heterosexual relationships in the
novel, which are usually fraught with frustration, anxiety and conflict,
systematically lead to the abuse of women and to a perennial
misogyny in Wrights work, biases that both run parallel to the
emasculation of the black male in his novel.
Shifting from the male perspective that Robinson Jones brings
forward in her essay, and in dialogue with her analysis of gender and
sexuality in Native Son, Carol E. Hendersons Notes of a Native
Daughter: The Nature of Black Womanhood in Wrights Native Son
undertakes the task of studying the ways in which Wrights novel
affected the literary production of black women in the 1940s and
1950s. Henderson also illustrates a stage in the history of the novels
reception, as previously explained by Goldstein. Taking Ann Petrys
xviii Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

The Street (1946) and Gwendolyn Brooks Maud Martha (1953) as


examples of novels that follow the Wright School of naturalistic
social protest fiction, Henderson shows how both novels actually
contest and undermine Wrights rendering of womanhood in Native
Son, establishing alternative sources of consciousness and personal
strength that allow for models of [female] independence, self-
reliance and self-determination that are strangely absent in Wrights
novel. The dynamics of place and space are central to Hendersons
analysis, as she demonstrates how both Petry and Brooks revise
Wrights domestic and urban spaces in their own novels.
As in Hendersons essay, the dynamics of space lie also at the core
of Babacar MBayes contribution. However, Slavery and Africa in
Native Son and Black Power: A Trans-nationalist Interpretation
enlarges the spatial dimensions in the interpretation of Native Son as
the usual emphasis on the restricted Chicago landscapethe Chicago
South Side, the domestic space of Biggers kitchenette and their
counterpart in the white American spaces shifts to the international
arena of a modern West constructed upon the foundation of slavery.
MBaye focuses, like Goldstein, on Maxs discourse, but he interprets
it as an articulation in trans-national and pan-African terms of both
Biggers and Wrights black nationalism. Like Corkery and R. Jones,
therefore, MBaye identifies Wright with his work, while exposing his
unresolved duality with respect to the West and Africa through the
comparative study of Native Son and Black Power. This duality is
depicted in Maxs deterministic view of slavery as a necessary
economicrather than (im)moralphenomenon for the West to
overcome Feudalism and, paradoxically, to spread Democracy, at the
expense of Africans. It is only through the resistance of blacks to their
oppression and in their final success that the Western enterprise of
modernity can be fully realized, since no Democracy can materialize
while blacks are not considered equal. Next, in his comparative
reading of Native Son and Black Power MBaye examines the impact
of slavery on the African American psyche and the resulting
internalization of violence towards blacks and the demonizing and
rejection of Africans, Africa, and the African cultural heritage.
Herman Beavers essay Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder,
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son bridges this
section on spatial dynamics and the next one on literary genres with
its analysis of vorticism. Claiming that Wright embraced Edgar Allan
Poes deployment of vortical symbolism as the trope to explain
Biggers violence and rage, Beavers links Naturalism,
Introduction xix

thermodynamics and stochastic principles in his comments on Native


Son. His analysis points at the way in which the novel portrays the
transformation of a local event into a catalyst for more wide-ranging
forces, illustrating Wrights belief that the U.S. was a system
spiraling down into entropy. In order to explain Wrights
renovation of naturalist aesthetic conventions, Beavers relies on
comparative analyses of Native Son, Poes short stories, and Theodore
Dreisers Nigger Jeff. Furthermore, the author provides a detailed
analysis of the scenes leading to and taking place in the movie theater,
affirming that the latter becomes that place where Bigger's actual
nature as a figuration of instability determines that disorder is
manifest. Gender politics and the novels rendering of masculinity
are also treated from the point of view of Wrights fusion of
thermodynamic and stochastic principles, thus expanding the
discussion on gender previously undertaken by Robinson Jones and
Henderson. Beaver's essay closes with an approach to Book Three
from the perspective of thermodynamics and the production of surplus
meaning, concluding that both Max and Buckley are wrong in their
synechdochical interpretation of Bigger as an example of malfunction
for exploring social instability.
The following three essays undertake the study of the novel from
the point of view of its adoption and transformation of various literary
genres, focusing respectively on the African American jeremiad, the
protest novel, the crime novel and courtroom drama, the
bildungsroman, and the Biblical modes of narration.
In Native Sons ideology of form: the (African) American
Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos
returns to the national arena. Instead of tracing an international
literary or socio-political source for the novels thrust, she argues that
the novels continuing appeal is largely due to Richard Wrights
particular engagement with American exceptionalism as embodied in
both the American and the African American rhetorical traditions of
the jeremiad. Even though Blackness, as symbolic of the flaws and
crevices of American exceptionalism, has been systematically
repressed, the Africanist presencein Toni Morrisons wordshas
permeated American literature in covert ways from its inception.
Wright, Fraile contends, brings that choked representation of an
Africanist presence to the forefront in the figure of the inarticulate
Bigger Thomas. Furthermore, Fraile reads Native Sonand Maxs
coutroom monologue in Part III in particularin the light of the
African American jeremiad tradition, with its simultaneous adherence
xx Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

to and critique of American exceptionalism. Far from the notion


advanced by the author himselfthat Wrights artistry was alien to
African American culture, Native Son appears in Frailes analysis as
firmly anchored in the African American literary and oratory
tradition, which derives from and corrects the American jeremiad
rhetoric, thus emerging as a doubly native product.
In Genre in/and Wrights Native Son Heather Duerre Humann
further explores some of the multiple generic classifications that have
been frequently used to inform analyses of the novel. Humann points
out that Wrights use of different genres serves the purpose of
forwarding his political statement. However, she suggests, Wrights
own conflicted views about ideology also lead to the violation of the
genres he borrows. Focusing on the genres of the protest novel, the
bildungsroman, the crime novel and courtroom drama, Humann
argues that Native Son consistently manages to both combine and
resist such generic categories. In conversation with previous essays,
Humann also relies heavily on the biographical component of the
novel as well as on the audiences agency in the construction of the
literary work. In closing, Humann affirms the collaborative character
of the novel as the deciding factor, thus overshadowing the readers
role in determining the novels genre(s).
Carme Manuels essay Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical
Imagery in Native Son completes the volumes exploration of genres
with its focus on Wrights borrowing of biblical themes and models of
narration. Manuel refers the reader back to Wrights childhood and to
his Adventist grandmother to explain his familiarity with biblical
mythology and its reflection on the deeply religious nature of Bigger
Thomass plight. Manuels essay is naturally linked to Frailes, as
both find common ground in the biblical mythology at the core of the
American ideology that suffuses the novel. Manuel points at the
opening epigraph of the novel expressing Jobs rebellious complaint
as the framework from which Wright sets out to expose and analyze
black suffering in twentieth century America. She draws from
several interpretations of the Book of Job in her reading of Native
Son, especially in her rendering of Biggers process of self-
understanding in Book Three of the novel. In addition, Manuel sets a
parallelism between the aggregation of genres in Native Son
alluded to by both Humann and Fraileand the generic accumulation
in the Book of Job. Furthermore, Manuel traces Biggers spiritual
alienation back to other Scriptural episodes, allegories, and
typologies. Her reading of Book Three in the light of the biblical
Introduction xxi

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

Thomas to Hip Hop culture. Thus, a main point in Petersons


discussion, like in Corkerys, is the authority invested upon a work
that relies on its identification with the writers life for its authenticity
and realism; but unlike the latter, Peterson emphasizes the parallelism
between the present socio-economic conditions and those in Wrights
time. Peterson connects Bigger Thomas and the personas and
characters created in the 1980s and 1990s by gansta rappers such as
Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.), Tupac Shakur, DMX, and Eminem.
The author also coincides with Corkery and Goldstein in pointing at
the important role of the audience in the success of these narratives,
as well interacting with Hendersons critique in pinpointing the
problematic public demand for artistic narratives of misogyny and
violence.

The wide range of approaches to Native Son gathered in this


collection of essays attests to the continuing interest in Richard
Wrights classic. In the hope of eliciting new responses and
interrogations, nothing will be more gratifying than to engage the
reader in the dialogue this book presents.

Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos


Universidad de Salamanca 2007

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.

For an author, being the subject of a literary biography is momentous.


It suggests a sort of application for canonicity. It also suggests the
source of the authors ascendancy. Literary biographers who focus on
the authors character more so than the writing produced steer the
flattery toward the authors writing persona. In such cases, the literary
power might come from the audiences awareness of the authors
character. The strength of the writing might draw more from the
person behind the words than the words themselves.
When Robert Park, the famous University of Chicago sociologist,
met Richard Wright, he asked, How did you come to be? (qtd. in
Ray viii), suggesting a remarkable confluence of influences needed to
create Wrights perspective. Parks fascination is characteristic of the
4 Caleb Corkery

mainstream American response to Wright ever since the publication


of Native Son in 1940. Sorting through the extensive scholarly writing
devoted to Wright, one is struck by the amount devoted to his life.
Understanding his background seems so central to appreciating his
work that over a dozen book-length biographies have been published
on Wright. In short, Richard Wright the man transcends Richard
Wright the novelist (Unfinished Quest xxix), claims Michel Fabre,
justifying his in-depth biography of Wright. This attention to the
man as a way to understand his works acknowledges what is
perhaps obvious to anyone familiar with Wright: he was a man whose
literary and social consciences were one (1), as biographer Keneth
Kinnamon characterizes him.
Looking into the man behind the writing readily reveals how
self-conscious Wright was in his role as a writer. He felt it his duty to
create values by which his race was to struggle, live and die (Aaron
46). Philosophically, he believed that being black and a writer
automatically put him into a representative role, proclaiming [t]he
voice of the American Negro is rapidly becoming the most
representative voice of America and of oppressed people anywhere in
the world today (White Man, Listen! 101). Such self-consciousness is
what makes Wright exceptional according to Fabre. Wright calls
himself an average Negro while also claiming the Negro is the
metaphor of America (Unfinished Quest xxix):

According to Wright, the experience of the black American crystallizes a more


universal problem of Western culture created by the transition from a family-
oriented, and still somewhat feudal, rural existence, to the anonymous mass
civilization of the industrial centers. (xxix)

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

Wrights strategy for initiating social and political change by


representing black people made the quality of his character central to
his message. One who claims to be portraying the black American
experience must satisfy the audiences expectations of a black
spokesperson. This is how Wright enters onto the world stage to
forever change his life and how people viewed his life. The way he
became constructed as a representative of black people advanced his
message far beyond his expectations. His disturbing depictions of
African Americans profoundly impacted his audience because he
embodied the meaning of being black to them. But this portrait,
when viewed today, presents him in quite a different light. It is
difficult for many to qualify him as representative of a race he
describes as stricken, frightened black faces trying vainly to cope
with a civilization they did not understand (309). In fact,
contemporary critics often accuse Wright of creating unflattering
stereotypes of African Americans (Hakutani 12).
Wrights impressive effect can be understood by examining the
dynamics of the rhetorical situation he stepped into upon publishing
Native Son. But the outcome was not entirely what the author had in
mind. As Kinnamon points out, The impact of the novel was
undeniably great, but at times in ways different from, or even contrary
to, those Wright intended (143). The limited focus of this study is to
examine the effect of Wrights own character on the success of the
novel. My contention is that the image of Wright that developed
before his white American audience in 1940 is largely what enabled
Native Son to change American culture forever (Hakutani 1) for
literary critics like Irving Howe. This sort of analysis can also
illustrate the limits of Native Sons impact and how Albert Murray,
among many others, can call the novel exaggerated and over-
simplistic (164).
The way authors can present themselves to assist their messages is
complex. There is, of course, what authors say publicly about
themselves. But more subtle arguments based on ethos can be at work
in a text. When considering arguments based on ethos, the central
issue to consider is whether the writer is believed to possess moral
principles arguing for good causes. This judgment is driven by
whether the audience feels the author is fair and credible.
Rhetoricians back to ancient times, such as Aristotle, Cicero, and
Quintilian, stressed that an ethical arguer must have the courage and
willingness to argue logically and honestly from a strong sense of
6 Caleb Corkery

personal integrity and values (Wood 213). This standard is helpful


for evaluating the effect of Wrights ethical stance.
An authors ethos, of course, is only one aspect of what makes a
message effective. Although other rhetorical aspects of Native Son
surely contributed to its impact, the goal of this analysis is to see how
ethos stands out, making the argument largely dependent upon the
image of the man behind the words. Distinguishing the message in the
novel as an ethos-based argument ties the importance of the book to
the importance of the author.
One can see how Wrights writing persona plays a powerful role in
Native Son by examining audience responses to the book as well as
Wrights comments that helped shape his public image. First, though,
in order to understand Wrights constructed image, a discussion of the
circumstances that produced the novel is needed.
It was certainly a unique situation for a black author to bluntly
address white America with racial issues in 1940. Wright felt
compelled to do so given his chance to reach a wide audience as an
emerging national literary figure. His first book, Uncle Toms
Children, had just been published in 1938 and won first prize in a
writing competition sponsored by the Federal Writers Project. And in
1939 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to finish Native Son.
Having reached a national audience with Uncle Toms Children,
Wright was disappointed that their response did not reflect the
message he was trying to get across:

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)

Consequently, Wright approached his new novel with almost


desperate urgency. The moment to get out his message was before
him. He therefore felt compelled to include all the ingredients that
would make Native Son an ideological bomb in case it would be his
last chance to speak out (Fabre, Unfinished Quest 183). He
anticipated a storm of protest against Bigger which he feared would
silence him forever (Rowley 156).
Richard Wright and His White Audience 7
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance

This moment in Wrights career constitutes a unique rhetorical


situation. No African American before him had portrayed the anger in
black people that white Americans feared (Baldwin 33). He was
positioned to be the first writer to give the white community an
understanding that looked past its prejudices and forced it to see the
reality of black life in America (Felgar 9).
When writing Native Son, Wright targeted a dominant thread of
the mainstream: all those who possess distorted, racist stereotypes of
black Americans, as purveyed by American culture. Bigger Thomas
represented the tragic result of those racist ideas. The novel
challenged accepted stereotypes of Negroes by pointing out that the
white supremacist attitudes are what shape victims like Bigger
Thomas. As Wright explains in How Bigger Was Born, [Bigger]
was hovering unwanted between two worlds, between powerful
America and his own stunted place in life, and I took upon myself
the task of trying to make the reader feel this No Mans Land (871).
Wright goes on to explain how he had to depict the scars of
Biggers relationship to white America, both North and South
(872).
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in her introduction to the original
publication of Native Son, describes the attitude Wright assumes in
his audience this way: the outlets of native power which would have
been open to any white boy were closed to Bigger. [Wright] knows he
does not have to prove this...every one of his American readers will
know all that without being told (xi). The defining characteristic of
Wrights audience seems to be a state of mind, a mainstream
mentality cultivated over a long history and posited in the national
consciousness.
Feeling himself before a national audience possessing this state of
mind, Wright used Native Son to deliver his most piercing social
commentary:

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)

Wrights opportunity before this audience inspired him to speak


not only for African Americans as a group in 1940 America, but also
for the future of all Americans. He eagerly assumed the representative
8 Caleb Corkery

role of a black voice speaking to white America, a point frequently


noted by biographers: The fact that he was a Negro would intrude
upon the very mode of his existence and would influence the direction
of his thought, and most certainly later did inform the bulk of his
public writing (Brignano 3).
In 1940, many reviewers praised the book because they saw it as a
new and disturbing vision of black life in America that previous
writers lacked the background, understanding, or artistic skill to
present in literature. Henry Seidel Canby boldly asserted in the
February 1940 issue of Book-of-the-Month-Club-News that Native
Son was the finest novel written by an American Negro, a book so
deeply grounded in black American experience that only a Negro
could have written it (qtd. in Butler 23). Edward Meeks of Books of
the Times called it unquestionably authentic (Kinnamon 144).
Several other commentators explained the originality and depth of
Wrights racial vision in terms of his creating a new kind of central
character, a black person whose story provided a fresh perspective on
African-American life (Butler 23-42). Clearly, these reviewers are
impressed by Wrights ability to represent the Negro race. Their
approval is stated in relation to the truth the author is able to
present about being black in America.
Wright set out to alter the course of mainstream thinking; but what
he did was expose divergent attitudes within that group. What Wright
had not realized was that part of the mainstream audience he was
trying to enlighten not only agreed that negative stereotypes of black
Americans existed, but they appreciated his revision of the
stereotypes. The white mainstream that sympathized with African
Americans found a model for their attitudes in author Richard Wright,
victimized black man who speaks for the downtrodden race. And this
image served his career very well, as numerous biographers have
recognized. Robert Felgar, in 1980, wrote:

One of Wrights triumphs is probably unique in American literature, his


successful overcoming of the horrible experiences of the Deep South, which
he not only survived but forged into great literary art. This remarkable ability
to overcome formidable barriers to literary achievement, whether economic,
familial, educational, or racial, is the keynote of much of his writing. (10-11)

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)

Biographers and reviewers alike have extolled Wrights writing


persona for being the one to explain what black people are like. This
is indeed ironic. Wright was afraid that Native Son might silence him
forever before white America. But while he had their attention, he
wanted to make the most of it: Wrights first ambition was to shock
his public, largely the white liberals, into realizing the truth of the
racial situation (Fabre, Unfinished Quest 183). Though his message
certainly did shock many, white liberals generally applauded him. As
rhetoric scholar Roderick Hart points out, speakers may create
messages but, often, messages recreate speakers as well (48).
Wrights characterizations of Negro life resonated with attitudes in
his audience, making him a symbol of their beliefs, as reflected by the
many reviewers who described his portrayals as truthful. If First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was moved to tears by Wrights depiction of
Bigger Thomas, one can imagine the First Familys white
constituency symbolically pouring out over the grim life of black
men. Wrights uncalculated success was brought on by his audiences
identification with him. Unintentionally, Wright established common
ground with the audience which made the author seem similar to them
and, therefore, trustworthy. Wrights writing persona satisfied his
audiences expectations of a black spokesperson because he shared
many of their attitudes toward African Americans.
How could a liberal white audience who generally enjoyed
privilege identify with a black man who grew up poor in the South
10 Caleb Corkery

resenting white people? The answer is in his complex evolution from


a deprived child of the South to a Marxist intellectual of the North.
But for the purpose of this study, which is examining his writer self, I
want to focus on two aspects of his attitudes that come through in his
writing that resonated with his audience in 1940. Like many of his
readers, Wright looked upon black people in objective sociological
terms. 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.
Despite living in black communities until the age of nineteen,
Wrights developed attitudes toward his race that were greatly shaped
by white people. A colleague of his from the Federal Writers Project
of the WPA in Chicago describes how his influences shaped him into
a pleasing black spokesperson to white intellectuals:

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)

Understanding Wright is not easy given this seeming


contradiction. Even though he depicts a degraded African American
life in much of his writing, he was proud of his black identity. He
insisted on his blackness although he pictured black life in America as
inhuman and sterile (viii), as Robert Farnsworth puts it. Applied to
Native Son, one can hear the distant language Wright uses to describe
Bigger:

He had been so conditioned in a cramped environment that hard words or


kicks alone knocked him upright and made him capable of actionaction that
was futile because the world was too much for him. It was then that he closed
his eyes and struck out blindly, hitting what or whom he could, not looking or
caring what or who hit back. (qtd. in Felgar 96)
Richard Wright and His White Audience 11
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance

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)

Examining Wrights influences one can see how his attitudes


paralleled many white intellectuals of his day. Wright knew little of
African American literary history (Gayle 103), and instead was drawn
to the literature of white writers such as H.L. Mencken, Theodore
Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and Frank Harris. In the
mid-1930s when Wright sought out training to develop his trade, he
was steered by his friends in the Communist Party toward the avant-
guard writers of the period: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William
Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot (Fabre,
Unfinished Quest 111). He was also reading books on Marxism.
Nothing he read told him about blacks in America. Wright claimed his
creativity suffered due to a lack of theoretical knowledge about black
life:

Something was missing in my imaginative efforts: my flights of imagination


were too subjective, too lacking in reference to social action. I hungered for a
grasp of the framework of contemporary living, for a knowledge of the forms
of life about me, of eyes to see the bony structure of personality, for theories
to light up the shadows of conduct. (qtd. in Fabre, Unfinished Quest 113)

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)

The attitude of Park and his colleagues toward the Negro as a


species to be studied worked well for Wright. He was inspired by the
piles of clippings, figures, maps, and graphs they had amassed on
black urban life (Rowley 250). The analytical sociologists eye helped
shape his stance as an author: In Native Son, I said, I had used the
concepts of sociology as devised by some of the guys at the
University of Chicago (qtd. in Fabre, Books and Writers 124).
Besides studying sociological studies of urban blacks, Wright also
used court cases he covered for the New York State Temporary
Commission on Conditions among Urban Negroes in the novel
(Kinnamon, The Emergence 73). In his explanation of the novels
main character, How Bigger was Born, Wright describes Bigger
as emerging from numerous patterns he observed across African
America communities. Detailing various traits he witnessed in
African Americans, he forms a representative type shaped by the
experience of being black in the United States: As I grew older, I
became familiar with the Bigger Thomas conditioning and its
numerous shadings no matter where I saw it in Negro life (859).
Wrights view of Bigger as a type positions him as an objective
observer of his race.
Wright even adopted Parks social scientist language as is clear in
his explanation of his motives for writing the novel:

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)

Clearly Wrights analytical lens of African American culture


appealed to many readers. Reviewers in 1940 were quick to pick up
on and affirm Wrights social scientist position. Milton Rugoff (New
York Herald Tribune Review of Books, 3 March 1940) stressed that
the first extraordinary aspect of Native Son is that it approaches the
Richard Wright and His White Audience 13
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance

tragedy of race, not through an average member but through a


criminal and that such a character is skillfully probed by Wright to
connect one individuals pathology to the whole tragedy of the
Negro spirit in a white world (Butler xxvii). Even black critics like
Sterling Brown (Crisis, June 1940) praised Native Son as a literary
phenomenon because it was the very first novel about American
blacks that provided a psychological probing of the consciousness of
the outcast, the disinherited, the generation lost in the slum jungles of
American civilization (Butler xxvii). Edwin Seaver, in a 1941
interview with Wright, introduces his guest claiming that he brings
home [clearly] to the white reader what it means to be a Negro
(Kinnamon, Conversations 43). Some leftist critics, such as Samuel
Sillen (New Masses, 5 March 1940), liked the book for its
revolutionary view of life and its portrayal of the heros
emancipatory struggles against a capitalistic society intent on
crushing him (Butler xxvii).
Many other reviewers were also struck by the novels
extraordinary impact, its power to transform the readers social
consciousness. May Cameron (New York Post, 1 March 1940) saw
Native Son as an intense and powerful novel that moved with
tremendous force and speed to shock the reader into a new
awareness of the status of blacks in American society (Butler xxvii).
Likewise, Nick Aaron Ford concluded in 1953 that [the power of
Native Son] resides in the ethical and sociological implication of the
action (Ford 141).

Another unsuspecting effect Wright had on his audience that allowed


for deep identification and powerful rhetorical impact was a latent
idealism. Like Wright, many in his audience also saw themselves as
committed to justice. Wrights bold charge against racist attitudes
gave white people who felt that blacks were being mistreated a chance
to voice the substance behind their liberal stance. Simply agreeing
with Wright gave this audience a chance to affirm their own political
ideals for justice. And they could do so with little threat to
themselves. The novel asks only that they be sympathetic to a poor
boys plight and to critique rich whites.
Identifying with the novel for white liberals is made easy since the
story hinges on the audiences ability to perceive racist attitudes. As
Robert Felgar explains, it takes simply a careful reading to unlock
the books message once the scales of wish-fulfillment and prejudice
14 Caleb Corkery

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)

Wright acknowledges the importance of distancing white people


from the vantage provided in the novel:

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)

Wright assumed that white people would collectively resist the


meaning of Bigger Thomas. As Felgar puts it, Whites [who rejected
Native Son] did not and do not want to acknowledge what their racism
has produced (98). Wright had not expected that acknowledging
Bigger Thomas allowed his audience a convenient opportunity to
express their sympathy for Negroes and their disgust for racial
injustice. Henry Hansen (New York World Telegram, 2 March 1940)
observed that Wrights novel packs a tremendous punch, something
like a big fist through the windows of our complacent lives.
Similarly, Margaret Wallace (New York Sun, 5 March 1940) sensed a
peculiar vitality in the book which was likely not only to challenge
the readers views on race but which would also father other books
(Butler xxvii). Another reviewer called it a deeply compassionate
and understanding novel (Kinnamon, The Emergence 144).
White people lined up to support Wright for the social statement
implied in his writing. Owen Dodson recalls Wright being
surrounded by people who came from various parts of the world and
made a special point of visiting him because they so admired what he
had done to reveal the life of the Negro (qtd. in Ray 78). Dodson
attributes Wrights popularity to his true compassion for the people
who, in the eyes of society, were criminals and needed help, not from
a prison, but from the embracement of brotherhood (79). Liberal
Richard Wright and His White Audience 15
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance

sentiments were also recorded of Edward Aswell, the Harper and


Brothers publisher of Native Son: I have often thought that if I, or
any of my classmates, had been subjected to one half the handicaps
and injustices that have been [Wrights] lot since birth, we would
have been defeated by life long ago. But he is not defeated. He is, in
fact, one of the most powerful and most widely acclaimed novelists of
our time (qtd. in Rowley 141).
In many cases, it seems the audience that identified with Wrights
principles of fairness also connected with his objectified view of
black people. In fact, some white people showed their concern for
Negro injustices through the omniscient vocabulary of social
scientific theorists. Most famous, perhaps, is Dorothy Canfield
Fishers introduction to Native Son:

[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)

Fisher also recognized the appeal of the novel to liberal


sentimentalities. [The novel] can be guaranteed to harrow up any
human heart capable of compassion or honest self-questioning (x).
Fisher positions herself close to Wright by assuming her
understanding of Wrights intentions. She also foretells the audiences
ability to identify with Wrights just cause: With a bold stroke of
literary divination, he assumes that every one of his American readers
will know all [about racial injustice suffered by Bigger] without being
told. And he is right. We do (xi).
According to Michel Fabres research, Richard Wright was largely
ignored after his death. In the mid-1960s, [Wrights] poor reputation
in academic circles led me to question my own enthusiasm to
research his life (Unfinished Quest xxii). Conversely, in the years
until his death, Wright loomed as an international literary figure. And
given his vaunted status now, it seems incredible that not until 1971,
at an institute of the Program on Afro-American Studies at the
University of Iowa, did scholars conclude that Wright was important
to us again (Farnsworth 1).
16 Caleb Corkery

This hiatus from interest in Richard Wright makes sense when


viewed through the rhetorical dynamics that propelled his career.
Arguments based on ethos are vulnerable to dismissal once the
authors character is no longer present to support the message. For
instance, Wrights self exile in France arguably diminished his
reputation despite his international stature. When The Long Dream
was published in 1958, Wrights editor for the project, Edward
Aswell, and critic Irving Howe congratulated Wright on the works
insight and literary polish (Rowley 494, 587). However, the reviews
were mostly negative, claiming expatriate Wright had lost touch
with his homeland (Rowley 494). Writing from Europe, his persona
became a bitter black American out of touch with his subjectand his
muse. Wrights precipitous fall during this period can be seen more
dramatically through the eyes of Ralph Ellison, who claimed in 1945
that Wright was an important writer, perhaps the most articulate
Negro American (Butler xxx). By 1963, though, Ellison had lowered
his view of Wright substantially, presenting him as a very limited
protest writer whose harsh naturalism was outdated and artistically
thin (Butler xxx).
Wrights writing persona has returned, though, supporting
sustained interest in him since the 1970s. Literary scholars have
immortalized Wrights persona in numerous biographies. Michel
Fabre, among others, describe Wright as a visionary of American
history: Wright may be more widely known as one of the first to
have thrown the truth of his resentment in the face of white America
(Unfinished Quest xxxi). Wrights message is often seen as prophetic
in the light of later violent outbreaks between races. And since his
persona was central to how his point was received, literary scholars
seek out the specter of Richard Wright to understand how his message
may still relate to us.
Richard Wright is undeniably an American cultural icon.
Representative of his race when alive, Wright becomes symbolic of
racial issues once dead. According to Fabre, Wrights quest came
from his own experience as much as from humanist philosophy: if
the black man is awakened, and if everyone accepts the black man in
himself, will not mankind as a whole eventually accept itself
(Unfinished Quest xxxii). Literary critics today continue to use
Wright as a way to interrogate a racist society. According to Richard
Macksey and Frank Moorer, What makes Wright exceptional is his
steady commitment to address the question of the place of the
American black. Wright founded his career and commanded the
Richard Wright and His White Audience 17
How the Authors Persona Gave Native Son Historical Significance

conscience of his readers by refusing to look away or to qualify the


violence that his insistent question implied (3).
Wrights status as a fearless voice of Black America still depends
upon his authorial credibility, which many have questioned. Zora
Neale Hurston claims Wright provides an unrealistic and stereotypical
view of the South as a dismal, hopeless section ruled by brutish
hatred and nothing else (qtd. in Maxwell 154). Hurston seems
offended by Wrights use of black people for political/social effect. In
particular, it is the use of Negro types to stand in to tell the story of
people who do not match the characterization. This critique is echoed
by other critics of Wright, especially James Baldwin.
Baldwin observes how social pressures can strangle an artist who
is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who
has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the
representative of some thirteen million people (33). But Baldwin
does not excuse this understandable response of an artist as a social
being: It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen)
and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment (33). He also points out
the detriment of this position on the individual artist:

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)

Baldwin almost seems to be taking pity on Wright, given the position


of a black writer in the 1940s.
Robert Stepto also calls attention to Wrights ambition to reach a
white audience with exaggerated representations of his race. And, like
Baldwin, he seems to pity the position history gave him as a black
writer before WWII. Wright was more the victim of his posture than
the master of it (199). Stepto realizes that Wrights writing persona
was not entirely his choosing.
Kinnamon claims that Wrights lasting importance is threefold:
social critic, articulator of the black agony, and as American writer
(152). However, others have recast him recognizing the rhetorical
features of his message in a historical context. For instance,
Yoshinobu Hakutani examines Wrights writing as racial discourse:
[T]he significance of his writings comes not so much from his
technique and style as from the particular impact his ideas and
attitudes have made on American life (1). When viewed through the
18 Caleb Corkery

rhetorical dynamics of author to audience, one can see that Wrights


authorial stance, though perhaps problematic outside of the audience
he was addressing, made him a touchstone. He brought to
consciousness a concern for racial justice spreading among the
American public.

The enduring literary value of Wrights expression is questionable,


though, given the writing persona his message depends upon.
Wrights praise comes within the rhetorical context that he daringly
stepped into. And though some may surely still identify with his
persona, the historical context has changed enough to make his
spokesperson status irrelevant to most. Wright was trying to affect
American racism, which meant that his target was an imaginary state
within white Americans that permitted racism. Wrights vulnerable
stance as a Negro could only reach that supremacist view point once
altered to fit their expectations of a Negro writer. His writing persona
comes to life for his audience once they shape him into a palatable
source. This is a tenuous persona to rely upon. His meaning is only
fully appreciated as long as the imaginary context exists. Once the
audiences attitudes change, the ethos is empty, the message inert.
The literature becomes historical artifact.
This critique is supported by Wright himself who saw his writing
in single-minded social activist terms. In this light, Wright might be
viewed as a mere sophisticated pamphleteer, as James Baldwin claims
of Harriet Beecher Stowe (18). It is my contention that as readers we
move further away from the attitudes of 1940 America, Wrights work
will resonate less and less with American audiences. In the end,
Wrights significance as an author will be his heroism in addressing
an entrenched national mindset that victimized black Americans and
the fortuitous impact he had on his audience in symbolizing a step
toward recognizing racial injustice.

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

Murray, Albert. Part I: The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience


and American Culture. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970.
Raushenbush, Winifred. Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist. Durham NC:
Duke UP, 1979.
Ray, David and Robert Farnsworth, eds. Richard Wright: Impressions and
Perspectives. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1973.
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
2001.
Stepto, Robert B. I Thought I Knew These People: Richard Wright & The Afro-
American Literary Tradition in Robert B. Stepto and Michael Harper, eds. Chant
of Saints: A Gathering of Afro American Literature, Art and Scholarship. Urbana:
U of Illinois P, 1979. (195-211)
Williams, John A. A Biography of Richard Wright The Most Native of Sons. New
York: Doubleday, 1970.
Wood, Nancy V. Perspectives on Argument. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1998.
Wright, Richard. How Bigger Was Born in Early Works. New York: Harper,
1991. (851-881)
. White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday, 1957.
From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The
Reception of Richard Wrights Native Son

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

Instead of taking a side, I mean to suggest that the dispute has


meaning because of the texts history, which includes not only the
changing beliefs of Wright but also the changing character of
naturalism and modernism as well as the evolution of Black Studies
Programs. In terms of Wrights changing beliefs, the dispute suggests
that the radical politics of Max do not square with the liberation of
Bigger. The novel fosters both Maxs politics and Biggers liberation,
but the pro-communist liberalism of Max, who represents the radical
politics of the 1930s, does not accord with the liberation of Bigger,
whose existential view of freedom parallels modernist notions of
independence and black concepts of liberation. Maxs politics do not
accord with Biggers sense of freedom because Max, for all of his
sympathy, does not understand or cannot accept Biggers
independence. The coherence of Maxs political discourse and
Biggers homegrown existentialism breaks down; as Edward
Margolies says, Wright does not seem to be able to make up his
mind. The reader feels that Wright, although intellectually committed
to Maxs views, is more emotionally akin to Biggers (79-80).4
Margolies is right: Maxs views express the intellectual commitment
of Wright, who, in the 1930s, led the left-wing John Reed club and
wrote articles for The Worker and other communist publications. Like
many other radical African-Americans, he favored the separate,
southern black nation advocated by the Communist Party and the
autonomous national Soviet republics created by Comrade Stalin
(Maxwell 6-8; see also Bell 152-54). By contrast, Wrights emotional
commitment to Bigger anticipates Wrights later work, in which he
rejects communist politics and accepts individual existential and
African national autonomy. Margolies adds that It is, then, in the
roles of a Negro nationalist revolutionary and a metaphysical rebel
that Wright most successfully portrays Bigger (82).
The incoherence of the last section echoes the political evolution
whereby Wright changes from a communist who believed that
Marxism pointed a way beyond race to a Black Power advocate who
defends Black autonomy.5 In addition to Wrights changes, the
evolution of critical practices and literary movements, especially the
changing status of naturalism and modernism and the emergence of
Black studies, also explain the incoherence.
Consider, for instance, the changing status of naturalism and
modernism. Since the late 1940s, the modernist art of William
Faulkner or T.S. Eliot has ranked among the best American works; by
contrast, in the 1930s, when Wright produced Uncle Toms Children
From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard 23
Wrights Native Son

and Native Son, the naturalist literary movement of Stephen Crane,


Emile Zola, and Theodore Dreiser was very influential, whereas
modernist or existential works were considered experimental or
regressive and were held in low esteem. Even though Wright was
familiar with them, modernist formal or existential works were by no
means consonant or on a par with the scientific naturalism whereby,
like a scientist, Wright would, as he says, invent test-tube situations,
place Bigger in them, and work out in fictional form an emotional
statement and resolution (xxi).
Since Theodore Dreiser, a fellow member of the anti-fascist
League of American Writers and other left-wing writers associations,
was one of Wrights favorite writers (See Rowley 60 and 87), it is not
surprising that, to produce Native Son, Wright drew on An American
Tragedy. Both Bigger and Clyde Griffiths seek the wealth and
glamour of the American dream and, as a result, murder their pregnant
girlfriends only to be tried, convicted, and executed (See Bone, 142-
43). Moreover, prosecuted by attorneys seeking political advantage,
both Clyde and Bigger undergo trials shining a national spotlight on
them.
Wright sticks strictly to the viewpoint of Bigger, whose feelings he
explains, whereas Dreiser engages in an omniscient narration which
tells us why the Griffith family neglects Clyde or why the district
attorney decides to prosecute him; however, both Wright and Dreiser
show that the trials make the character of the accused a political issue.
As Joseph Karaganis points out, thanks to the intense national
spotlight, Clydes trial confers on him a celebrity status questioning
his public or national self (156). In other words, what is at issue is the
nature of Clydes public or national self, not his guilt or innocence,
because it goes without saying that he will get a death sentence.
Biggers trial raises similar issues. In it too, his guilt is not really
in question; rather, thanks to the intense national spotlight, the trial
makes an issue of Biggers true self.6 In a racist manner, the
prosecuting attorney Buckley and the Chicago newspapers insist that
Bigger is an animal whose death will make the city and the country
safer. Max argues, by contrast, that the death sentence will do nothing
to alleviate the oppression which made Bigger a killer and which is
creating more Biggers.
These arguments and the intense, national spotlight move Bigger
to examine himself. In addition, introduced by Jan, who wishes to
help Bigger even though he killed Jans lover Mary, Max causes
24 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

(Cited in Schwartz, 15). Because of this and other criticism, in the


early 1940s Faulkners work went out of print, and Faulkner himself
worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. Hurston, at the time the most
prolific African-American writer, worked as a maid and died
impoverished and forgotten in 1959. Her work was not recuperated
until the 1970s, when Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Black
feminists repudiated protest fiction and revived her positive
depictions of black culture.
Native Son, by contrast, made Wright famous and wealthy and
influenced the next generation of black writers, including his critical
friends, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Unlike Hurston, they
favored protest fiction, but they complained that the novel did not
depict black humanity or intellectual and artistic independence in a
positive way. In defense of the novel, Irving Howe and others argued
that Wrights anger with blacks and whites truly reflected his
debilitating experience of American social life and that in oedipal
fashion Baldwin and Ellison were rebelling against their literary
father.
Howes view lost out, for, to justify American postwar dominance,
New York Intellectuals like Lionel Trilling condemned the pro-
Stalinist radicalism of naturalist fiction. Moreover, they praised the
work of Faulkner, construing him as an American modernist who
asserts the universal values of tradition, endurance, and individual
will.9 So did New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, who, Lawrence
Schwartz says, considered him imbued with tradition, yet with an
avant garde, modernist core(28).10

While Faulkners reputation rose, Wrights reputation declined


because both the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals adopted
conservative, modernist accounts of American or western culture.
Their views converged despite their political differences. That is, in
the 1920s and 1930s the New Criticism supported the Southern
Agrarian movement and the modernist avant-garde and condemned
the progress, industry, liberalism, science, wealth, bureaucracy, and
democratic equality of the Yankee North (See Jancovich 1994: 71-
101); by contrast, in their youth the New York Intellectuals, who
included Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and James
Burnham, and others, forcefully defended Marxist and radical views.
Moreover, they feared that the economic security, ideological
conformity, and alienating professional jargon of the burgeoning
From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard 27
Wrights Native Son

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

dimensions of Biggers character and give no attention to how


Wrights use of language punctuates the irony and ambiguity of
Biggers personality(172).13 While Baker argues that Biggers
struggle for survival parallels African-American slave narratives,
Joyce, who faults Baker and Gates for accommodating the white
literary establishment, ascribes to the novel a universal archetypal or
mythic import, identifying it with canonical Greek and Biblical
works, not with works of naturalist protest or black aesthetic
affirmation.14
Other critics defend its naturalist critique of racial oppression,
rather than its Biblical or mythic import, but these critics also defend
Wrights authorial genius and public values and fault affirmative,
black or modernist notions of existential freedom, reviving thereby
the controversy about Maxs speech (See Bone, Burgum, DeCoste,
Gloster, and Howe). For instance, Barbara Foley argues that, by
means of Maxs speech, Native Son makes an issue of the social
critique which American Tragedy takes for granted. Moreover, she
faults critics who object to Maxs didactic speech on the grounds
that, instead of construing proletarian fictions as rhetorical acts
(189), they accept Henry James bourgeois distinction between
showing and telling (196). More importantly, like Joyce, Foley terms
Biggers surge of existential freedom a twisted assertion of
identity which, in its very deviance, profoundly condemns the social
circumstances which have deprived Bigger of any coherent sense
of self (Politics 194: See also Burgum 122 and Decoste 133-43).
While Joyce construes the novel as a modern tragedy, Foley takes the
novel to defend the communist politics of the 1930s; nonetheless,
unlike Baker, who argues that black cultural experience justifies both
Biggers liberation and Maxs procommunist politics, Foley and
Joyce both assume that the novel occupies a public space in which
class politics or tragic flaws transcend ethnic or racial difference and
reveal the universal truths of human nature or capitalist society.15
Walter Benn Michaels also says that Wright situates Bigger
outside black culture (Our America 126). Moreover, he too faults the
multicultural critics who, like Baker, treat race as a legitimate
category and ignore or dismiss the authors intentions. He maintains,
however, such multiculturalism flourishes only because communism
has collapsed: ideological differences have been replaced by
differences that should be understood on the model of cultural or
linguistic differences Readers at the end of history differ but
they do not disagree (Shape 80).
30 Philip Goldstein

I have argued that the controversy provoked by Maxs speech


reveals the incompatibility of Maxs radical politics and Biggers
liberation not only because of Wrights life and times but also
because of the changing status of naturalism and modernism and the
emergence of Black Studies. I have also suggested that what the
convergence of the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals
implies is that the modern university and giant corporate media have
acquired massive cultural influence undermining the public sphere in
the name of which critics revalued modernist fiction and degraded
popular culture and the naturalist protest fiction of Wright and others.
This cultural influence also indicates that neither the neglect of the
authors genius nor the collapse of communism explains the
breakdown of the public sphere. Contrary to Michaels, both
communists and anti-communists engaged in draconian tactics
blacklists, prison sentences, torture, and warfareprecluding rational
debate.
As a result, criticism which assumes, as Joyce, Foley, and
Michaels do, that only the neutral public space outside racial
differences enables readers to debate the truth of the novel is no
longer viable. By contrast, although criticism like Bakers denies the
opposition of Maxs politics and Biggers liberation because it
neglects the novels original contexts, such criticism justifies the
novels depiction of black culture and experience and, as a result,
gives Black Studies and, more generally, multiculturalism a
progressive import.

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.

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Baker, Houston A., Jr. Introduction in Houston A. Baker, Jr., ed. Twentieth Century
Interpretations of Native Son; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. ( 1-20)
. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Bayliss, John F. Native Son: Protest or Psychological Study? in Negro American
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Massachusetts P, 1987.
Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1958.
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DeCoste, Damon Marcel. To blot it all out: the politics of realism in Richard
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Fishburn, Katherine. Richard Wright's Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. Metuchen,
New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1977.
Foley, Barbara. Marxism in the Poststructuralist Moment: Some Notes on the
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Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, 1993.
(188-99)
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self. New
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Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina
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Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: U Missouri
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Howe, Irving. A Critic's Notebook. ed. and intro Nicholas Howe. New York:
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. Black Boys and Native Sons Rpt. in Richard Abcarian, ed. Richard Wright's
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Jackson. Esther Merle. The American Negro and the Image of the Absurd in
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(Summer 1991): 543-65.
34 Philip Goldstein

.Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1986.


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(1972): 269-83.
Lee, Robert A. Inside Narratives in Harold Bloom, ed. Richard Wright. New York:
Chelsea House, 1987. (109-26)
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. The Shape of the Signifier 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton UP,
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Interpretations of Native Son; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. (35-62)
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Schaub, Thomas. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P,
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Schwartz, Lawrence H. Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern
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Kinnamon, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright's Native Son. New York: G. K.
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California P, 1989.
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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. ( 26-39)
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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
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. 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

This essay presents the complexity of Wrights sexual persona in Native


Son, focusing primarily on Bigger Thomas. With Bigger prevailing as
Wrights most central figure in his art, the essay explores the link between
writer and subject in the context of homoeroticism and homosocialism,
which culminate into a forming of Wrights feminine self. The male
bonding, what Eve Sedgwick terms homosocial desire, is apparent in
most of Wrights fiction, which is so fecund with gender issues. However,
other aspects of sexuality are interpreted in Native Son, coined in the
essay as Biggers sexual diversity or sexual complexity. Along with this
sexual complexity is Wrights obsession with Biggerthat Bigger, along
with most of Wrights male characters, is drawn from Wrights extreme
preoccupation with the plight of the African American male. And
Wrights obsession with Bigger, which originated in his boyhood as noted
in his essay, How Bigger Was Born, suggests different shapes of his
own and his characters sexuality. The essay alludes to the biographical
scholarship on Wright, specifically from the texts of Margaret Walker
Alexander (1988) and Hazel Rowley (2001). However, most vital to
examining this sexually diverse paradigm in Native Son is Eve Sedgwicks
theory of homosocial desire in Between Men.

Richard Wrights most treasured, captivating, provocative, and


timeless character in all of his fiction is none other than Bigger
Thomas, the protagonist in his bestseller and major literary
achievement, Native Son. It was primarily Wrights fiction that
created the paradigm, the premise from which successive African
American writers, especially those of the 60s, express themselves.
Earning the title of the Father of the Black Protest Novel with Native
Son, Wright has garnered a place in history by establishing his
protagonist, Bigger, as the prototype, the archetype of the angry,
rebellious, disenfranchised, dispossessed militant, and even
revolutionary African American male, too often victimized by a
40 Yvonne Robinson Jones

racially divided American society that historically has targeted


African American males via lynching, police brutality, and, in most
recent years, racial profiling.
Prior to writing Native Son, Wright had introduced a cadre of male
figures to American audiences, for most of his fiction is grounded in
the victimization of African American males. His first literary
achievement, a collection of short fiction, Uncle Toms Children
(1938), could have been titled Uncle Toms Sons since every
protagonist is a male who is victimized by whites, is often killed, and
prevails as a tragic hero. In fact, most of Wrights fictional texts have
male signifiers in their titles or male protagonists in their narratives.
These include Uncle Toms Children (1938), Native Son (1940),
Black Boy (1945), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958),
Eight Men (1961), Lawd Today (1963), and Rite of Passage (1994).
In 1940, Wright debuted his favorite son, perhaps more comrade
than son, and what Wright terms Americas native son, Bigger
Thomas. Immediately, Wrights depiction of Bigger elicited a
discourse that emphasized a menacing image of black maleness that is
so entrenched in Americas literary and social history. Other more
critical, tenuous reactions argue Biggers redeeming, empathetic
qualities. This controversial image Biggers characterization has
suggested throughout the years is most notably treated in James
Baldwins essay Everybodys Protest Novel and in Wright gender
and feminist criticism. In addition to the varied interpretations readers
have had regarding such a controversial character in American
/African American literature, there is a sexual dimension that evolves
as a result of the male to male and male to female relations in the
novel. Thus, Biggers character, along with other males in Wright
fiction, presents a sexual consciousness that suggests not just sexual
ambivalence, as biographer Margaret Walker Alexander has argued,
but what may be perceived as sexual complexity or sexual diversity.
Eve Sedgwicks Between Men, which explores a homo-social and
homo-erotic dynamic in English literature, offers an appropriate
paradigm for examining males and male culture in Wrights fiction.
Sedgwick views sexuality as a continuum that includes the different
shapes of sexuality and consisting of a myriad of erotic inclinations
involving homo-social relations. In the context of male culture,
however, she presents the varied manifestations of male sexualitya
continuum that includes homo-socialism or male bonding,
homoeroticism or male desire, and homosexuality, which can be
covertly or overtly expressed among males in a historically
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 41
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine

heterosexual, patriarchal, and especially homophobic culture


(Sedgwick 4-5). This continuum of male sexuality and especially
homoerotic desires in men Sedgwick examines in literature is
suggestive of, firstly, the relationship that Wright created with Bigger;
secondly, the homo-social bond between males in Wrights oeuvre;
and thirdly, the emasculating or feminizing processes that run through
his work.
This essay will begin by examining the identification between the
author and his male characters. The identification between writer and
subject(s) in Native Son will serve as a departure point for exploring
several dimensions of Biggers diverse sexuality: homo-socialism,
homoeroticism, heterosexuality, as well as the emasculating /
feminizing dynamics the narrative presents.
Considering the corpus of Wrights art, his fiction and nonfiction,
as well as the philosophical worldview that evolves from it, one can
certainly discern that Bigger prevails as one character that endured
one who represents all that Wright was awed by and perhaps capable
of being had he not been refined with books and the literary culture.
Wrights refinement is the result of his insatiable thirst for reading
and writing, creating the stature he attained in mainstream American
and African American letters. Cross Damon in Wrights existential
novel, The Outsider, is simply a well-read, employed Bigger, given
the vestiges of existentialism some critics have attributed to the
Bigger character often viewed as a creation who prefigures Cross.
And because of the dramatic effect and definitive presentation of
Biggers thoughts and actions that readers experience in Native Son,
one can argue that the relationship between Bigger and Wright is
quite discernible. Wrights essay, How Bigger Was Born, and Black
Boy, his autobiographical novel, are revelations of the authors
identification with Bigger. This view of Bigger mirroring Wright is
shared by Margaret Walker Alexander in her biography, Richard
Wright: Demonic Genius. She states,

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)

And though Wright presents Bigger as tough, brutish, and callous,


in his interactions with males and females, he creates this male to
male bond that exists not only with Wright as creator of Bigger (like
42 Yvonne Robinson Jones
Mary Shelleys Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he creates), but also
a bond that exists between other males in his fiction. It is this link
between males in Wrights fiction that is suggestive of Sedgwicks
concept of homo-socialism, homoeroticism or male desire.
When studying the life and works of Richard Wright, there are
basically two schools of thought that emerge regarding his sexuality.
One is that he was solely a heterosexual whose relations with women
were publicly known, and, if he was anything other than heterosexual,
such as bisexual or homosexual, there is no documented evidence
uncovered by Wright scholars and biographers. Another view
regarding Wrights sexuality emerges from Walker Alexanders
examination of Wrights fiction which posits the writer of such as
sexually ambivalent: heterosexual, but with a compelling feminine
side, all pointing to what the biographer terms sexual conflict,
confusion, and revulsion (319).
Specifically, Walker Alexanders account of an episode in New
York created a shroud of suspicion regarding Wrights sexuality, and
she has publicly recounted (in writing and verbally) her version of the
incident revealing the estranged relationship that resulted from her
New York visit and encounter with Wright in 1939. In summary, she
suggests the possibility of Wright having homoerotic inclinations as a
result of her observing a suspicious scenario involving the writer and
another male, playwright Theodore Ward. However, the homoerotic
inferences drawn from Wrights text do not point to any suggestive
innuendoes in his life, and Walker Alexanders treatment of Wrights
sexuality in her biography is not grounded in any real life observances
but rather the sexual dynamics in his fictional texts.
However, regardless of how one interprets the encounter Wright
and Alexander had in New York, she contends that her frustration was
more centered on Wrights and his friends reactions to the incident,
their homophobia. More important, Wrights imperative, I think the
best thing for you to do is pack your things and get out of here the
first thing in the morning (135), apparently caused him to feel that
Walker Alexander had the potential for or had already been
discussing him in the context of homosexuality, which he and his
literary cohorts felt would be damaging to his career; after all, Native
Son was awaiting publication the next year, 1940.
Juxtaposed with Walker Alexanders account of the New York
episode is that of another Wright biographer, Hazel Rowley, who, in
Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001), characterizes the former
as a talkative young girl whose reputation for gossip was . . . firmly
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 43
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine

established (171). While Walker Alexanders account points to the


New York incident as an unfortunate set of circumstances, deriving
from involuntary comments and remarks innocently or perhaps
naively made, Rowley presents her research on the matter, which
includes Walker Alexanders own admission of talking too much and
confiding in people (171). Moreover, in a rather acrimonious tone,
Rowley further contends that a close contact Walker Alexander
observed between Wright and Ward existed because of the small size
of a hotel room, which had little capacity to offer roomy
accommodations for visitors (172).
Some may think that Walker Alexanders inclusion of the New
York incident in her repertoire of Wright scholarship may tend to
preclude an unbiased approach to discussions of sexuality in his texts;
however, Wrights fiction is so fecund with sexual nuances and
sexual dynamics that any textual analysis of sexuality in it, whether
socio-cultural or linguistic, has the potential of unveiling a plethora of
hypotheses regarding the writers sexual consciousness and the
complex and diverse sexual landscape he creates. The pattern of male
and female relationships, the recurrence of male homo-socialism and
the effect of homo-eroticism, as well as the gathering of males who
formulate a discourse that is not only of racial victimization but
female vilifying, are fodder for such sexual inferences. Thus, an
artistic consciousness permeated with sexual complexity and diversity
is evident in Wrights fiction, particularly with Native Son because of
the homo-socialism suggesting the homoeroticism, the heterosexual
relationships creating conflict, and the emasculating and feminizing
scenarios presenting variations of male subjugation to other males
(like female subjugation to males).
Houston Bakers assertion, it is impossible to understand the
aspirations, turnings, and contradictions of his [Wrights] work
without some understanding of his life (122) points to a substantive
link between the autobiographical Wright and his fictional construct,
Bigger. In his own testimonial (How Bigger Was Born), Wright
explains how the character became embedded in his creative
consciousness. The reader is apprised of Bigger as the writers
response to the racial landscape of Americaa landscape the writer
articulated in poems, essays, and short fiction even before the
publication of Native Son. Thus, Bigger, from the outset, becomes a
major artistic agent for Wrights sociopolitical discourse; in fact,
Biggers voice resonates in all of Wrights fiction. But along with this
44 Yvonne Robinson Jones
politicized Bigger is the sexualized one, and there are several areas in
the text that demonstrate this sexual diversity.
One of the initial scenarios that presents the homo-social, i. e., men
promoting the interests of men (Sedgwick 4) is the male to male
bonding that occurs with Bigger and his buddies, Jack, Gus, and G.H.
The cajoling, the situations of camaraderie, and the fellowship they
all share are reminiscent of Big Boy and his friends in Big Boy
Leaves Home. As in Big Boy, there are four buddies who comprise
the so-called gang in Native Son. Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweets
examination of the short story label their frolicking as suspended
sexuality, the homo-social yielding to the homo-erotic; this same
dynamic can be observed in Native Son.
The gathering of males inside and outside of the poolroom to
discuss the robbing of Blums store includes moments of mockery,
laughter, awe, and fear. Biggers disposition moves from critiquing,
menacing behavior to what Wright terms as child-like wonder (16).
In response to the billboard Bigger sees of the State Attorney,
Buckley, whose words of warning to urban youth are, You Cant
Win, Bigger retorts, astutely, You let whoever pays you off win!
(13). In contrast, when Bigger states, Looks like a little bird (16) in
response to a plane flying overhead, readers can perceive a type of
softnessa feminine effectthat is often overshadowed by the other
harsh and callous incidences pervading the novel.
Biggers fear in the first section of the novel, labeled Fear,
includes role playing, mood swings, and threatening behavior that
eventually climax into a brutish, sadistic gesture, suggestive of homo-
eroticism and sodomy. The knife scene with Gus is often critically
interpreted as an act of cowardice, but it can also be perceived as
homo-erotic. In describing Biggers threatening act, Wright states,
Bigger held the open blade an inch from Guss lips. Lick it, Bigger
said, his body tingling with elation (39). The tingling elation and
hand-held knife, a phallic symbol, occurs within the context of this
continuum of male companionship that weaves in and out of Wrights
fiction. There are other inferences readers may have other than the
dynamics of thuggish, criminal behavior; specifically, they may notice
that repressed anger swells and expresses itself in a tingling,
aggressive gesture of sensual dimensions.
This scene continues with Wrights description of Guss
subjugation by Bigger. Prior to the knife scene, Gus is physically
attacked by Bigger, The muscles of his body gave a tightening lunge
and he saw his fist come down on the side of Guss head; he had
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 45
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine

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

the presence of other family members. In addition, by having self-sex


together, they suggest having sex vicariously with each other. More
important, though, Jacks and Biggers masturbating competition,
involving who will finish first, seems more important to them than the
absent Otherthe female.
The masturbation scene is followed with mocking statements
Bigger and friends make about the lives of rich whites. When Bigger
views on the screen the rich young woman . . . laughing and dancing
with her lover, he states, Id like to be there (32). But that desire is
ridiculed by his buddies and, though Bigger expresses the desire to
emulate the couple he sees on the screen, his peers remind him of the
futility of having such delusions of grandeur, as they poke fun at his
looks and his esteemed sense of self. Therefore, guffaws follow when
Bigger expresses the desire to be a part of the white world, but such
commenting and laughter indicate the gangs ability to mock and
ridicule the very elements of society that can be painful reminders of
the impotence which evolves from their socially and economically
deprived lives.
The homo-socialism in the movie scene, as well as the role-playing
on the street corner where Bigger and Gus verbally impersonate J. P.
Morgan and the President of the United States in a telephone
conversation, is definitely an empowering event. It provides Bigger
and his buddies the autonomy and license to resist and respond to
socioeconomic inequalities in their communities and lives. However,
the seriousness of their condition does not go un-addressed, for
Wright has Gus respond to Biggers ambition when he observes the
plane flying overhead: If you wasnt black and if you had some
money and if theyd let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a
plane (17). Being cut off, castrated, from white male patriarchal
privileges like flying planes and not having credible access to
mainstream male communities are significant impotencies that are
often consequential for African American males. This lack of access
and deprivation can cause a type of aggression that is often channeled
into other venues: sexual and social. When Bigger tries to identify
with powerwhiteness, richness, and white womenhis desires are
cut off, shut down, and he is reminded of his impotencehis
powerlessnessin a capitalist, racialized society that historically is
primarily the catalyzing agent for the poverty, joblessness, and slum
conditions he must endure.
48 Yvonne Robinson Jones

The dialogue of Bigger and his buddies in the movie scene


presents not only their version of social and economic inequalities,
their impotency, but their own exhortations of sexual prowess. This
condition makes the female even more necessary for their sexually
oriented discourse. This covert critiquing of economic injustice is also
an example of Wrights refracted voice, his Marxist voice,
expressing his desires vis a vis Bigger and his buddies. It is a factor
that is evidenced in the entire narrative of Native Son, but it is
nonetheless rendered through male homo-socialism when males are
awed at the wealth displayed by the images and actions on the screen.
Exclamations of their sexual prowess with the white female are
invoked. The phallo-centric nature of their comments not only reflects
the emphasis on male sexual power, the phallogocentrism of this male
groups thinking and Wrights text, but it also presents a dialectic of
social and sexual stereotyping of both black and white worlds. Their
own sexual touting and the comments they make concerning the
deviant behavior of whites not only illustrate their combative and
innovative techniques for resisting the white world they encounter
vicariously, but it is also self mocking. Critiquing, as well as
soliciting, occurs as in the statements aimed at Bigger concerning the
white female:

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

Other shared experiences are just as empowering, and though Wright


presents the resulting complexities of enslavement and a segregated
society (poor housing, unemployment, and poor educational
opportunities), the bonding dynamics of Bigger and his buddies, their
homo-socialism, mockingly address those inequities. The discourse
that emanates from them represents their critique of American
societys historically racist and capitalist posture.
In the context of heterosexuality in Native Son, Wright clearly
establishes Biggers feelings of hate and desire for Mary Dalton from
the moment he meets her to the moments of her drunken stupor and,
finally, to the moments of her death and dismemberment via
decapitation. Even though Mary has befriended Bigger, he thinks,
But for all of that, she was white and he hated her (81).
Subsequently, Marys death becomes the catalyst for the plots
development, its raison d etre, yet the horror of her death is
exacerbated by her decapitationWrights gothic touchan event
that reiterates the texts anti-female bias. However, her decapitation is
necessary for her cremation, and her total destruction is not
consummated until she is burned.
This decapitation and burning of the female body in Native Son
reflect Wrights Freudian, psycho-analytical influence in addition to
the anti-female stance in his fiction; the males act of destroying
femaleness is symbolic of destroying the power and control females
have over males even before the latter enters into other systems of
control in society. Such power often attributed to females involves the
acknowledgment of their ability to not only biologically continue the
development of human beings but also to recognize their expertise in
human development because they are the primary nurturers. In
Wrights fiction, it is clear that anti-female behavior usually proceeds
from either a heterosexual or homo-social situation. By the time
Bigger puts Mary to bed, she has aggravated and annoyed him with
her gestures and questionsher liberal overtures. Her drunkenness in
the car becomes another facet of her aggravating behavior that causes
discomfort for Bigger, just as her suggestion for them to go to the
chicken place causes him embarrassment and anxiety. Biggers
negative attitude is exacerbated especially when his girlfriend, Bessie,
observes him with two white strangers, Mary and her boyfriend, Jan.
His heterosexual moments proceed from this uncomfortable
disposition when he has to assist Mary in her drunken stupor; he
thinks, in spite of his hate for her, he was excited standing there
watching her like this (82). As he is trying to carry her to her
50 Yvonne Robinson Jones
bedroom and, simultaneously, avoid detection (for his sake
especially), readers are informed of his desire for Mary from Wrights
description:

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)

Related to this scene are Rampersads comments on an earlier


scene that was cut from the original manuscript, which has Bigger
responding sexually to a newsreel that shows Mary and apparently
other wealthy, carefree young white women cavorting on a beach in
Florida (xviii). His editors later cut it from the 1940 publication
because it presents Mary as a sensuous female, an image that would
offend whites. Nonetheless, this moment of intimacy and intenseness
Bigger has with Mary in her bedroom also is cut off by the intrusion
of a blind Mrs. Dalton, thus causing Biggers justifiable fearbeing
entrapped clandestinely in the bedroom of a white female. Wright has
created a heterosexual situation that is immediately aborted and
politicized by the entrance of Mrs. Dalton, another white female, once
again reminding his readers of the black male/white female taboo he
addresses in Uncle Toms Children and other texts, especially The
Long Dream. Thus, Biggers opportunity to express his
heterosexuality is thwarted.
Wright reiterates Biggers heterosexuality with the relationship he
has with Bessie Mears, his girlfriend, who is introduced in the same
context as Biggers mother and Mary. Like the mother and Mary,
Bessie is immediately established as an annoying, irritating character
very early in the narrative when Bigger is forced to accompany Jan
and Mary to the chicken shack where she works. His presence with
two white strangers in a black joint on the Southside of Chicago
immediately creates suspicion because of Jim Crowism and the
potential the scenario has for creating friction not only with Bigger
and his girlfriend but also with other African Americans.
Moreover, Wrights characterization of Bessie renders her as one
of the most devalued characters in the text. Race, class, and gender
issues surface with Bessie because of her depiction as an alcoholic
African American domestic, who earns little, lives in poverty, and
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 51
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine
recognizes the bleakness of her existence. The danger of her
accompanying Bigger as an alleged fugitive murderer reflects her
hopelessness, Bigger, please! Dont do this to me! Please! All I do is
work, work like a dog! From morning till night. I aint got no
happiness (180). Her status as a commodity is realized because of
how she is treated by whites as well as Bigger, with his actions of
rape and murder reducing her to nothingness, like the murder and
dismemberment of Mary. Readers become cognizant of the status of
both females; whether rich or poor, their lives are dispensable, for
Wright emphasizes this anti-femaleness with both characters who
become the objects of Biggers most gruesome acts of violence.
Some critics have never understood the necessity of Bessies
murder. Even Wrights friend, Jane Newton, who is reported to have
offered suggestions regarding Mary Daltons dismemberment, was
horrified about Wrights decision to kill Bessie (Rowley 155).
Rowley gives the following account:

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)

When Bigger kills Bessie by smashing her head with a brick to


prevent what he perceives as her disclosure of his murder of Mary,
readers are exposed to another realm of Wrights fascination with
horrorific details. As the murder of Mary is followed by
dismemberment, the murder of Bessie results in her bodys disposal
down the air shaft. Of course, Wrights and Biggers vehemence do
not end with the smashed head; readers eventually are informed that
Bessie has died of exposure as a result of still being alive when
Bigger disposes her body. Wright compounds one act of horror with
another. Bessies death, like that of Mary, proceeds from a
heterosexual experience even though the sexual act she shares with
Bigger is a non-consensual one. Perhaps it is more rape than a non-
consensual sex act, given its context; however, because of her race
and the historical, social, and political context in which Wright is
writing out of, Bessies alleged rape is obscured. Marys death is
viewed as more rape than murder while Bessies rape or non-
consensual act becomes more murder than rape or sexual violation.
Moreover, since much of the gender/feminist criticism on Native Son
finds no substantive reason for Bessies heinous murder, it seems that
52 Yvonne Robinson Jones

Wright utilizes it as a way of exacerbating Biggers criminality;


Bessie becomes the conduit for Wrights characterization of Bigger
who must continue to formulate Wrights artistic goal of black
protestation. In doing so, he further advances his anti-female stance in
the narrative, his misogyny and invites the suggestion of male desire.
Thus, heterosexuality in Native Son, as in most of Wrights fiction,
is hardly ever a positive erotic and pleasurable experience; it is
accompanied with frustration, anxiety, and conflict. Most, if not all
scenarios are of such crafting, like Sarah and the salesman in Long
Black Song, Cross Damon and the prostitute in The Outsider,
Fishbellys sexual encounters in The Long Dream, Erskine Fowler
and Mabel in Savage Holiday, and, of course, Marys and Biggers
relationship in Native Son. In fact, even though The Outsiders Cross
and Eva prevail as perhaps the most sensuous couple in Wrights
fiction, they never consummate their relationship, and Evas suicide
precludes any hope for their union.
With Wrights feminizing processes with Bigger being subjugated
by the protagonists aggression and anger in Native Son, the writers
Man of All Work in Eight Men can certainly pique ones interest in
how effeminacy and the infusion of a projected feminine self can
come to fruition in a Wright narrative. By having his male protagonist
cross dress and utilize transvestitism in order to save his family from
financial ruin, Wright demonstrates how he will innovatively use
black masculinity to achieve his ultimate artistic goal. The
protagonist, Carl Owens, dresses in his wifes clothes to secure a job
as an African American female domestic in order to survive and
overcome his personal challenge(s). In this particular case, Wright has
created a tragic comedy that prevails as more slapstick than serious
fiction with rather sophomoric humorous elements. However, this
replacement of the male persona with a female mask, or this act of
masking maleness, does not preclude Wrights pattern of staging
more than developing dramatic conflict to achieve his artistic goals.
The formulaic, mechanistic craftsmanship in Wright has Carl, the
male dressed as a female, having to assist in bathing his naked white
female employer while having to fend off sexual advances that had
been aggressively made to him/her by his/her employers
husband. Again, as in most of his fiction, Wright traps his victim,
violence occurs, but, surprisingly, unlike most situations in Wrights
fiction, the story has a happy ending. This short fictional narrative and
Native Son give credence to Wrights crafting of varied sexual
identities to accomplish the ultimate truth of his artto once again
Sexual Diversity in Richard Wrights Characterization of Bigger Thomas: 53
Homo-socialism, Homo-eroticism, and the Feminine
confront America with a myriad of experiences African Americans,
especially males, often undergo in order to cope and survive the
dehumanizing and oppressing elements that may confront them in a
historically racially divided society. Bigger kills for escape a while
Cross Damon feigns his identity and Carl Owens feigns femaleness.
Thus, Man of All Work reveals how Wright will go to any
extreme(s) with his males for artistic purposes.
Finally, regardless of the critical approach one uses to examine the
fiction of Richard Wright, issues of gender, whether male or female,
are germane to interpreting his texts. By the latter part of the
twentieth century, practically every school of Wright criticism
comments on how Wright treats the female character while presenting
to his reading public the overt, caustic message regarding a myriad of
injustices that historically persons of African descent, particularly
males, have inherited from the systems of European imperialism and
colonialism, white American enslavement, and the aftermath of
American racism. Nonetheless, one would be hard pressed to deny
Wrights sexism and misogyny. His concentration of harsh,
demeaning treatments of not just African American females but white
females and his consistency in presenting white males as the
harbingers of black oppression leave him with only one agent, the
African American male, to demonstrate injustice and the call for
humanitarianism in his writings. He is his first priority on the gender
scale for exposing injustice and promoting his interests and the
interests of his male characters (Sedgwick 4); his fiction espouses
this. The female character, however, is the most vital agent for
leading the reader to the male. She is necessarythe catalystyet
she must eventually be discarded.
Eve Sedgwick asks, Why should the different shapes of the
homo-social continuum be an interesting question? Why should it be a
literary question?(5). Richard Wrights fiction answers such an
inquiry because of the different shapes of sexuality in his fiction.
The homo-socialism, homo-eroticism, and heterosexuality, as well as
the emasculating and feminizing processes the writer employs, unveil
an artistic sexual consciousness of complexity and diversity, with
Bigger Thomas prevailing as his major artistic accomplishment and
his most treasured fictional companion.

Yvonne Robinson Jones


Southwest Tennessee Community College
54 Yvonne Robinson Jones

Works Consulted

Baldwin, James. Everybodys Protest Novel in Richard Barksdale and Keneth


Kinnamon, eds. Black Writers of America. New York: Macmillan, 1972. (725-
729)
Baker, Houston. Racial Wisdom and Richard Wrights Native Son. Long Black
Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: U of
Virginia P, 1972. (122-141)
Best, Stephen Michael. Representing Black Men. Marcellus Blount and George P.
Cunningham, eds. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet. Yo Mama Don Wear No Drawers: Suspended
Sexuality in Big Boy Leaves Home in Notes on Mississippi Writers 21.1
(1989): 33-36.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1940. New York: Random House, 1980.
Rampersad. Arnold. Foreword in Richard Wright. Lawd Today. Boston:
Northeastern U P, 1986. (1-6)
. Introduction in Richard Wright. Native Son. 1940. New York: HarperPerennial,
1998. (ix-xxii)
. Afterword in Richard Wright. Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
(117-143)
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and the Times. New York: Henry Holt,
2001.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homo-social
Desire. New York: Colombia U P, 1985.
Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.
Wright, Richard. Early Works: Lawd Today, Uncle Toms Children, Native Son. New
York: Harper Collins, 1991.
. Eight Men. 1961. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996.
. How Bigger Was Born in Native Son. 1940. New York: HarperPerennial 1998.
(433 462)
. Native Son. 1940. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.
. Rite of Passage. New York: Harper, 1994.
. Savage Holiday. 1954. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1994.
. The Long Dream. 1958. New York: Harper, 1987.
. The Outsider. 1953. New York: Harper, 1993.
Notes from a Native Daughter:
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son

This essay considers the global implications of Richard Wrights


characterizations of black women in his novel Native Son. Systematically
one of the most controversial and troubling aspects of his oeuvre,
Wrights bold literary depiction of the brutal rape and murder of Bessie
Mears ushered in a chilling reminder of the cultural license some men take
with the bodies and legacies of black women. This essay contemplates
Wrights influence on the field of African American and American letters,
directing attention to the ways in which Native Son reordered the literary
and cultural landscape of African American realist and naturalist writing
for black women in the Americas. African American women writers from
Zora Neale Hurston to Gwendolyn Brooks would have to address this
architectural staging of womanist expression as they simultaneously
reinvent the ways in which voice, identity, and personhood are seen in the
urban setting.

I am often amazed and even spiritually puzzled by the rhetorical


energy used by critics to recast Bigger Thomass cruel behavior
towards women, particularly black women, in Native Son.
Systematically one of the most controversial and troubling aspects of
his work, Wrights bold literary depiction of the vile dismemberment
of one Mary Dalton and of the doubly brutal rape and murder of one
Bessie Mears ushers in a new era of literary violence against women
that borders on the sadistic. Besides, it serves as a chilling reminder of
the cultural license some men take with the bodies and legacies of
black women.
While understandable to some in terms of Wrights literary
objective to condemn social injustice, his portraits of black women,
nonetheless, complicate this assessment, as his blueprint for acquiring
such justice employs the systematic abuse of black female figures.
Given the recent reconsideration of black womens images both in
visual and print mediaimages sanctioned by an insatiable public
56 Carol E. Henderson

need to see black people self-humiliate and self-maim themselvesa


revisiting of Wrights work is timely.
As part of the process of reading, rereading, and revising the
analytical approaches to Richard Wrights work, I would like to
explore the nature of womanhood in Native Son using the signs,
symbols, and metaphors of a literary tradition cultivated by black
female writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Ann Petry. This
tradition is predicated on challenging those preexisting conventions
and codes that preclude the creative gestures of resistance and self-
exploration so often found in black womens writing.
In negotiating with a cultural and literary terrain that has
consciously or subconsciously invested its formulaic aesthetic with
the negative stigmas and associations that dominate conventional
discussions of black female identity, black women writers have had to
dialogue with these practices using a call and response technique
that reinvests these known signs and symbols with an/other language
that is no mere gesture of empty words, as bell hooks reminds us,
but an expression of ones movement from object to subject (9)a
move that is, for the exploited, the oppressed, a gesture of defiance.
This process of liberation allows Ann Petry to rescript the
dynamics of place and space in the life of Bessie Mears, for example,
utilizing the narrative of her character Min in The Street. Likewise, it
permits Gwendolyn Brooks the opportunity to use her semi-
autobiographical text Maud Martha to reinterpret not only the rat
scene in Wrights Native Son, but the dynamics of the
interrelationships of parent/child, man/woman, and sibling/sibling
within the domestic space of Wrights novel.
It is in putting these texts in dialogue with each other that we fully
ascertain the alternative sources of consciousness and personal
strength, those models of independence, self-reliance and self-
determination that black women writers utilize to mold the lives of
their black female characters within the context of more traditional
literary conventions. In doing this, writers such as Ann Petry and
Gwendolyn Brooks rewrite the dynamics of black womanhood across
a wide spectrum of texts like Wrights as they speak out against the
multiple forms of aggression that mark the tenuous lives of their
muted sisters.
Notes from A Native Daughter: 57
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son

Engendered Perspectives

The challenge of examining Native Son from a female rather than a


male perspective is evident in the title of the narrative. Common
practice defers to the nativity of the son, not the corresponding
reformation of the native daughter who, birthed out of a similar
experience, must bear the brunt of the societal impact of the aborted
promise of the son (and in some cases her brother).
The scarcity of critical examinations on the subject speaks for
itself. As Trudier Harris concludes, the female characters in Native
Son act in ways that are antithetical or foreign to individual black
development, but commensurate with or native to what whites want
for blacks (63). Such an alliance supports the negative values of the
culture at large whose principles Bigger prefers to identify with (63).
In short, women become part of Biggers problemnot a solution
and their presence in the narrative bears this point out.
Critics Maria K. Mootry and Patricia Tuitt support this assessment.
Mootry argues, for example, that Wrights female characters typically
fall into two categories: mothers or whores. Tuitt proposes that
women are Biggers unmitigated legal props, emblems of the laws
violence towards him (and by default towards all black men). Tuitts
assessments of Wrights work re-invoke Robert Butlers observations
a number of years prior, when he reasoned that Wrights violence
against women reflect the deepest recesses of its central characters
radically divided nature (10). It is this nature, therefore, that drives
Bigger to kill Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears, thereby uniting his two
divided selves.
W. E. B. Du Bois would highlight this very division of the mind
decades before Biggers appearance when he determined that the
reality of black life in America presupposes a dual existencetwo
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivingscontained in one
dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder (3). These warring idealsone African, one American
belie the premise of Biggers treatment of Dalton and Mears. Their
murders appear to be the end result of a misinformed and similarly
twisted urge on Biggers part to be recognized, projected as bigger,
within the restrictive confines of his mere existence. Yet, as John M.
Reilly rightfully determines, it was Wrights decision to use a point
of view closely identified with Biggers which accounts for readers
58 Carol E. Henderson

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:

The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In


the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience
whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of
Negro lifewhich evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the superior race.
(New Masses, October 5, 1937)

Secondly, Wrights characterizations of his female characters led


to an uneasy alliance, a delicate waltz between opponents of racial
and gender disenfranchisement that took center stage in recent
decades. Given all the progress of a post-feminist/post-womanist
world, there seems to be, as Calvin Hernton puts it, a double standard
among critics and writers alike when evaluating the hostile attitudes
and brutal treatment of black women by black men. This is so much
so that while black men feel comfortable calling black women writers
castrators without fear of reprisal, black women are considered
bull-dykes, black-men haters, and perverse lovers of white men and
women (202) if they should write about or speak out against acts of
sexual violence and/or domestic abuse committed at the hands of
black men.
Despite the legacy of the double standard, black women writers
have continued to redesign and revamp the blueprint of a male
dominated literary establishment. These women have been persistent
in their cause, taking careful pains to speak into existence the
simultaneity of their oppressionbeing black and female. This
interdependence of thought transforms minds and liberates spirits. It
Notes from A Native Daughter: 59
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son

is the fundamental condition for self-definition. It is the dynamic that


Ann Petry and Gwendolyn Brooks employ to change the nature of
womanhood in Wrights Native Son.

Revisioning Domestic Spaces

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

What is also witnessed in this space is the disintegration of


parent/child relations (which I will return to latter on in this essay),
and the dissolution of male/female relationships, which crumple under
the basic human need to survive. Couched in this interface are
Wrights sardonic references to both the idyllic conditions of the
Garden of Eden and the shame that comes with knowing you are black
and poor. While the reference to the Garden of Eden implies a state of
ignorant bliss by those who have not been trained to accept their
condition, shame is borne out in the tiny confines of the Thomass
daily living as every morning, the two boys kept their faces averted
while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from
feeling shame (4). This shame, like Biggers fight with the rat, sets
the stage for his need to dominate people, places, and things as he
comes into the full awareness of his economic and social predicament.
Biggers domineering spirit and its resulting aftereffects are clearly
illustrated in his interaction with his family. Bigger rules this house
with venom. His harassment of his mother and sisterhe teases them
with the crushed dead body of the rat until his sister Vera faints
establishes the rhetorical link between dominance and subjectivity as
the black female voice becomes refigured in Biggers violent
interactions with his family members. But more importantly, Biggers
struggle to be recognized as a man and person reveals a compelling
tension in the narrative between the subjectivities of black men and
women as the premeditative and divisive actions of Bigger function as
a metaphor for the systemic philosophies of oppression. Embedded in
the signs and symbols of these interlinking narratives are the remnants
of a shared experience.
Other authors have revisited these codes in their narratives to
speak for Bessie Mears, Mother Thomas and Vera, signifying and
revising those discursive signs of domesticity to more adequately
reflect their urban truths. Ann Petry, for example, bears witness to
Bessie through her characterization of Min in her 1945 novel The
Street. Min acts within her naturalized setting, revising the muted and
nongestural form of Bessie, whose body has been effaced
eclipsedby the narrative structure of Wrights text that would offer
[into] evidence the raped and mutilated body of one Bessie Mears
(330). This body and voice are viewed by Bigger as a liability, a
fleshy manifestation of his own inbred demons.
Through the shapeless and formless personage of Min, Petry
figuratively situates Bessies struggle to be heard above the sigh of
resignation, a giving up, a surrender of something more than her
Notes from A Native Daughter: 61
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son

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.

Love and Marriage

Given the historical and sociological challenges African Americans


have faced in keeping the family unit whole, the domestic space is a
communal institution that has been coded culturally and literarily as a
collective buffer that combats the daily hidden injuries of racism.
Although this buffer may yield and even bend to the pressures of
outside forces, the family unit (and its attending sub-units) should still
be viewed as an emancipatory representation of the multi-vocal and
contradictory impulses of self-preservation and self-possession. As
Ann duCille reminds us in The Coupling Convention, the disparity
between the implicit promises of the marriage idealand the explicit
impossibilities of the actual social and material conditions of most
Americans, especially most black Americans is a topic readily
explored by African American writers from William Wells Brown to
Zora Neale Hurston (143).
While duCille does not mention them specifically, I would like to
add Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Gwendolyn Brooks to this list. If,
as duCille continues,

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)

This can clearly be seenand echoedin the chapters that frame


the centerpiece, of Brooks Maud Martha, chapter 16 and 18. In
chapter 18, titled were the only colored people here, Brooks deals
with the stigma of racism and class. Whereas Wrights commentary
on economic development in Native Son becomes embodied in the
Daltons to the extent that they become the romanticized equivalent of
economic mobility, Brookss expos places the political in the
personal, demonstrating that change must occur on an intimate level.
One should be careful to note that Wrights romanticization of the
economic mobility embodied in the marital unit of the Daltons comes
from a misplaced reliance on the success stories of others. As the
narrative discloses, Bigger felt

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)

This coupling convention cloaked in the garments of class and


race, leads Bigger to reassess his relationship with Mary Dalton to the
extent that he was filled with a sense of excitement about his new
job (33) after viewing her enlarged image on the movie screen at a
local theatre house. It is this celluloid image of seduction that renders
Bigger vulnerable to the desires and manipulations of the larger
society and makes him desire white women and all that they
represent. As Farah Griffin aptly observes, Biggers perception of
women means that white women are the embodiment of wealth,
desirability, femininity, and power; black women as provincial,
ignorant, and stifling (76). Hence, Biggers frustration at his lack of
power causes him to redirect that frustration at women in a violent
way in order to creatively design alternative forms of economic and
social fulfillment.
Biggers journey to this fulfillment is more revealing than its end
and demonstrates the roles women serve not only in Native Son, but
also in a text like Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. In the latter, the
protagonist is similarly prodded by a white woman at the bequest of a
white male audience, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and
murder her, to hide from, and yet to stroke where the small American
flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V (1527).
64 Carol E. Henderson

This simultaneous gesture of longing and loathing creates a similar


quandary for Bigger whose fantasy to possess the lifestyle of the rich
and famous links him to the only image/position available to him on
the screen: that of primitive. As the following exchange between Jack
and Bigger reveals, Biggers desire to be invited to a vacation place
like the one he sees in The Gay Woman is circumvented by the reality
of those troubling images he sees of Africans as primitive beings on
the Trader Horn movie poster. As Jack explains, Bigger is welcome
to go to a place like that, But youd be hanging from a tree like a
bunch of bananas (32). This startling revelation of lynching means
that Jack and Bigger know the cost one incurs for desiring such a
fantasy. Thus white women, although the embodiment of economic
promise, reinforce that feeling of fear very much associated with this
act of racial transgression. As Farah Griffin also reiterates, there is
no place for [Bigger] in that world, even though as spectator
[Bigger] attempts to place himself in the picture on the screen(77).
Interestingly enough, Wrights re-visioning of this interaction
between Jack and Bigger in another version of this passage in the
1966 edition of Native Son points up the spectacle of black
masculinity so evident in the undercurrent of this scene. As the 1966
version states, when Jack responds to Biggers request to be invited to
that place of palm trees and relaxation, Jack comments, Man, if them
folks saw you theyd runtheyd think a gorilla broke loose from the
zoo and put on a tuxedo(492). This merging of two extremesof a
black and a gorilla, of a tuxedo (formal class) and a zoo (primitive
class)signals the myriad of ways Wright tries to construct an
alternative narrative that not only challenges cultural but also social
divisions. Some would have Bigger be only a social symbol,
multiplied twelve million times, (as Max argues in the courtroom),
whose collective identity constitute[s] a separate nation, stunted,
stripped, and held captive within this nation, devoid of political,
social, economic, and property rights(397). But Wright also wants
Bigger to reflect the consciousness of a nation afraid to face the
inconsistencies in its own moral and collective promise.
Wrights commentary on race takes into consideration the vile
manner in which the absorbed nihilism of racism spiritually alters the
psyche of a people. This same commentary also demonstrates that
Wrights reading of race in these instances emphasizes the
refiguring of blackness as spectacle on screen and in the courtroom,
evoking the strained intercultural and intracultural exchanges that
exist amongst blacks and whites, men and women. It is at this juncture
Notes from A Native Daughter: 65
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son

in the narrative that Wrights literary artistrylike Gwendolyn


Brooks and Zora Neale Hurstonreflects how it feels to be black in
America from a self-reflexive posture.
In Brookss case, her venture into the nature of voyeurisms that
shape the enterprise of blackness has her rework, for example, Paul
and Mauds perceptions of their experiences at the playhouse. Pauls
desire to have a night on the town is folded into Mauds dream to
feel rich at the World Playhouse. This playhouse represents sacred
space for Maud; the Caucasian patrons who inhabit the hallways and
the auditorium of this space signify wealth and possibilities. However,
Mauds dark skin, and Pauls blue work shirt make them foreign
objects/subjects in this space.
Just as the metaphoric rendering of the caged gorilla in Mauds
dream (chapter 3) signals the essence of black manhood on display
caged behind psychological and figurative bars constructed by an
inhumane societyMaud and Pauls being on display at the
playhouse (they are the only black there) amplifies the visual
language of the body in chapter 18, signaling for the reader an
alternative way to read not only urban but also suburban landscapes.
This alternative representation of black peoples experiences stands as
a metaphor for the spiritual development of a people trying to find the
essence of themselves. As Melvin Dixon reminds us in Ride Out the
Wilderness,

images of physical and spiritual landscapesreveal over time a changing


topography in black American quests for selfhood.Images of land and the
conquest of identity serve as both a cultural matrix among various texts and a
distinguishing feature of Afro-American literary history (xi).

A close examination of Ann Petrys and Gwendolyn Brooks


narratives reveal that, like Wright, these authors use of selfhood,
identity and landscape shapes our understanding of the body as these
same properties also frame a context for understanding African
American subjectivity in the urban/domestic aesthetic. Although
Wright represents marriage as an economic undertaking, and
certainly one out of the reach of Bigger, Brooks and Petry depict
marriage as a spiritual covenant in the relationships of Paul and
Maud, and Lutie Johnson and her husband Jim Johnson, a spiritual
connection vital to the sustaining of black family life.
This covenant itself becomes a spiritual and figurative landscape
to explore the subtleties of personhood within the domestic space in
66 Carol E. Henderson

both Petry and Brookss texts. In the wittingly melodramatic


exchange between Maud and Paul, for instance, Brooks marvelously
comments on the various languages spoken in marriage, and reveals
the conflicts that arise when one tries to speak their self into existence
despite their prescribed gender roles:

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

Brookss depiction of domestic life differs starkly from Wrights


portrayal of family life, a life Wright represents as dreadful. If, as
Malin Walther determines, the wholly negative domestic scene,
which depicts a home life of violence and antagonistic family
relationships is rescripted in Brooks mouse scene,(143) then one
can rightfully argue that in the case of Wright and Petry, it is the
lack of a traditional vision of the marriage ideal that speaks
volumes concerning the sociological impact of poverty on familial
and personal development.
Petrys portrayal of Lutie Johnsons frustration of her husbands
inability to secure sustained employment foregrounds not only her
own characterization of marriage and its connection to the American
Notes from A Native Daughter: 67
The Nature of Black Womanhood in Native Son

Dream, but it also speaks to the overwhelming impact of poverty on


the material conditions of the urban poor, particularly black women.
Luties marriage, a casualty of this conundrum, suffers greatly
when she must live at the Chandlers residence as a maid while her
own family is left to fend for itself. While she watched another
womans child and cleaned another womans house, her marriage
broke into so many little pieces that it couldnt be put back together
again, couldnt even be patched into a vague resemblance of its
former self. Yet what else could she have done? (30). The fact that
Lutie recognizes her predicament sets her apart from other fictional
female characters of this period. Until Petry, claims critic Calvin
Hernton, there had been no such women as Lutie Johnson, Min, and
Mrs. Hedges in the entire history of black fiction (60).
Some critics may dispute Herntons assertions, but they must,
nevertheless, admit that the rhetorical strategies Petry employs to
point up the adverse conditions of working black women set her apart
from other renderings of black female characters, particularly Richard
Wrights. As author Toni Morrison reminds us, African American
writers come to tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts
of debates blanketed in their texts (4) within a culture-specific
context. This self-reflexive posture, inherent in African and African
American artistry, forms the basis of African American interpretative
and theorizing practices. Petry exemplifies this mode of writing (as
does Brooks, and to some degree Wright) as she is the first woman
novelist to fully depict a black mothers struggle to survive in the
inner city.
Analogously, Petry and Brookss creative foresight are expansions
of Wrights urban vision as well as their own feminist intervention. In
each novel, Petry and Brooks call attention to the social institutions
that oppress African American women. They also focus on the efforts
of black women to circumvent those institutions that mark them as
Other. Women are viewed as sovereign beings in Maud Martha and
The Street, or at the very least they are seen acting in their
environments to improve the quality of life for themselves and their
families.
As is dramatically portrayed in Native Son, Biggers motherwho
is a nameless prototype of the emasculating Black Medusa in the
opening scene of the novelserves as a doppelganger to Lutie
Johnson due to their similar gender status, economic circumstance,
and marital woes. Many of the examinations of Native Son and The
68 Carol E. Henderson

Street compare the experiences of Bigger and Lutienot Lutie and


Biggers mother (hereto referred to as Mrs. Thomas)because, as
Calvin Hernton speculates, Both Bigger and Lutie are
ambitiousand [b]oth are conscious of being hated and oppressed by
white society (97).
However, in placing these two women in concert, it becomes clear
that the economic impediments of single parenthood are dramatically
set forth in the material conditions of these women, and their non-
maternal actions towards their children demonstrates the extent of the
violence done to them in this existence. For instance, Luties inability
to find employment that would enable her to provide a secure
environment for her son in Petrys text makes him vulnerable to the
seductions of the street, and this vulnerability is reflected the cyclical
nature of poverty as young boys like Bub witness the deterioration of
their families and their fathers. As the narrative makes clear:

day-by-day, month-by-month, big broad-shouldered Jim Johnson went to


pieces because there wasnt any work for him and he couldnt earn anything at
all. He got used to facing the fact that he couldnt support his wife and child.
It ate into him. Slowly, bit-by-bit, it undermined his belief in himself until he
could no longer bear it. And he got himself a woman so that in those moments
when he clutched her close to him in bed he could prove that he was still
needed, wanted. (168)

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)

Biggers inability to adequately fulfill his role as provider for his


family evokes those symbolic acts of castration that create the essence
of the shadow that becomes part of the black mans realityand
part of the African American imagination. These actspartly a
product of the sexual, criminal, and racial voyeurisms of a nation
viscerally obsessed with the image of the black man, and partly the
social longings of a white nation intent on maintaining economic
and political supremacyare central to a long line of dehumanizing
practices connected to the maturation process of African American
men that marks their psyche and creates a historical pattern of black
male behavior.
According to William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, the black man,
born under slavery that continues through the present, exhibits the
inhibitions and psychopathology that had their genesis in the slave
experience (60). In slavery, the black man was forcibly emasculated
as an owned being, totally dependent on the paternalistic isms of
chattel bondage. In the present, this system is affirmed in the material
conditions of economic impotence, and physically mimed in the
tenement buildings that have now become the new plantations.
Biggers master has become violence itselfsomething he
experiences in his own environment on a daily basis. From the
opening scene of the novelwhich finds Bigger at war with a black
rat in a small one-room apartment he shares with his mother, brother,
and sister, to the end of the novelwhich finds Bigger in an even
smaller space, his jail cell, Wrights Frankenstein is an
American-grown product. Bigger has become an incarcerated shell of
a man who has murdered to satisfy his yearning to be recognized as a
human being, only to be killed again by the system that created him; a
dispossessed and disinherited man in the land of plenty, looking, as
Wright argues, for a way out. It is in watching Bigger come to terms
70 Carol E. Henderson

with his own disfigurement, his own disenfranchisement that we see


the figurations of a dead man walking.
Although Petry addresses in The Street many of the issues raised
by Wright through the characterizations of her male figures
especially Boots and the Super Jones, whose basement craziness
makes him a shadow of Wrights Bigger Thomas, Petry anchors her
social critique in the portraits of her female characters as a way to
reflect on black men and women relations. She also succeeds in
reaffirming the maternal connections of black mother/womanhood so
often missing in the sociological critiques of Wrights work. Wrights
deep animus with the maternal is clearly seen in not only his self-
made narrative Black Boy, but also in the numerous studies of his
characterizations of women. Wright is not alone in this instance. Yet,
given his prominence at the time, his portraits stand head and
shoulders above other insensitive treatments of black women during
that era. As Malin Walther reiterates, Brooksand I would argue
Petrymark [their] delineation of new, uncharted aesthetic space in
the context of Wrights dominance over Chicago Renaissance literary
aesthetics, which emphasized a sociological perspective and protest
literature (144).

Petry, Brooks and Hurston honor to some degree Wrights


assumptions of the inescapability of racism and poverty in certain
cultural arenas by redefining the communicative aspects of body and
voice within the space of the narrative. In this respect each author
evokes Wrights literary aesthetic in order to revise it. And as such,
interrogates the ideological mappings of cultural and spiritual renewal
that do not necessarily fall within the predictable prescriptions of
normalcy, as Jacqueline Bryant surmises, but the unpredictable
freedom of self-definition (459).
It is in the currents of this rhythm that these artists find a space to
refashion a self that liberates the voice of the silent. And in doing so,
they call forth the muted stories of their sisters, providing another
place for which their spirits may enter in.

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.

Native Son belongs in the intellectual tradition in which Richard


Wright denounces the impact of slavery and colonization on African
Americans. Moreover, the novel is part of the internationalist
scholarship, including Black Power, in which Wright decries the
consequences of Western oppression on the formerly enslaved or
colonized populations of the United States and Africa. When it was
first published, the book 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.
In order to suggest the connections between Native Son and Black
Power, one must place Wrights condemnation of racism in the
United States alongside his repudiation of colonial tyranny in Africa.
This methodology surely reveals the radicalism that overpowers the
ephemeral Eurocentrist, elitist, and condescending views that Wright
76 Babacar MBaye

developed about Africans in the 1950s. Unearthing this radicalism


shows the unresolved duality in Wrights perceptions of the West and
Africa and contradicts the narrow interpretations of his work as either
anti-African or anti-Third World.
Although it is about Bigger Thomas, a young African American
man who reacts under the pressure of American racism and social
injustices during the 1930s, Native Son also deals with the impact of
slavery on African Americans and the relationships between African
Americans and Africans. These international dimensions of Native
Son are unknown, however, primarily because critics tend to interpret
the book mainly as a sociological exploration of the effects of racism
on African Americans of the 1930s. Although this type of
interpretation is valid, it loses impetus because it fails to analyze the
book as Wrights representation of the effects of slavery on African
Americans, which is fully understood only when it is contrasted with
his exploration, in Black Power, of the consequences of slavery on
Africans.
In The Road Out of the Black Belt: Sociologys Fictions and
Black Subjectivity in Native Son (2000), Cynthia Tolentino places
Native Son in the scholarship about race, class consciousness, Black
agency, national development, modernity and progress that was
developed by the Progressives and the Chicago School sociologists in
the United States in the 30s (378-379). Tolentinos thesis, while it is
pertinent and accurate, localizes Wrights concepts of race, class, and
Black agency within an African American context only, failing to
suggest their international dimensions.
Similarly, in Where Is Biggers Humanity? Black Male
Community in Richard Wrights Native Son, Aim J. Ellis narrowly
interprets Native Son as a story about Biggers relationships with the
other black males and about how poor urban black males created
racial community, combated social alienation in Chicago throughout
the 1930s, and ultimately made sense of a world filled with racial
terror (24). Though it is primarily African American, the racial
community in Native Son is really more Pan-African because Wright
traces the racism against Bigger to the oppression of Europeans
against Blacks during slavery in Africa. Biggers status as a Pan-
Africanist is suggested in Wendy W. Walters argument in At Home
in Diaspora: Black International Writing that Bigger was, like
Wright, an uncertain Black nationalist, who lived in in-between a
natal, yet prohibited, Americanism and a vague Negro nationalism
(5). Inspired by the trans-nationalist flavor in Walters interpretation
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 77
A Transnationalist Interpretation

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:

As historical prototypes, Bigger and Okonkwo seem to share a common


genesis: their African ancestry. As cross-cultural symbols of contemporary
society, what motivates their behavior and personality is inherent in the state
of affairs defined by their respective societies. (327)

Sengovas approach has practical thematic and methodological


values because it goes beyond characterization and localization to
emphasize what he defines as Pan-Africanism, that is, the shared
struggle for political emancipation and self-determination (332) of
African Americans and Africans. In order to know how the two
struggles relate, one must examine Wrights views about the trans-
Atlantic slave trade and the class status of Blacks living on both sides
of the Atlantic Ocean. By contrasting Native Sons examination of the
consequences of the Atlantic trade on African Americans with Black
Powers exploration of the effects of slavery and colonization on
Africans, one clearly understands how Wright grappled with his own
in-betweenness and the plight of oppressed people.

The Historical Context of Native Son

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

to death a White woman named Florence Johnson. Nixon was


executed on June 16, 1939 in the Cook County electric chair in
Chicago. Nixon was an example of a northern Black man, like Bigger,
who became a victim of American legal injustices during the 1930s.
Focusing on Biggers execution, Michael J. Pfeifer rightly argues in
Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 that
Wright captured well the social experience and rhetoric of a
transition in the American legal system in which

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)

Many Blacks, including those who migrated North in the 1920s


and 30s or were children of migrants in the North, were subjected to
various forms of oppression. As Bart Landry points out in The New
Black Middle Class, low-paying jobs, discrimination, and segregation
forced most of the urban Black population in the North to poverty,
disillusionment, and misery (21). Reflecting on the plight of African
Americans during the 1940s, Ralph Ellison said in his 1941 review of
Native Son:

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)

One of the effects of Jim Crow segregation that Wright shows in


Native Son is the class-based and institutionalized forms by which
White Americans continued to exploit African Americans.
Consequently, at Biggers trial, Max says, The relationships between
the Thomas Family and the Dalton family was that of renter to
landlord, customer to merchant, employee to employer. The Thomas
family got poor and the Dalton family got rich (362). Mr. Dalton
pays Bigger $ 25 a month from which he deducts the monthly rent of
the Thomases. While he makes a million dollar profit from renting
rat-infested houses to African Americans, Mr. Dalton invests nothing
in the Black community besides donating ping-pong tables to the
Youth Club and token money to the NAACP. Being increasingly
aware of the inequality between his social and economic conditions
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 79
A Transnationalist Interpretation

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.

Representation of Slavery in Native Son and Black Power

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:

We must deal here with a dislocation of life involving millions of people, a


dislocation so vast as to stagger the imagination; so fraught with tragic
consequences as to make us rather not want to look at it or think of it; so old
that we would rather try to view it as an order of nature and strive with uneasy
conscience and false moral fervor to keep it so. (358)

Maxs statement reflects Wrights recognition of the drastic


impact of slavery on people of African descent, such as the loss of
African lives, human capital, labor, and cultures from both sides of
the Atlantic Ocean. These effects have been examined in many
historical texts including Donald Wrights African-Americans in the
Colonial Era (1990) and, more recently, by Randall Robinsons
speech The Case for Black reparations.1 Like these historians, Max
believes that Blacks continue to suffer from the violent and
institutional impact of slavery. His ideology about Blacks follows the
lead of many abolitionists who were convinced that slavery turned the
lives of African Americans into that of degradation and brutal ill-
treatment, of economic, physical and sexual exploitation, (Ranson
and Hook 93). This abolitionist conviction is consistent with Maxs
interpretation of the conditions of African Americans, whose history
was shaped by the oppression of slavery and racism, as injustice.
Max tells the jury:

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

Maxs statement reflects his strong belief that the causes of


Biggers predicament were not just the ongoing injustices and
violence that Whites continued to perpetrate against Blacks in
America during the 1930s, but also the psychological consequences of
such oppression on both Whites and Blacks. By representing White
guilt about such history as a feeling that can be as detrimental as
Biggers own hate of himself and the world, Max forces us to move
our critical attention from the psychology of terror and incrimination
of Whites and Blacks to the search for equality and justice that such
psychology negates in order to persist.
Yet, as if to contradict his own principles, Max later represents
slavery as a stage of modernity in which oppression is a normal
course of empire building and Capitalism. When he addresses the
court, Max asserts:

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)

Maxs discourse reveals Wrights interpretation of slavery more


than a historical referent; instead it is a modern experience that
developed the economic and cultural institutions of the West despite
its brutal oppression of Blacks, imperialism, and feudalism.
Resonating Wrights theory, Max now seems to ask not who is
guilty? but how did slavery modernize the dreams of empires?
revealing the unresolved duality about slavery that is apparent in
Wrights writings. Like Wright, Max views slavery as a history that
resulted not from racism, but from the Europeans search for power
outside of their own world. Drawing from Eric C. Williamss
Capitalism and Slavery, Wright developed similar views in Black
Power:

The kidnapping of poor whites, developed in England, had but to be extended


to the African shoreline and the experience gained in subjugating the poor
whites served admirably for the taming of the tribal blacks. A hungry cry for
sugar rose from all Europe, and blacks were siphoned from Africa to grow the
cane. The colonial plantation became an economic and political institution
that augmented wealth and power for a few aristocrats, spread misery for
countless blacks, and imperiled the democratic hopes of millions of whites.
(11-12)
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 81
A Transnationalist Interpretation

Judging from the fact that Wright espoused the ideology of


Williams about slavery, one could say that Wright perceived slavery
as an exploitation that arose out of Europes economic greed and
disrespect of democratic ideals. This rationale implies that only a
restoration of fair economic and political institutions in Western
societies could offset the damaging impact of slavery on modern
Blacks. This reasoning also infers that African American resistance to
slavery transformed the modern world by forcing it to reduce its
dependence on the bondage of Blacks with a reliance on the freedom
of all people.2
In the 1950s and 60s, Wright transferred this argument to an
African context by asking the questions he originally used to pose in
an African American context. While he kept asking them during his
journey in Africa in the 1950s, Wright ended up giving these
questions concrete forms in Black Power. Here, he implicitly
suggested that Africans, like African Americans, played a major part
in the development of modernity. Wright theorizes modernity as a set
of historical experiences in which both African Americans and
Africans have participated. He perceived Africans as participants in
the economic, social, and cultural development of the West from
conditions traceable to the Middle Passage. According to Weiss, the
pivotal role of Africans in the building of modernity is noticeable in
the questions that Wright asked himself before he was able to arrive at
his full conception of modernity:

To understand modernity (of which post-colonialism is another chapter) one


must understand Africa and the African Americans role in its making. At
mid-century, Wright pauses to ask: How did the Africans become slaves?
What was the impact of slavery on those who survived the Middle Passage?
What was the impact of slavery on white Europeans and Americans?
Furthering Du Boiss Would America have been America without her Negro
people? Wright contends that the Negro is Americas metaphor. (130-131)

Wrights question How did the Africans become slaves? is


answered through Maxs voice in Native Son. Max points out that
Europe needed slaves in order to become modern: Exalted by the
will to rule, they [Europeans] could not have built nations on so vast a
scale had they not shut their eyes to the humanity of other men, men
whose lives were necessary for their building (359). A number of
works such as John Thorntons Africa and the Africans in the Making
of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 and Joseph E. Inikoris The Atlantic
Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa,
the Americas, and Europe corroborate Maxs points. These historical
82 Babacar MBaye

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)

Yet although he establishes strong connections between Mr.


Thomas and himself, Wright views the former as someone who is
unable to sustain the course of history, thereby viewing Mr. Thomas
as an outsider or an antithesis in (or of) modernity. For example,
Wright mockingly says that Mr. Thomas was living in the wrong
century (32) and that he had succeeded at the moment when history
was about to nullify his triumphs, and he was already confused and
bewildered at the new social and political currents swirling about
him (32-33). Perhaps Wright was alluding to what he prejudicially
viewed as the incapability of the African leaders who acquired
nominal government of their countries from the 1950s onward to
organize and develop their nations. Wright based his reasoning on the
ethnically and religiously-based national solidarity in these countries
that he arrogantly viewed as tribalism. In this sense, for Wright,
going back to Africa was equivalent to moving from modernity into
backwardness. In her summary of the questions Wright asked
himself when he began his 1953 trip to Ghana, Weiss writes:

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)

This statement suggests the dilemma in Wrights attitudes about


Africa, a dilemma which is visible in his inability to answer this
central question: how to claim Western modernity or reclaim his
American heritage without demonizing Africans? In the end, it
appears as though Wrights prejudices about Africans and his blind
faith in the Western conception of modernity prevented him from
denouncing the injustices Europeans perpetrated in Africa without
repeating their conception of Africa as the other.
In Native Son, Wright also represents the impact that the violence
of Whites on Blacks during slavery has had in the intraracial
relationships between Blacks during modern times. One example is
when Bigger threatens to beat Gus when the latter is unwilling to help
him rob the property of a White storeowner called Old Blum. The
narrator says: He [Bigger] had transferred his fear of whites to Gus.
He hated Gus because he knew that Gus was afraid, as even he was;
and he feared Gus because he felt that Gus would consent and then he
would be compelled to go through with the robbery (28). While
transferring his fear of Whites on his Black neighbors, Bigger
internalizes the White-on-Black violence he inherited from history.
Similarly, while focusing on Biggers psychology, Houston Baker
depicts him as a character who enacts the manipulative impulse of the
White slave traders that tortured Africans and directs it toward his
African American girlfriend, Bessie. Baker writes: It is not black
love (or industrial workers wages) that secures the relationship
between Bigger and Bessie as far as the former is concerned; it is
stolen capital. He [Bigger] is a murderer and petty thief who uses
Bessie as a means of passage (220). Bakers statement suggests
Biggers imitation of the exploitative and ruthless tactics that Whites
used during slavery time to oppress Blacks. Such strategies are visible
in the following passage, where Bigger justifies his violence towards
those who stand in his way by comparing it to that of the white
folks:

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:

Avatar of the violence of traders above deck, undeceived about the


exploitative intent of their tools, victim of a denigrating Western will to
dominationBessie is accessible, domestic, and unprotected. She possesses
the most lucid vision in Native Son. She is the only character in the novel (and
one among the few critics of Bigger Thomas) who realizes that Biggers
murderous course is a mistaken redaction of Western tactics of terror. (219-
220)

In this sense, Bessie represents an alternative form of resistance


against oppression that avoids the controlling and blood thirst impulse
of the White slave traders.

Wrights Representation of Africa in


Native Son and Black Power

On June 16, 1953, Wright arrived in Takoradi, Ghana, where the


nations Black president, Kwame Nkrumah, invited him. When a
young Ghanaian clerk asked him if he knew from what part of Africa
his ancestors had come, Wright arrogantly replied, Well, ... you
know, you fellows who sold us and the white men who bought us
didnt keep any records (Black Power 40). Wrights response
suggests his impression that 1) Africans do not know that most
African Americans cannot trace their roots to Africa, and that 2)
Africans are not conscious of the enormous impact of slavery on
African Americans. These beliefs, which represent Africans as
unaware of the history of African Americans, are part of the
stereotypes that Wright often revealed in his representation of the
relations between Africans and African Americans. As noticeable in
his cold response to the Ghanaian clerk, Wrights inquisitiveness
about Africans belied a sense of discomfort and resentment towards
Africans that he often revealed in his work. For example, in Native
Son, he depicts Africa as a continent inhabited by primitive people.
Slavery and Africa in Native Son and Black Power: 85
A Transnationalist Interpretation

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)

Biggers dismissal of Trader Horn suggests a personal sense of


self-denial, acculturation, and uprootedness. His rejection of African
tribalism is also reflective of Wrights own discomfort and shame
about African culture, not about the Western representation of such
culture as exotic and primitive. In this sense, Wright was, like
Bigger, confused in his personal relations with Africa because he was
ashamed of his African past even when he later pretended to embrace
it on some level. M. Lynn Weiss explains:

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)

Yet, despite his prejudice and ambivalence about Africa, Wright


was aware of his own cultural ties with the continent even when he
pretended not to acknowledge them fully. Nevertheless, Wright never
seemed to fully embrace these connections even when his intelligence
exposed him to them. In Voices of a Native Son (1990), Eugene Miller
points out:
86 Babacar MBaye

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)

The passage shows that Wrights suspicions about religion


derived from some type of agnosticism rather than from a deep-seated
resentment of one specific type of religion. Wright was skeptical of
not just African religions, but also of African American religions,
suggesting that his prejudices towards traditions were generally
arbitrary and driven by a logic that transcends nationality and
geography. However, it is undeniable that, while he was
indiscriminate about his religious views, Wright was particularly
prejudiced towards African culture, which is one of the foundations of
African American religions. In An American Hunger (1997),
Andrew Delbanco explains:

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

Therefore, Wright continued to avoid embracing and


celebrating his African traditions visibly for fear of being perceived as
a primitive in the eyes of White Americans. This fear of feeding the
Europeans exotic representation of Africans seriously hampered
Wrights search for his African roots by leaving the imprints of his
unresolved relationships with Africa.
Clearly, Native Son is an experimental novel in which Wright
denounces the social and economic consequences of slavery on
African Americans. The poverty and the limited choices that slavery
and racism imposed on African Americans are visible in the forces
that prevent Bigger from achieving equality in America, and
eventually this struggle for equality leads him to a miscalculated
violence that results in a trial and his execution. Thus, as David
Bakish points out, Biggers spiritual death predates his execution
because he is formally killed by the society that had been slowly
murdering him all his life (40).
From a cultural point of view, Biggers fatal experiences
parallel Wrights efforts to understand his American identity. Like
Bigger, Wright knew that slavery and modernity had fragmented his
identity and his position in the world. When he addressed the
audience at the First International Conference of Negro Artists and
Writers, held in Paris in 1956, he said:

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)

This statement reveals the ambiguity in Wrights perception of


his own position and identity in the modern world. As it is noticeable
in both Native Son and Black Power, Wrights dilemma in modernity
is traceable to the history of slavery that he historicizes as a tragedy
while also remaining an important catalyst of development in the
modern world. This dilemma is unsettled because Wright never fully
acknowledged his intimate relationships with Africa. And, even more
tragically, he never acknowledged the great roles that Africa played in
the development of modernity.

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:

The enslavement of blacks in America lasted 246 years. It was followed by


a century of legal racial segregation and discrimination. The two periods,
taken together, constitute the longest running crime against humanity in the
world over the last 500 years. Fifteen to twenty-five million Africans were
killed in the Middle Passage alone.
African social and economic institutions were destroyed. Languages,
religions, customs were extinguished. Whole cultures were lost. All memory
of Africas greatness in antiquity, the source civilizations of Western
civilization, were stripped from the consciousness of slaverys direct and
derivative contemporary victims.
As a result of the ravages of slavery and the racial strictures that followed
it, blacks in America were consigned to this Nations economic bottom. A
yawning gap was opened. It has been a static gap since the Emancipation
Proclamation. This condition can no longer be tolerated. Were here today to
discuss this gap and the lasting social penalties of slavery and how they might
be addressed once and for all.

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

Using Richard Wrights reference to Edgar Allan Poe in How Bigger


Was Born, the companion essay to his novel Native Son, as a point of
critical departure, this essay seeks to understand Poes deployment of
vortical symbolism in his short stories as a trope Wright embraced in the
process of conceptualizing Bigger Thomas. Wright characterized Bigger
as a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex
of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses and this essay argues that
he did so as a way to expand the terms by which naturalism could serve as
a method of social commentary and critique. Though Native Son is in step
with naturalisms embodiment of thermodynamic principles, his use of
vortical symbolism is meant to suggest the ways that in addition to the
ways the laws of conservation and dissipation governed the trajectory of
Bigger Thomas, he was equally a product of a collision of static and
kinetic forms of motion that allowed Wright to portray the systemic nature
of oppression as an indicator of Americas slow descent into entropy.
Using chaos theory as an instrument of critical intervention, this essay
seeks to understand Bigger Thomas as a figuration of surplus meaning, the
product of inadequate methods of determining the nature of the black
male subject, whose violence and rage suggest a quality of alienation and
disaffection synonymous with chaos.

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

Seems like I gotta do wrongbefore they notice me.


The Whispers, Seems Like I Gotta Do Wrong
92 Herman Beavers

I want to begin this essay by citing Richard Wrights now-famous


declaration, And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent
horror, horror would invent him. Wrights comment constitutes a
point of departure for several reasons. First, Wrights comment is
suggestive of the extent he was willing to go to implant into his
readers minds that Native Son was a work of fiction intended to
horrify rather than sentimentalize. Second, Wrights comment
anticipates Betsy Erkkilas assessment of Poes aesthetic of
whiteness, the manner in which Poes introduction of the concept of
horror into the American literary idiom was rooted in his anxiety
about blackness,1 a concern Wright gestures toward, first in Uncle
Toms Children, and later in Native Son. The third reason for
Wrights invocation is that it indicates his desire to disrupt the racial
assumptions underlying literary naturalism. Having lived in the South
and the North, Wright was left with a considerable storehouse of
horrific experiences upon which to draw for his fiction. And thus
Wright knew that the challenge he faced in Native Son was largely a
matter of fashioning a character who was reflective of naturalisms
representation of social determinism even as his life demonstrated the
turbulence generated by the persistence of black disenfranchisement
and segregation.
However, the horrors of African American life notwithstanding,
grasping the ways Wright sought to realize his intentions requires a
more nuanced approach if we are to view the novel outside of the
context of protest fiction. Wrights insistence that the horrors of the
20th Century lay beyond the scope of Poes literary imagination also
affirms that Americas tangled racial past was the only instrument
available to determine the social and historical contexts embedded
within horrors profaning of meaning. In making the pointed
statement that white writers represented the life preserver of [his]
hope to depict Negro life in fiction, Wright may have been
suggesting that Poe represented a touchstone because the gothic and
its fascination with the death in life, offered him a way to
conceptualize what it meant to be Bigger Thomas. Hence, Wrights
reference to Poe may be less about refuting or challenging him and
much more about his sense that Native Son constituted an
amplification of Poes body of work.2
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 93
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son

Much of our critical understanding of Native Son rests comfortably


on the assumption that the novels main intent, as Louis Menand
insists, was to paint racial injustice in primary colors straight out of
the naturalist paintbox (81). But what if Wright saw Native Son as a
much more speculative gambit? It would be easy to follow up
Wrights observation about Edgar Allan Poe simply by working ones
way through his novels to see where Wright reconstituted Poes
symbolism, but what might be more useful for our purposes is to see
how Native Son sought to expand (if not reimagine outright) the
naturalist project. After all, it is perhaps too late in the day to insist
that over 60 years of critical practice have yet to limn Wrights intent.
However, expanding the terms we use to ascertain the strategies
operative within naturalism could help to resituate Native Son in the
critical imaginary.3 And it could be that such an endeavor, ascertained
through a determination of Wrights relationship to Poe, leads to a
fresh approach to Wrights fiction, one that might also illuminate a
conscious desire to enlarge the tenets of naturalism.
Investigating Wrights attraction to Poe begins by turning to
several of Poes short stories, including his first publication,
Metzengerstein (1832), MS Found in a Bottle (1833), The Fall
of the House of Usher (1839) and finally, A Descent into the
Maelstrom (1841). What each of these fictions share is Poes use of
the vortex as a symbol of natures destructive power, but also, by the
time he publishes Descent, the crossroads between different planes
of existence. In the first story, the Palace Metzengerstein is consumed,
along with its master, in a whirlwind of chaotic fire. And the
narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher watches in horror as the
ruined house disappears in the fierce breath of the whirlwind. The
narrator of MS Found in a Bottle describes the sudden arrival of a
storm which kills the entire crew of a ship sailing the Malaysian sea.
Caught in the throes of the tremendous storm, only the narrator and an
old Swede remain aboard as the ship languishes in a vortex in which
all around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering
desert of ebony. Soon, the ship and the Swede disappear into the
deep abyss of black water, but the narrator saves himself by leaping
onto the rigging of a gigantic ship, peopled by a crew imbued with
the spirit of Eld. The narrator, who has authored the eponymous
manuscript, falls into what Charles Minahen describes as an anti-
reality, reminiscent of the event horizon of a black hole (104), where
none of the crew acknowledge his existence and from which he never
escapes. In an ingenious turn, the manuscript is all that remains of the
94 Herman Beavers

narrator, as if to suggest narrativity alone can withstand the force of


the vortex.4
In A Descent into the Maelstrom, the reader finds a story
narrated by a young man who encounters a sailor, with white hair, in a
weakened state of health, who relates his escape from what he refers
to as the Moskoe-strom, or maelstrom. As is often the case in Poes
fiction, reflective perhaps of his propensity to create a beautiful effect
that is nonetheless destructive, the sailor finds himself thinking about
the likelihood of death, but not with terror as the reader might expect.
Strangely, upon entering the vortex, the sailor says, I felt more
composed than when we were only approaching [the maelstrom].
Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of
terror which unmanned me at first (169). The sailor survives, then,
because he comes to regard the maelstrom as a circumstance
understood through ratiocination, and he opts for self-preservation
over fraternal obligation, as if the vortex can only abide the assertion
of personal autonomy. Far from representing a mysterious force, the
maelstrom is both a natural force governed by the principles of nature
and the product of random chance (an example of the order to be
found in chaos). But the sailors deliverance comes at a steep price:
the loss of his youthful vigor with weakened limbs and unstrung
nerves; scientific thinking depletes rather than invigorates.
Readers can only conclude that the manner in which scientific
curiosity displaces terror intimates the ways that Poes fiction, like his
poems, is deeply embedded in the socio-historical traumas of his
time . (61) Thus, when we look at the vortical symbols in Poes
fiction we must be mindful of the fact that a vortex is the product of
opposing forces, a juxtaposition of stasis and violence (103), with
turbulence as the result.5 The most important trauma of Poes time, of
course, grew out of Americans national sin: slavery. If the gothic
proceeds from the eruption of private sin into public space, then the
forces that produce the vortex are analogous to mans inability to live
a life free from sin.
Teresa Goddu has argued that gothic novels actively engaged
issues of slavery (230). And Goddu further asserts, The terror of
possession, the iconography of entrapment and imprisonment, and the
familial transgressions found in the gothic novel were also present in
the slave system (230). That Poe consistently utilizes descriptions of
the vortex whose most salient feature is that it appears to be ebony
or a wall of blackness, intimates that what lies at the heart of his
deployment of vortical symbolism is the sense that the right to own
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 95
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son

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

an instance of what he calls negative sentimentality. Along with


James Miller, readers could view the novel as the story of Biggers
quest for voice and audience. And they can finally, as Jerold Savory
recommends, note that Bigger can be likened to Job. But remembering
that Elijah saw God in the whirlwind leads me in a different direction.
Wrights description of Bigger Thomas as a hot and whirling vortex
of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses (445), communicates
his sense that he saw his role as a write to investigate the nature of
chaos as it resided in the orderly, systematic denial of social justice to
blacks. Here, Wright invokes the destructive power of Poes
maelstrom, but does so to suggest that Biggers subjectivity can be
likened to vortical turbulence which thus accounts for the novels
depiction of violence and rage. As I examined this imagery
throughout the novel, I was struck by the recurrence of vortical
symbolism, running throughout Native Son. Again and again, Biggers
subjectivity is likened to vortical turbulence, or Bigger is discovered
in the midst of figurative or actual turbulence.
In his book, Beautiful Chaos, Gordon Slethaug describes
turbulence as a mess of disorder at all scales, small eddies within
large ones. It is unstable. It is highly dissipative, meaning that
turbulence drains energy and creates drag It is motion turned random
(63). He goes on to talk about the field of stochastics, a field of
mathematics and economics that is most often concerned with chance,
unpredictability, and randomness. Stochastics is a necessary
component in this essay largely due to the fact that it functions in the
humanities, Slethaug notes, as a metaphor for the confusion and
uncertainty that sometimes accompanies unpredictability (64).
Slethaugs description leads to my further insistence that Native
Son is a novel best understood through the advent of chaos theory.
This assertion rests on several important postulates. First, at its heart,
Native Son is a heuristic text, growing out of Wrights sense that
African Americans possessed no fictional works dealing with [the]
problems associated with life in Chicagos Black Belt. In writing
Native Son, Wright sought, in keeping with the dictates of the
naturalist project, to investigate the forces acting on a Bigger Thomas.
A second postulate is that Native Son is fixated on a local event. For
while it is true that the novel places a heavy emphasis on portraying
the injustice of African Americans plight, Wright ultimately chooses
to set the novel in and around Chicagos Black Belt. This is not to
suggest that Wright was not seeking to ruminate upon the collective
predicament of African Americans.8 But Wrights novel created such
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 97
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son

a memorable impact because it harnessed local events in the service


of a more wide-ranging rhetorical engagement with the meanings of
black life.9 In other words, Native Sons effectiveness (and the extent
of that effectiveness has long been up for debate) rests on its
relentless explication of a local tragedy, implying that the real danger
lay in ignoring what that tragedy portends on a grander scale.10
Wrights description of Biggers 1-5 in How Bigger Was Born is
meant to suggest the ways that global forms of analysis issue, not
from universal truths, but from local phenomena that recur again and
again.11 It is not an inaccurate assessment of Native Son to say that it
chronicles the tragic outcomes to be found in a system of oppression.
And hence the last postulate, which is that Native Son arises from
Wrights sense that the U.S. was a system spiraling down into
entropy. As such, Bigger Thomas provided him with a way to show
how a minor event could create major forms of social turbulence.12
Wright accomplishes this by working out the microscopic fluctuations
within Bigger Thomas that ultimately lead from the deaths of Mary
Dalton and Bessie Mears to his own death13 and to the macroscopic
social disruption evidenced by the amount of manpower and
journalistic space devoted to Biggers crime. Put another way, in
Native Son, the vortex symbolizes the manner in which blockages
economic, spiritual, cultural, and ideologicalcreate the occasion for
turbulence to form.14 Remembering that systems of turbulence are
dissipative, requiring periodic infusions of energy to sustain them, I
want to advocate that Wrights novel worked to deconstruct the point
made at the end of his autobiographical essay, The Ethics of Living
Jim Crow, where a friend of Wrights observes, Lawd, man, ef it
wuznt for them ol polices n them ol lynch-mobs, there wouldnt be
nothin but uproar down here! (15) This observation is worthy of
note, not only because it gives voice to the disciplinary regimes in
place to stymie black social aspirations, but also because the speaker
is so secure in the soundness of this repressive logic. This is evident
when readers consider that the observation is a response to the
question, How do Negroes feel about the way they have to live?
There are deeper implications embedded in this conceptual pairing: it
takes violence, administered on a consistent basis for the slightest
transgression, to hold social turbulence at bay, prevent it from
becoming a quotidian circumstance. Posing Bigger as a radical
departure from the fear and intimidation characteristic of black mens
lives in the South, Wrights description of Biggers snarled and
confused nationalist feelings likewise suggests the ways that his
98 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.

In his book Bodies and Machines, Mark Seltzer likens literary


naturalism to a machine whose ultimate aim is to manage the
problems of production and reproduction. According to Seltzer, the
achievement of the naturalist novel appears at least in part in the
devising of a counter-model of generation that incorporates and works
to manage these linked, although not equivalent, problems of
production and reproduction (25). Noting the presence of the steam
engine in Frank Norriss novel The Octopus, Seltzer observes that
naturalisms conception of force is a restatement of the first and
second laws of thermodynamics. In Seltzers view, the two
fundamental principles of thermodynamics, the law of conservation
and the law of dissipation, operateboth thematically and formally
in the naturalist narrative (29). And he concludes, what the
naturalist aesthetic requires, then, is a principle of generation that
incorporates rather than opposes the machine, a mechanics that forms
part of its textuality (36).
What I would suggest is that Wrights approach to naturalism
reflects certain thermodynamic principles, but these are merged with
the stochastic principles to be found in the concept of turbulent flow.
As we will see, Bigger Thomass act of violence is an act of self-
creation, an attempt to nullify female reproduction and conserve
masculine energies. But it is just as much an occasion demonstrating
that along with production and reproduction, naturalism depicts the
social blockages that produce in their turn, vortices of discontent. To
understand Native Sons renovation of naturalist aesthetic
conventions, I want to contrast it to the example of Theodore
Dreisers short story Nigger Jeff, published in 1918. Though Wright
admired Dreisers writing so much that he had asked himself how
Dreiser would write about Chicagos South Side, we see in Nigger
Jeff a story that exemplifies naturalisms acceptance of racialized
thought (60).
Of particular interest is Dreisers description of how witnessing a
lynching transforms the storys hero, Elmer Davies
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 99
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son

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)

The storys fundamental concern is the transformation Davies


undergoes from dilettante to professional. As an interpreter of events,
Davies task is, interestingly, not a matter of objectivity. Clearly, his
reaction to the mother, his sudden interest in the story at hand and its
potential for moving his readers, making them see, are characteristic
of naturalisms deployment of the visual as an instrument working in
the service of rhetorical force. This position is made all the more
affecting when we arrive at the storys last words, when Davies cries
out, Ill get it all in! He does this feelingly, if triumphantly, as if
he has come to understand his writerly task as one in which passion
and meticulousness are linked. Further he recognizes that in a story of
victimization such as this, narrative power resides in the writers
ability to capture the dualism of tragedy. Dreiser describes victims
mother as an old black mammy doubled up and weeping, which
leads Davies to realize that in reporting on the lynching, there is also
the mothers guiltlessnessher love (367), wondering how one
could balance that against the other (367).
Naturalisms depiction of generative acts are to be found in
Dreisers story, but with a difference. Mrs. Ingalls cries of woe, as
they will be preserved in Davies story, lead us to understand his
promise to get it all in, as the attempt to restore the integrity of the
black female womb. Mrs. Ingalls guiltlessness, points to the
manner in which black reproduction is always already caught up in
the flow of social determinism such that, irrespective of any effort
she might make to raise a good son, black men are always destined to
be brutes. In order to balance Ingalls crime against the mothers
guiltlessness, he must represent Ingalls as the product of a black
mammy, a figure historically meant to serve white interests. As Toni
Morrisons The Bluest Eye makes clear, the black mammy is
distracted from her childrens everyday plight by the fact that she is in
a constant state of mourning regarding the loss of her own sexuality,
100 Herman Beavers

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

Brockway, the paint factory employee who appears in Ralph Ellisons


Invisible Man, Bigger is the machine inside the machine.
Moreover, the job itself constitutes a regulatory circumstance.
When Mr. Dalton informs Bigger that he is going to hire him, he tells
Bigger that hell receive $25 dollars a week, an extra five dollars over
what the job calls for. Bigger is to provide his family with $20 so his
mother can keep [his] brother and sister in school and keep the
other five for himself. From the start, Biggers relationship to his job
is organized around balanced apportionment: feeding the furnace and
cleaning it, money for his family and money for himself, maintaining
the appearance of the frightened good boy for the Daltons against
the image of street-wise hustler he holds with his friends.
The optimism Bigger feels on the first day of his job represents a
radical departure from what he felt at the start of the novel, when he
tells Gus, Its like I was going to do something I cant help Here,
Bigger articulates the ways naturalism negates the idea of personal
choice. Bigger resides inside a force that he cannot fully articulate,
much less control. In keeping with naturalisms mandate of depicting
case histories of bodies, sexualities, and populations, on their way
to no good end (Seltzer 43), Native Son seeks to represent Biggers
entrapment in a flow of events that will spell his demise. I reckon
we the only things in this city that cant go where we want to go and
do what we want to do, he complains to Gus (20). And. like a
furnace, Bigger can only conclude that his life is under the control of
someone else:
Every time I think about it I feel like somebodys poking a red-hot
iron down my throat. Goddamit, look! 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 like living in jail. Half the time I feel
like Im on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in
the fence(20)

What makes regulation such a powerful trope in Native Son, then,


is the manner in which it sustains binary forms of existence, where the
tactics of control Seltzer describes as symptomatic of the naturalist
novel are felt: each time the protagonist determines the nature of the
forces holding him in place, regulatory forces come into play to tamp
down the impulse to mount resistance (Seltzer 43).
However, it is here that readers can also note Wrights use of the
vortex as a figuration of Biggers turn toward self-creation. Just after
Bigger and Gus watch a pigeon fly into the air, Bigger says, Now, if
102 Herman Beavers

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

racial resistance have grown into a collective form of disobedience


requiring government intervention. Without recognizing it, Bigger and
Gus have used the game to give conceptual shape to the racist
anxieties motivating the brand of social control exerted over
inhabitants of the Black Belt. In other words, Bigger and Gus employ
the vortical act of raising sand to explain the workings of racial
oppression, which results from the collusion of government and
business. Here we find Wrights complicated turn on naturalisms use
of the symbols of mechanical production. He insinuates that the
government machine is mindful of drag as an impediment to
system efficiency and thus it works to eradicate the possibility before
it can take shape. 15 The fact that systems are dissipative, spiraling
down to randomness, suggests that Wrights experiments in
naturalism sought to conjoin thermodynamics and stochastics because
he understood his role as an artist was the portrayal of disorder, the
machine in danger of spinning out of control. Wrights artistic ethos is
restated in John A. Williams novel The Man Who Cried I Am, in
which Harry Ames, a character clearly based on Wright, declares, I
want trouble to be my middle name when I write about America. I
wouldnt like it if a single person slept well. (Williams, 49) Williams
translates Wrights intent as the antithesis of a desire to explain the
race problem for the majority. Seeing his writing as a gateway to
the horrific, Wrights fiction eschewed the rich possibilities in the
blues tradition, and used chaos as a way to chart the presence of
surplus meaning.16 Though it is easy to view the purpose of protest
fiction as one of offering a plea for redistributive justice, Wrights
fiction seeks to portray social disequilibrium, as if he wishes the
reader to understand that systems (political, ideological, social, etc.)
initiateand indeed, seek to perpetuatea state of imbalance. This
might explain why Wrights fiction seems to revel in those moments
where the disasters in his fiction become the occasion for didacticism
rather than complexity (Menand 80).

Because my space is limited, I am unable to discuss each and every


manifestation of vortical symbolism in Native Son. In the interest of
brevity, I want to focus in on the scenes leading up to and taking place
in the movie theater. I also want to introduce the idea of the feedback
loop. Though the concept can be confusing, it nonetheless provides
readers with a way to understand how Wright was able to stay true to
104 Herman Beavers

naturalisms deployment of thermodynamic principles while


expanding it to reflect stochastic principles. The feedback loop is an
essential concept for both fields and, once again, it argues for the need
to understand naturalisms social project within the context of chaos
theory. Second, and more directly, the feedback loop allows us to
account for Biggers duality: his regulatory function and his
embodiment of vortical force.
According to Gordon Slethaug, a feedback loop is an aspect of
far-from-equilibrium systems (57). We can best understand how the
feedback loop works by thinking about the thermostat that controls a
furnace. It allows conditions to be regulated and modulated because it
generates a negative feedback loop. As the room grows colder, the
thermostat turns on the heat (or, if it hot, the air conditioning) in order
to maintain a constant temperature. In a closed system, a negative
feedback loop maintains order, holding entropy at bay because it
limits the amount of variability in the system. A positive feedback
loop, on the other hand, is distinguished by its lack of regulatory
functions. Positive feedback loops, because they lack external checks
to maintain equilibrium, are characterized by their potential to spin
out of control. Here, one aspect [of the system] is tremendously
amplified, possibly creating discomfort and instability (57). Let me
also note here that feedback loops exemplify the ways that local forms
of instability can transmute themselves into global trauma or they can
be contained within a closed system where sufficient energy exists to
maintain equilibrium, in short, forcing local instability to remain so.
What this means is that readers should not disconnect the scenes in
the movie theater from the plan to rob Blums store. The violent
confrontation between Bigger and Gus after the movie exemplifies the
workings of a negative feedback loop. Knowing that robbing a white
man constitutes trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an
alien white world [could] be turned loose upon him and his friends,
Bigger views the plan as a way to collapse the influence of the
negative feedback loop that controls life in the Black Belt. For if he
and his friends can enact a successful trespass, Bigger can actualize
the conditions that exist at the end of the game of playing white.
Readers should also recall the language used in the game to denote
black resistance, raising sand, a nod to the vortical force contained
in a sandstorm, a positive feedback loop that resists human
intervention.
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 105
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son

Conversely, it is also clear that the robbery offers the possibility of


generative force. Robbing Blum represents a form of energy sufficient
to divert Biggers attention away from the social blockages preventing
him from leading a life flying planes or owning capital. In view of
patriarchys imperative to conserve energy, be it in the form of
property or progeny, Biggers desire for release points to the ways
that nihilism, as Cornel West reminds us, is held in check by
stimulation (17). Consider how Bigger dramatizes this state of mind:
Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling
of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it. He
longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and
drain off his energies. He wanted to run. Or listen to some swing
music. Or laugh or joke. Or read a Real Detective Story Magazine.
Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. (28)

Biggers nihilistic impulse is, in itself, a vortical symbol in light of


Biggers sense that only stimulation can slow his descent into the
maelstrom. Consider this point alongside the description in A
Descent into the Maelstrom by Poes sailor:
Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large
masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller
articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and
staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had
taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me
as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to
watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our
company. (171)

What appears to be a wall of blackness is actually shot through


with light sufficient to illuminate objects in the embrace of the
whirl that speak to the manner in which the vortex seems to be
history incarnate, a repository of human existence in which notions of
value or distinction collapse. Biggers desire for stimulation is such
that it can assume any number of forms, ranging from physical
exertion to reading pulp fiction to emotional levity. As Wrights
portrayal of Biggers dilemma suggests, the most efficient way to
regulate the descent into the abyss is, ironically, a matter of
dissipation, release. But even if the stimulus assumes sexual form, it
is not a quickening of body and soul. Instead, Bigger seeks a means of
deceleration to slow his descent.
It is through the need for stimulation that Bigger shifts his desire
away from his need for money to the desire to see a movie. In a
106 Herman Beavers

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.

Remembering the assertion above that Wright saw Native Son as a


heuristic project, let me suggest, along with Knoespel, that extending
inquiry can be compared to the play of surplus meaning. Which is
to say that turbulence provides the occasion for Wright to suggest that
black life is, by definition, a matter of dialectics but perhaps more
importantly, also a matter of surplus meaning.23 I would submit that
Vortical Blues: Turbulence, Disorder, 109
and the Emplotment of Surplus Meaning in Native Son

whatever one may think about Bigger Thomas, or Wrights level of


artistry, what Native Son confronts us with, and this is particularly the
case in Book Three, is the politics of surplus meaning. And in light of
this, let me suggest that Wrights ultimate aim in Native Son was to
express the inadequacy of synechdochical thinking.
What is significant about Book Three is not only that Max fails
and Buckley succeeds (Max assuming a position reflective of the 2nd
law of thermodynamics, Buckley reflecting the 1st [remember, his
poster announces, YOU CANT WIN]) but rather that Wrights
prose generates a gloss of surplus meaning. To be sure, Wrights
explication of Biggers interior state might have been more deftly
handled, but I would suggest that what made the novel such a
watershed event becomes clear when we try to imagine another point
in American literary history where one could find two white men
caught in a state of disagreement on what it means to be black in the
United States. And didacticism not withstanding, both mens long-
winded analyses lead us to the conclusion we might expect: both are
wrong. Maxs blindness is evident in his declaration that every
Negro in Americas on trial out there today, and Buckleys is
apparent when he states, Every decent white man in America ought
to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the
woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his
belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death
(409). Here, Bigger moves from mammal to lizard to reptile, as if his
place outside the human race is so fraught with taxonomic slippage
that making Bigger an example constitutes a proliferation of meaning
where surplus meaning is the result. What characterizes both
statements is their attempt to globalize the meaning of Biggers trial
when it is nothing more than a local circumstance. Where Max is
more accurate than Buckley lies in Maxs awareness that micro-
disturbances like Biggers often incite macro-responses from the
status quo, which only heightens the sense that white supremacy
signals a system in danger of collapse.
The grounds to understand this goal are available from Wrights
own characterization of his life growing up in the South. As Abdul
JanMuhammed has argued, Richard Wrights achievement, both as an
artist and as a product of the South, was his ability to resist the
hegemonic negation of his subjectivity and to create art that
transformed that resistance into prose narrative. (107-108).
When Bigger declares, What I killed for mustve been good! we
are meant to see it as both triumph and malfunction; the horror that
110 Herman Beavers

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

Brivic, Sheldon. Conflict of Values: Richard Wrights Native Son in NOVEL: A


Forum on Fiction 7. 3 (Spring 1974): 231-245.
Brown, Stephanie and Keith Clark. Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood?
Meditations on Topos and Social Menace, An Introduction in Callaloo. 26.3
(Summer, 2003): 732-737.
114 Herman Beavers

Dayan, Joan. Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves in American Literature.
66.2 (June 1994): 239-273
Demarest, David P. Jr. Richard Wright: The Meaning of Violence in Negro
American Literature Forum 8,3. (Autumn, 1974): 236-239.
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:
Oxford U P, 2001. (41-74)
Goddu, Teresa. The Ghost of Race: Edgar Allan Poe and the Southern Gothic in
Henry B. Wonham, ed. The Color of Criticism. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers U P ,
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
and Science. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
JanMohamed, Abdul. Negating the Negation as Form of Affirmation in Minority
Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as Subject. in Arnold
Rampersad, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Essays. Edgewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1995. (107-23)
Kennedy, J. Gerald and Liliane Weissberg, eds. Romancing the Shadow; Poe and
Race. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001
Kinnamon, Keneth,ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 1990.
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)
Menand, Louis. American Studies. New York: Farrar Strauss, and Giroux, 2002.
Miller, James A. Bigger Thomass Quest for Voice and Audience in Richard
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.
Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans. 1970. New York: Vintage Books,1984.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Thirty-Two Stories. Eds. Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine,
Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Co. 2000.
Rampersad, Arnold, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edgewood
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

Savory, Jerold. Bigger Thomas and the Book of Job: The Epigraph to Native Son in
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.
West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
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

The critical consensus established around the canon of Richard Wrights


thirteen published works has tended to divert the attention to either
Wrights particular brand of Black Nationalism or to his creation of the
Negro as a metaphor of the modernalienated, deracinated, and
disorientedWestern man. Instead, this essay will attempt to analyze the
novels engagement with American idealism from within the African
American tradition which has, from its inception, both embraced and
criticized American exceptionalism. Native Son continues holding a
prominent position in both the American and the African American
literary traditions because, I would like to contend, Wright inscribed the
novel in the national cultural continuum of the American jeremiad,
exploiting its rhetoric, symbolism and typology, rather than because the
novel successfully combined the more international or universal tenets of
Marxism, naturalism, or existentialism. The analysis stems from Wright,
Ellison and Morrisons coincident observations about the centrality of the
Black experience in America, an experience that returns the image of the
nations betrayal of its foundational principles, as well as it reflects the
humanity of blacks and their legitimate claim to freedom and equality.

Above all, we must not hesitate to discover the Americanness of Richard


Wright. [...] Wrights departures from Afro-American traditions generally
serve to confirm his place in the mainstream of American letters, and, for the
moment, it seems like the knowledgeable Afro-Americanist critic is best
suited to articulate Wrights stature in both literary worlds.
Robert B. Stepto

The critical consensus established around the canon of Richard


Wrights thirteen published works, which simplistically proclaims the
success of his American production while declaring the lesser quality
of his European output, has tended to divert the attention to either
120 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

Wrights particular brand of Black Nationalism or to his creation of


the Negro as a metaphor, a central symbol in the psychological,
cultural, and political systems of the West as a whole (Gilroy 158).
However, Wrights novel Native Son stands at the crossroads not of a
double, but of a triple intersection where the African American
experience works its way from the margins to the center of both
American idealism and the Western understanding of modern man.

This essay will attempt to analyze the novels engagement with


American idealism from within the African American tradition which
has, from its inception, both embraced and criticized American
exceptionalism.1 It is my contention that the novels status as both an
American and an African American classic is due, to a large extent, to
Wrights adherence to the sanctioned discourse of the nations
exceptionalism, but by employing the African American rhetoric that
has consistently pointed to its shortcomings. Native Son can also be
seen as a contributor to the coherence of a national (American)
identity while simultaneously reinforcing a sense of an African
American national identity. Furthermore, the novels universalist call,
based on its Marxist content and on the creation of Bigger as a
representative modern man, connects directly with the pursuit of
universal social perfectibility which lies at the core of American
exceptionalism.
Wrights novel appears to be, therefore, a doubly native product,
just like its main character, of whom Wright himself writes: Bigger
was attracted and repelled by the American scene. He was an
American, because he was a native son; but he was also a Negro
nationalist in a vague sense because he was not allowed to live as an
American (How Bigger xxiv). In spite of the novels blemishes,
imperfections [...] [and] unrealized potentialities (Wright xxxiii), its
engagement with the meta-narrative of the nation warrantees its
central position in the American literary canon, whose creation
responded from the beginning to a standard of Americanness rather
than a standard of excellence (Baym 125)this, however, is not to
say that the American canon of literature is lacking any form of
excellence.
Likewise, Native Son responds to the conjunction of form and
social political ideology that has historically shaped the African
American canon of literatureas the contributors to Houston Baker
and Redmonds Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s agree
Native Sons ideology of form: 121
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

upon. This essays objective will, therefore, be the study of Native


Sons ideology of form, to borrow from Frederic Jameson. It is my
argument that Wrights engagement with American idealism grounds
his work both in the African American and in the national cultural
continuum of protest and self-affirmation as articulated by the
jeremiad rhetorical tradition.2

American Exceptionalism in Black and White

During the era of the American Revolution, literature became


instrumental for the promotion of nationalism. As new writers aspired
to be equal to the challenge of the new nation (Baym 125), old texts
gained momentum when put to the service of the exceptionalist cause,
and the American literary canon was shaped to promote an
exceptionalist ideology.3 The Puritan colonial experience offered, for
example, John Winthrops sermon A Model of Christian Charity,
which became the paradigmatic text of Americas exceptional origins.
This sermon reinforced the republican idea of a model society using
the metaphor of the City upon a hill, and added the notion of the
United States special status as Gods Chosen People. In the
nineteenth century this would support the notion of Americas
Manifest Destiny, backing the countrys expansionist and
imperialist thrust. Religion and secular ideology joined forces to
produce the exceptionalist American civil religion.4
However, by the time that the democratic values of the nascent
nation had been articulated in the Declaration of Independence
(1776), which confidently asserted the self-evident truths that all
men are created equal and that among their inalienable rights are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it had become obvious
that the American reality was a long way off from achieving its ideals
with regard to race, class and gender. As historian Joyce Appleby
points out, American exceptionalism emerged as a peculiar form of
Eurocentrism which offered eighteenth-century Americans a
collective identity before they had any other basis for spiritual unity
(25), but it foreclosed any other interpretation of reality, and turned
the Other invisible. The resulting construction of a national identity
shunned any interpretation that, acknowledging the authentic ethnic
diversity of the country, might have included a multicultural
perspective. Slavery, especially, contradicted the egalitarian
122 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

democratic ideals by excluding people of African descent from fully


participating in American society.
Like any ideology, American exceptionalism conditions thought,
its structures and figures, becoming inescapable; what Louis
Althusser calls a representation of the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence (162). Accordingly,
the process of organizing American coherence through a displacing
Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony
(8), as Toni Morrison puts it in her 1992 study, Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. This displacement was not,
however, an erasure, and Africanism acquired a covert presence,
characterizing American exceptionalism and its cultural
manifestations, as Morrison insists:

In the scholarship on the formation of an American character and the


production of a national literature, a number of items have been catalogued. A
major item to be added to the list must be an Africanist presencedecidedly
not American, decidedly other. (48)5

The repression of the problems of race, class and gender has


proven highly productive of canonical American literature (Byers
57), which usually critiques from within the ideology the breach
between the ideal and the reality. Thus, as Toni Morrison perceptively
notes, the optimistic spirit which was grounded in the Enlightenment
humanist belief in the inherent goodness of man was paradoxically
paired in literature with explorations of evil that are, more often than
not, translated into symbols and rituals involving blackness and
whiteness, the absence or presence of guilt, fear, sin, death. Literature
becomes, hence, one significant site of the return of the
exceptionalist repressed (Byers 57). Hence, many of the present-day
canonical American texts, either by white or black authors
Winthrop, Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T.
Washington, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and
Toni Morrison, among many otherscontain an intriguing textual
tension that relies heavily on the possibility of Americas failure to
live up to its ideal, to its exceptionalist destiny. However, their
critique usually emerges from within the ideology, and does not
challenge the ideological paradigm (62).
Richard Wright is a notable addition to the above list, as his angry
indictment in Native Son signaled a point of inflection in the protest
tradition of African American literature and a landmark in American
Native Sons ideology of form: 123
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:

we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain


humane values; [...] But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past
tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in
the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and
heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if
Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.
(How Bigger xiv)

Other African American writers agree with Wrights observations.


Thus, Ralph Ellison was drawn to analyze how the white American
seeks to resolve the dilemma arising between his democratic beliefs
and certain antidemocratic practices (85) in his essay Twentieth-
Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity (1946). After referring to
the denial of the blacks humanity as the rhetorical strategy
Americans used to excuse the contradictory reality of a race of people
submitted to another in a country that boasted of being the cradle of
124 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

freedom and democracy, Ellison suggests picturing the whole of


American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant
(85). This drama, Ellison argues, is reflected in the literature of the
nation, where blacks have been consistently portrayed in the works of
white Americans as stereotypes, depleted of the complex ambiguity
of the human (82). For Ellison, this false representation of blacks
both in the literary work and in the inner world of the white
American (84) is the result of a process of institutionalized
dehumanization so that white men could become more human
(85). He adds,

we see that the Negro stereotype is really an image of the unorganized,


irrational forces of American life, forces through which, by projecting them in
forms of images of an easily dominated minority, the white individual seeks to
be at home in the vast unknown world of America. Perhaps the object of the
stereotype is not so much to crush the Negro as to console the white man. (97)

In the same vein, Toni Morrison explained that Nothing


highlighted freedomif it did not in fact create itlike slavery (38),
and by the same token, nothing highlights humanity like a
dehumanized race. Deriving from Ellisons observations, Morrison
definitely drew attention to the Africanist presenceor absence
as the overlooked mirror held up to reflect the American psyche and
to explain the paradoxical moral anxiety at the core of American
literature. And like Ellison, Morrison concludes that blacks have
served to objectify white Americans fear of freedom, transferring
internal conflicts to a blank darkness, to conveniently bound and
violently silenced black bodies (38) (emphasis added).
African Americans have consistently contested this stigmatization
of darkness that both sanctioned the institutional oppression of blacks
and excluded them from the broader American ideals with which
they, nevertheless, usually identified (Ellison 82).6 It is precisely this
identification that returns the image of the nations betrayal of its
foundational principles, as well as the blacks humanity and their
legitimate claim to freedom and equality. And it is out of this African
American tradition that Richard Wright produces Native Son, despite
his own denial of African American forerunners.

Native Son and exceptionalism

Native Son embraces the ideology of American exceptionalismand


blends it with the Marxist doctrines that fed scientific socialism as
Native Sons ideology of form: 125
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

well as with modernist existentialism as articulated both by Euro-


centric tenets and by African American folk expressions such as the
blues7in order to launch a harsh critique of the way in which
American civil religion was falling short of its ideals by exploiting,
oppressing and contributing to the dehumanization of African
Americans, therefore leading to the moral and physical disintegration
of the nation. American exceptionalism is explored in the novel
mainly through the figures of Bigger Thomas and his lawyer Boris
Max. In How Bigger Was Born Wright points to the dual
character of Biggers social consciousness (xxiv), but underlines his
absorption of exceptionalism. Hence, Biggers identity as an
American emerges as his prime defining characteristic, even more
important than his black nationalism or his alienation from the
religion and the folk culture that sustainor fail to sustainhis own
African American community:

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)

As Biggers articulate counterpart, Max will help Wright proclaim


Biggers belonging in the American polity, as well as Biggers dual
role as either redeemer or destructor of American society and of
American idealism.
The novels angry condemnation and warning inscribes it, as I
suggested above, in the tradition of the American jeremiad,amply
studied by Sacvan Bercovitch in his seminal book The American
Jeremiad (1978), and turns it into a truly native product. As David
Howard-Pitney explains,

the term Jeremiad, meaning a lamentation or doleful complaint, derives from


the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, who warned of Israels fall and the
destruction of the Jerusalem temple by Babylonia as punishment for the
peoples failure to keep the Mosaic covenant. Although Jeremiah denounced
126 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

Israels wickedness and foresaw tribulation in the near-term, he also looked


forward to the nations repentance and restoration in a future golden age. (6)

In current scholarship, Emory Elliott observes, the term


jeremiad has expanded to include not only sermons but also other
texts that rehearse the familiar tropes of the formula (257). It is in
this latter and more ample understanding of the term jeremiad that I
refer to Native Son as Wrights ownprobably inadvertent
inscription in the (African) American rhetorical tradition of the
Jeremiad.
Wilson Moses pointed to the jeremiad as the earliest expression of
black nationalism and used the term Black jeremiad to refer to the
constant warnings issued by blacks to whites, concerning the
judgement that was to come from the sin of slavery (30-31). Being
an accepted cultural and rhetorical instrument deeply embedded in
American culture and traditionally used to express poignant social
criticism, the jeremiad allows African Americans to express their
discontent and to demand their own liberation for the redemption of
America, thus fully embracing the tradition they criticize and
becoming an integral part of the nations body politic.8
As I have explained elsewhere, African Americans have
historically used the jeremiad rhetoric with the double aim of
asserting blacks as a chosen people within another chosen nation
which, as such, had the covenantal obligation to be just to them.
Consequently, the African American struggle aims not only at their
own liberation but, through its achievement, also at the redemption of
America and, ultimately, of the entire human race. The use of the
jeremiad rhetoric by black leaders signals, as Howard-Pitney
pinpoints, their virtually complete acceptance of and incorporation
into the national cultural norm of millennial faith in Americas
promise (13), at the same time as it asserts black nationalism. This
apparent paradox of claiming ones Americanness while asserting
ones difference was paradigmatically explained by W. E. B. Du Bois
when he defined African Americans identity as being determined by
a sensation of double-consciousness. What African Americans
wish, he stated is to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro
and an American (365). The result has been a paradoxical communal
identity which is both American and separate.
Contradicting Robert Steptos view that Wright was either
unaware of, or simply refused to participate in, those viable modes of
speech represented in history by the [African American] preacher and
Native Sons ideology of form: 127
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

orator and in letters by the articulate hero (527), the novel


participates fully in the African American rhetorical tradition, as well
as in the broader American one on which the African American
jeremiad impinges. Like other African American authors who have
found in the American jeremiad a suitable genre to articulate their
protest from within American culture, simultaneously critiquing and
adhering to it, Native Son appears as an appropriation and
transformation of the genre. 9 Wright does not speak, therefore, from
the margins of Euro-American discourse (Werner 141), nor from
outside Afro-American discourse, but from the very center of both
rhetorical traditions, at the point where they intersect.
Unlike the works of the white canonical writers discussed by either
Ellison or Morrison and mentioned by Wright, Native Son brings the
Africanist presence to the forefront by focusing on the life of a black
youth whose first direct encounter with the white world from which
he is alienated leads him to accidentally kill a rich white girl. This
fortuitous crime spirals into a series of other crimesthe decapitation
and burning of Marys corpse, the incrimination of the girls
communist boyfriend, the forgery of kidnapping notes asking for
ransom, and above all, his most heinous crime, though belittled by the
white prosecuting officer of the State of Illinois, his plotting and
murdering of his girlfriend Bessie after abusing her sexually. The
context of the novel is clearly that of a disordered society where
violence can explode at any moment. This is, curiously, the wasteland
landscape from which both modernism and the jeremiad emerged.
If the parallelisms between Native Son and genres such as the
plantation tale (Stepto 530), or the blues (Werner) enrich our
interpretation of the novel by investigating its African American
rhetorical roots, to read Native Son from the prism of the (African)
American jeremiad seems even more in keeping with Wrights
aspirations to make an impact on American reality. On the one hand,
Native Son embodies above all the jeremiadic lament and
condemnation, warning, and urgent exhortation to both admit the
nations downfall and incite it to change. The direct influence of the
jeremiad as a political instrument aimed at acting upon reality
differentiates it from Wrights view of folk expression as politically
passive (Werner 144).
On the other hand, because the jeremiad is doubly grounded in the
American and the African American cultural traditions, it can reach
both audiences. Of the three stages that the American jeremiad
contemplates, citing the promise; criticism of present declension,
128 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

or retrogression from the promise; and a resolving prophecy that


society will shortly complete its mission and redeem the promise
(Howard-Pitney 8), Native Son is firmly grounded in the second
moment of declension, a time of catastrophe (Fabre 64) brought
about by the economic Great Depression of the 1930s, the ideological,
moral, and spiritual fracture that followed the Great War and
preceded World War II, and the repeated eruptions of violence in the
country during this inter-wars period.
The promise of an earthly paradise is the antithesis of the Chicago
ghetto where the Thomas family lives, which in turn proves that the
American Dream is a failure. Thus, undermining the model society
encapsulated in Winthrops figure of the City on the Hill, Wright
presents Chicago as a city of contrasts and extremes,

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)

Wrights plight in this context is that of the African American


writer who must speak with a double voice so that his dire warning
may reach both a white and a black audience. Wrights friend Jean-
Paul Sartre perceptively captured this fact when he applied
Baudelaires phrase a double simultaneous postulation to Wrights
achievement:

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)

Rather, Wright creates a JewMaxwho launches a jeremiad to


white Americans, and hence illustrates the belief of many black
writers of the 1930s in the possibility of biracial solidarity and
understanding (Bell 150). Because of his dual target audience, Wright
does not wish to present blacks in the role of the passive victim. On
the one hand, to portray blacks as objects would be detrimental for the
races self-esteem and nationalism. On the other, it would only serve
to reinforce the stereotypical misreading that reduced blackness to a
subhuman state, given the supposed inability of blacks to act
autonomously. Thus, Bigger turns into an agent, an active subject who
Native Sons ideology of form: 129
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

is able to choose within his very restrictive environmental limitations


and who accepts responsibility for his own actions. This, according to
Paul Gilroy, is an ongoing characteristic linking Wrights output
beneath his ideological shifts and the profound changes in his
philosophical perspective (154). Bigger is aware of the racist
conditions that imprison him and make it impossible to realize his
potential as a human being, or as an American, something which his
comments about his frustrated dream to become an aviator
demonstrate. He is even aware of the violent consequences of his
deferred dream when very early on in the novel he foresees his
tragic outcome:

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)

However, in spite of his awareness, Biggers double consciousness


and his internalization of racism come to the surface when he has to
face whites:

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)

It is this acceptance of the prevailing white view of black


inferiority that James Baldwin decried when he wrote,

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)

However, after murdering Mary, Bigger manages to reject the


negative, subservient identity imposed on him by, paradoxically,
embracing it and using it to his advantage. Thus, his self-conscious
adherence to the ignorant but serviceable black type allows him to
divert attention away from himself when Marys absence sets off the
alarms. Furthermore, his self-esteem as a cunning man who is able to
fool whites is reinforced: He saw it all very sharply and simply: act
like other people thought you ought to act, yet do what you wanted. In
a certain sense he had been doing just that in a loud and rough manner
130 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

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)

Wrights African American jeremiad is articulated at the end of the


novel by a white American Marxist Jew, thus establishing cross-
national, cross-racial, and cross-generational alliances that may be
read from our current standpoint as prefiguring those set up during the
Civil Rights era. However, the paradox of having a white man
articulate an African American Jeremiad indictment and exhortation
to reform was not something new in African American letters, and can
be compared to the white voices that framed slave narratives and
attested to their authenticity.
Eliminating from his novel the religious connotations of divine
election present in the classic American jeremiad sermon, Wright
addresses two American peoples whose destinies are intertwined. As
Bernard Bell puts it,

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)

Wrights naturalistic vision also involves a modern wasteland


landscape that propels the Jeremiad lament; his craftsmanship relies
on a system of symbolsa typology of biblical connotations which
allows the reader to interpret reality in racial, historical and economic
terms. Thus, the novel openly aims to represent and to act on the
collective American consciousness despite the focus on Biggers
individuality that emerges from the summary of the plot. Wrights use
of symbols and metaphors which are deeply engrained in the
American psyche successfully manages to turn the individual into a
representative and the physical experience into a metaphysical one.
The power of Biggers portrait made it impossible for the readeror
as it was Wrights hope, for white Americato ignore the Africanist
presence and the version of reality it embodied, to the extent that
critic Irving Howe could claim that The day Native Son appeared,
American culture was changed forever (Bloom 32).

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

both demands and undertakes the study of the impact of racism on


those who perpetuate it (11): The scholarship that looks into the
mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally
valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology
does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters (11-12).
Native Son is, as such, an analysis of the effects of racism on both
blacks and whites, the oppressed and the oppressors. Thus, fear, hate
and guilt are not only the obvious feelings that trigger Biggers
behavior, but, as Max perceptively points out in his guilt of the
nation thesis, the main ingredients to explain white Americas
persistent oppression and mistreatment of its minorities:

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)

Wright is outspokenly intent on showing how oppression has


harmed whites as well as Negroes:

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

forms the quicksands upon which our civilization rests (368).


Having identified the sources of social unrest and scrupulously
following the typical sequence of jeremiad sermons, Max goes on to
warn of the dangers that await a society which is unwilling to make
all its members partake fully in its exceptionalist creed. So, with a
foresight that makes us shudder, especially after the terrorist attack on
the Twin Towers of New York on September 11, 2001, Max
apocalyptically presages

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)

Equally, and probably more credible at the time because it was


already part of American history, Max warns of the threat of another
civil war in these states (369). After the mention of the promise, the
observation of a failure to keep up with the ideals, and an apocalyptic
prophecy, Max proceeds to build Biggers trial as a climax, a cathartic
turning point that may either put an end to this period of declension
and redeem America by renewing the faith in the promise, or
precipitate the final downfall. Biggers murdersbut especially his
murder of the rich white woman, Maryare the catalyst for
Americas reaction. Max asks that Biggers life be spared and that he
be sentenced to prison for life instead because he wishes white society
to accept its responsibility in Biggers crimes. By sharing the blame
with him, his humanity would be acknowledged and He would be
brought for the first time within the orbit of our civilization (369).
Although Max does not produce an explicit religious discourse, his
interpretation of Biggers destiny is in keeping with Wights portrayal
of him as a Christ figure at the moment of his detention, and
Americans, in the figure of the judge, may, like Pilate, redeem
themselves by not condemning him to death, as Maxs last words
convey: 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).
Biggers chronicle of personal catastrophe, which Ralph Ellison
interpreted in terms of the blues (90), is transmuted into a chronicle of
a communal, national catastrophe as well as into a call for national
regeneration and self-creation. Far from going a-begging to white
134 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

America (Wright, Blueprint 37), as Wright believes previous


African American writers have done, he indignantly exhorts America
to change for its own good. Wright is acutely aware of the fact that
the more unsettling aspect of his novel for the majority of (white)
readers is not his portrayal of the black community or of the threat it
may pose, but the explicit reference to Americas responsibility and
blame, as illustrated by his reply to David L. Cohn: And what alarms
Mr. Cohn is not what I say Bigger is, but what I say made him what
he is (65). He foresaw this reaction when he made Max argue:

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)

In Maxs terms, when Bigger is finally sentenced to death, the


prophecy of a better future for America crumbles down, since the
nation is unwilling to see and know (369). The same idea is stated at
the end of 12 Million Black Voices when Wright says What we want,
what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black
folk perish, America will perish (240). Wright himself believed that
Native Son would be his last chance to exhort America because, as
with Bigger, Americans would ostracize and condemn him after
reading the novel, turning their back on his message. Instead, he was
hailed by liberal whites and became the most (in)famous and the best
paid black author ever, as well as an unavoidable reference for blacks.
The place of Native Son as an American classic is not, however,
such a surprising outcome when considered from the perspective of
the jeremiad as a cultural manifestation which accommodates dissent
within the American exceptionalist ideology, as Werner Sollors
explains in his Beyond Ethnicity. However, Maxs disappointment
turns to terror when he interprets Biggers self-assertive words But
what I killed for, I am! (391-2) not only as a confirmation of
Biggers definitive alienation and isolation at the very instant when he
claims his humanity and his communion with the rest of the world,
but as an irrevocable condemnation of America at large for leading
Bigger to such a conclusion. Maxs understanding of the situation
provokes in him a terror akin to Benito Cerenos when he exclaims
The Negro! The Negro! in Melvilles classic, or to Kurtzs The
horror! The horror! at the end of Conrads Heart of Darkness.
Native Sons ideology of form: 135
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

Thus, Bigger arises as a negative representation of the American


Adam and his life as a mockery of the American Dream. He is
ironically a native son, deeply grounded in the American context and
its racial construction. Wright himself points to Biggers
inarticulateness and to his individual anger and hatred (xx) as the
characteristics that mark him as unequivocally American, the product
of Americas educational restrictions on the bulk of her Negro
population and of American oppression (xx). Hence, Bigger
embodies the contradictions that lie at the heart of American identity
because of his un-American oppressed status as a black man. An
insider outside of society, he truthfully reflects the values and
dynamics of that society. Thus, the novel represents the paradoxical
merging of two extremes (vii): on the one hand,

an idealism that makes us believe that the Constitution is a good document of


government, that the Bill of Rights is a good legal and humane principle to
safeguard our civil liberties, that every man and woman should have the
opportunity to realize himself, to seek his own individual fate and goal, his
own peculiar and untranslatable destiny. (xxiv-xxv)

And on the other hand, the most blatant betrayal of those


principles and that idealism. Underlined is Wrights belief that
African Americans are a mirror to mainstream society: Look at us
and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking
back at you from the dark mirror of our lives! (12 Million 240-241).
Although Biggers development toward agency and subjectivity, self-
consciousness and a sort of articulateness at the end of the novel
complicate his image as a mere mirror, it makes him a more apt
symbol of the universal modern man, illustrating Frantz Fanons
claim one decade later that [t]he Negroand not just the African
Americanis comparison (Black Skin 211).
Thus, through the novels modernist existentialism and its
endorsement of socialism, which universalize the (African) American
experience and turn it into a cautionary tale, Richard Wright manages,
curiously, to reproduce the universalizing thrust of American
Exceptionalism. If The propagandists of American democracy
breached the geographic isolation of their country by universalizing
what was peculiar to Americans: their endorsement of natural rights,
their drive for personal independence, their celebration of democracy
(Appleby 32), Wright broke the isolation of African Americans by
turning them into a symbol of oppressed humankind across the world.
136 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

In Wrights scheme, Bigger passes from representing a sector of


the African American populationthe only Negroes I know of who
consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away
with it, at least for a sweet brief spell (xi), to embody a symbolic
figure of American life (xx), and further still, to represent the
existential dilemma of the modern world at a time when the
traditional social and cultural structures have crumbled under the
weight of industrialization and mercantilism. Biggers blackness thus
becomes a mirror that both emphasizes race and deconstructs it. His
reflexive capacity as both a racial and an a-racial figure is
overshadowed when Wright declares that the shadings and nuances
which were filling in Biggers picture came, not so much from Negro
life, as from the lives of whites I met and grew to know (xvi) and
attributes Biggers behavior to certain modern experiences [which]
were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial
and national lines of demarcation (xix). Hence, as Wright aligns
himself with the American literary tradition that exploits an
American Africanism in order to obtain a reflection of the larger
national and international picture, Native Son embodies

The fabrication of an Africanist persona [a]s reflexive; an extraordinary


meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that
reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of
terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. (Morrison 17)

Native Son is, therefore, both an admonition and an indictment of


white America, a shocking and apocalyptic representation of the way
America is falling short of its ideals, betraying the foundational
principles adopted by the new nation that saw itself as a City upon a
Hill. Far from this image of perfection the Chicago ghetto portrayed
in the novel is, like Bigger, the undeveloped negative that threatens
American civilization with destruction, death and havoc. However,
the same as the negative holds the potential to be developed into a
photographa truthful reflection of its object, both Bigger and
white Americans hold in themselves the potential to act upon the
present in order to transform it into a truthful reflection of the
American ideal. Therefore, in spite of the novels inscription in the
deterministic tradition of naturalism, Wright intended the novel to be
a dire call for change, which underlines his hope in the possibility of
a better future. The creation of Bigger as a representative of black
Americans as pathological social deviantswhich can be viewed as
Native Sons ideology of form: 137
The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

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.

Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos


Universidad de Salamanca

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

Adams, David K. and Cornelius A. van Minnen, eds. Reflections on American


Exceptionalism. Keele: Keele UP, 1994.
Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation) in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster.
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Appleby, Joyce. Recovering Americas Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism
in Dale Carter, ed. Marks of Distinction: American Exceptionalism Revisited.
Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus UP, 2001. (24-42)
Baker, Houston A., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc. , 1972.
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon P, 1955.
. Everybodys Protest Novel in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & N. Y. McKay, eds. The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1997. (1654-9)
Baym, Nina. Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction
Exclude Women Authors in American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-39.
Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: The U of
Massachusetts P, 1987.
Bellah, Robert: Civil Religion in America in Daedalus 96 (1967): 1-21.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. Typology and Early American Literature. Connecticut: The U of
Massachusetts P, 1972.
. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wrights Native Son: Blooms Notes. A Contemporary
Literary Views Book. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996.
Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twaine
Publishers, 1991.
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Exceptionalism Revisited. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus UP, 2001. (45-68)
140 Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

Carter, Dale, ed. Marks of Distinction: American Exceptionalism Revisited. Aarhus,


Denmark: Aarhus UP, 2001.
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Writings. New York: The Library of America College Edition, 1996. (357-549)
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Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. I. New York: Cambridge UP,
1994. (169-306)
Ellison, Ralph. Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity in John
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Library, 1995. (81-99)
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks, 1952. trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New
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Paradise in MELUS 28.4 (Winter 2003): 3-33.
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Relations in Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright.
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New York: Verso, 1993.
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World Press, 1972.
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
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The (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism

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52541.
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. Reply to David L. Cohn in Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, eds. Richard Wright
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. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941 in Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, eds. Richard
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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 the novels initial publication in 1940, critics and audiences


have taken a wide range of views on both Native Sons theme and its
generic classification. In their assessment of the novel as a whole,
critics have placed it into several different categories; it has been
called, among other things, a work of social protest fiction, a crime
fiction, a courtroom drama, and a bildungsroman. When critics
evaluate the three separate books within the novelFear, Flight,
and Fate individually, they further complicate the question of
Native Sons generic classification. Even those critics who
confidently make pronouncements about how the novel should be
categorized revealthrough the peculiar ways in which they discuss
the bookthat Native Son resists any easy generic classification.1
Part of this difficulty may stem, as Edward Margolies suggests in
his book The Art of Richard Wright, from Wrights own conflicted
views about ideology (which, in turn, have an impact on both the
messages he wants to convey in Native Son and the generic traditions
144 Heather Duerre Humann

he chooses to employ). Margolies argues that the chief philosophical


weakness of Native Son is [] that Wright himself does not seem to
be able to make up his mind (113). Native Son, however, is also
difficult to categorize because it simply does not fit into any one
generic group. Instead, Wright uses several different generic forms
within the novel. Native Son functions, at various points, as a
bildungsroman (a novel of formation), a social protest novel, and
(though, perhaps to a lesser extent) a crime/courtroom drama. By
combining these genres, Wright is able to successfully make a
political statementboth an assessment and a critiqueabout not
only Bigger Thomas, as a character and a type, but also about the
society in which he lives (Biggers society encompasses both his
immediate environmentSouthside Chicagoand the greater society
to which he belongs, that is mid-twentieth century America).
Though Native Son functionsat different pointsas each of
these genres previously mentioned, the novel also violates all three
genres as they are traditionally understood. Native Son is 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. Native Son is a
protest novel with a not wholly sympathetic protagonist: Bigger is an
anti-hero, of sorts. It is a crime novel/courtroom drama where justice
does not prevail: Bigger ends up being executed for his accidental
killing of Mary and, at the novels end, his family seems to be in
much the same situationat least socially and financiallyas they
were at its start (and, further, after Biggers death they no longer have
the hope that he may one day be able to provide for them).
In conjunction with his use of various literary genres, Wright relies
upon setting, descriptions, and characters in such a way that they also
contribute to the novels theme (and overall effect). He employs
realistic settings and scenarios in Fear, the first section of Native
Son; this heightens the political aspect of the novel. In Flight and
Fate, the second and third sections of the novel, Wright, already
having set the events into motion that will lead to Biggers conviction
and execution, largely abandons the early part of the novels realism
to emphasize Native Sons political and social messages. Wrights
technique only adds to the fact that Native Son remains a complicated
novel to classify, yet it is precisely because of his employment of
these various techniques and generic forms that Wright is able to
create his finished product. A closer examination of each potential
genre will illustrate my contention.
Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 145

First of all, Native Son has many of the characteristics of a social


protest novel. Its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, lives in abject poverty
in the slums of Southside Chicago. He is systematically denied
privacy, education, opportunity, a decent living, and many other of the
most basic human needs. Moreover, as Wright narrates Biggers story,
he provides an insight into the stultifying conditions under which so
many people live. These details are not simply incidental to the events
that occur within Native Son; instead, they prove to be the catalysts
that lead to Biggers crimes and subsequent punishment. In this way,
Native Son is a highly political work. Fredric Jameson comments on
the political-ness of novels in his book The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. He claims that political
interpretation [] is the absolute horizon of all reading and
interpretation (400). As a corollary to this assertion, Jameson
persuasively argues about the usefulness of Marxism, claiming that
only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically
compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism (401).
Marxism is highly relevant to any discussion of Native Son. Not
only is Native Son an overtly Marxist and an all-around politically
charged work, but Wright himself was a sometime associate of the
Communist Party (through his membership in the Chicago John Reed
Club). In her book, Richard Wrights Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-
Victim, Katherine Fishburn comments on how Wrights political
stance shaped his fiction; she notes:

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)

As these remarks suggest, Wright was invested in the social and


political challenges of his era, and this, in turn, likely contributed to
how (and why) he communicated the political messages within Native
Son.
Another common criticism, and one that also points to the political
messages within the novel, was that Native Son was too
propagandistic. Some readers criticized the novels style and claimed
that Wright (in Native Son, at least) focused too much on the political.
146 Heather Duerre Humann

In his hallmark essay, Everybodys Protest Novel, James Baldwin


denounces Native Son as a work of propaganda. He writes:

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)

Here Baldwin faults Wrights novel because he sees it as solely


showing Bigger as a victim of circumstance. As Irving Howe explains
in his essay Black Boys and Native Sons, Baldwin disapproves of
Native Son for just these reasons: The protest novel, wrote Baldwin,
is undertaken out of sympathy for the Negro, but through its need to
present him as merely a social victim or a mythic agent of sexual
prowess, it hastens to confine the Negro to the very tones of violence
he has known all his life (Howe 353). Moreover, according to
Baldwins stance, Wrights Bigger is so thoroughly trapped by his
circumstances and his environment that he [] is stripped of his
humanity (Portelli 255).
Baldwin is not alone in thinking that Wright focused too
much on the political in Native Son. Margolies, for example, also sees
the novel as propaganda. He is quite critical of Native Sons
aesthetics; he faults the style of the novels prose, among other things,
and he attributes these faults to the attention Wright pays to the
political. He asserts that in certain respects Native Son possesses
many of the characteristic failings of proletarian literature (104).
Elsewhere Margolies quantifies why he sees Native Son as lacking in
various respects. He explains:

First, the novel is transparently propagandisticarguing for a humane,


socialist society where such crimes as Bigger committed could not
conceivably take place. Secondly, Wright builds up rather extensive
documentation to prove that Biggers actions, behavior, values, attitudes, and
fate have already been determined by his status and place in American life.
Biggers immediate Negro environment is depicted as being unrelentingly
bleak and vacuouswhile the white world that stands just beyond his reach
remains cruelly indifferent or hostile to his needs. Thirdly, with the possible
exception of Bigger, none of the characters is portrayed in any depthand
Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 147

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)

Though Margolies, like Baldwin, is harsh in his criticism, his


assertions here (along with Baldwins) help to highlight the political
nature of Native Son. Yet, even as Margolies decries Native Son for
being too-political, other parts of his study assert and even underscore
the generic complexity of the novel.
In fact, some of his remarks help to problematize the novels
generic classification. At one point he observes, the reader may
properly ask: was not Wright himself somewhat deluded as to the
efficacy of his Communist frame of reference? The answer must be to
a certain extent, yes (106). He continues along this vein, pointing out

Since moral responsibility involves choice, how can Wrights deterministic


Marxism be reconciled with the freedom of action that choice implies? The
contradiction is never resolved, and it is precisely for this reason that the
novel fails to fulfill itself. For the plot, the structure, even the portrayal of
Bigger himself, are often at odds with Wrights official determinism. (107)

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

American ones. He asserts that the European bildungsroman functions


as it does because its actions and events generally occur within an
urban environment (247). Moretti excludes American novels from his
discussion because he sees them as occurring out in nature and the
outdoors (247). The events within Native Son, however, unlike those
in Twains Huckleberry Finn and so many other classic American
coming of age novels, does not occur out in nature. In contrast to
the American novels that Moretti is alluding to, Native Son is set
within the maze-like urban environment of Southside Chicago.
Vincent Perez also examines the importance of Native Sons
urban setting in his article Running and Resistance: Nihilism and
Cultural Memory in Chicano Urban Narratives. Perez points to
undaunted yearning and the violence and entrapment intrinsic to
certain urban areas; included in his analysis2 is a discussion of how
the urban environment within Native Son works to exacerbate (and, in
part, cause) Biggers turmoil. Perez sees Bigger as a nihilistic
figure, and further, he argues that (as a nihilistic figure) Bigger
renounces institutions and ideologies which are perceived to
maintain a repressive social and racial order (135). Perez believes
that education is a trope for the protagonists of running narratives
(136). (Education, then, according to Perezs reading of the novel,
functions as a trope for Bigger Thomas, as well.)
By emphasizing that education is so central to his claim, Perez
shows the relationship between it the urban environment, and these
nihilistic figures. This discussion highlights, as well, the fact that
Native Son possesses many of the characteristics of a bildungsroman
(since a bildungsroman, by definition, is a novel of initiation or
education). Continuing in his assessment, Perez explains Whether
it be in the classroom or on the street, education serves as the central
trope for the narrators troubled upbringing (136). Thus, it is only
by accepting his identity as a nihilistic figure that Bigger Thomas
can derive a meaning from a life of suffering, alienation, and
violence (144). Therefore, as Margolies puts it, Bigger acts
violently in order to exist (116).
Like Moretti, Hugh Holman discusses the bildungsroman as a
genre in his book, Windows on the World: Essays on American Social
Fiction. Holman, however, argues that there is a subgenre of the
American Bildungrsoman3. He posits that a trait specific to the
American Bildungsroman is the character of a narrator who
witnesses the action of the protagonist in the main story, and from
this observation gains an insight into the nature of experience (170-
Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 149

171). In this way, Native Son deviates from Holmans characterization


(there is no such character within the novel), but by distinguishing the
American Bildungsroman from its European counterpart by the way
that characters, in the American version, reach their mature attitudes
as a result of what they see rather than what happens to them or what
they do (193), Holman establishes yet another aspect of the genre. In
this aspect, although much of Native Son differs from Holmans
account of how the American Bildungsroman operates, it does,
however, conform in part to the definition Holman provides about the
bildungsroman as a broad category. Holman asserts that the
bildungsroman is usually a record of a series or rites of passage, of
initiations for the young, unusually sensitive and intelligent
protagonist, trials in which he is tested and instructed (168). Clearly ,
Native Son is a record of Biggers life and it shows his encounters
and his various rites of passages (getting hired for the job at the
Daltons can be seen as a rite of passage for Bigger as can his
encounters withand killing ofMary, among other things). Also,
we can see Bigger face various trials in which he is tested and
instructed (in the novel, for instance, Bigger deals with various people
and negotiates within a society that offers him little or no choice).
Yet, because Bigger has so few opportunities (he is uneducated and
deprived of so many things), he does not come across as the
unusually sensitive and intelligent protagonist that Holman
describes.
Though neither Moretti nor Holmans characterization of the
bildungsroman (as a genre) fit perfectly with the situation depicted in
Native Son, both nonetheless can offer insights into what occurs
within Wrights novel. Moretti posits that, as a genre, the
bildungsroman is all-important in novel theory. He points out that it
occupies a central role in the philosophical investigations of the
novel (15). Moretti further claims that this category or genre
reappears under various headings (novel of formation, of
initiation, of education) in all of the major literary traditions. Even
those novels that clearly are not Bildungsroman or novels of
formation are perceived by critics or readers against this conceptual
horizon; so they speak of a failed initiation or of a problematic
formation (15). It is precisely with this measure that readers can
track Biggers progress (or lack thereof). Central to Morettis
argument is his observation that the conflict between self-
determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization
gets played out in a bildungsroman (15). Morettis claim is highly
150 Heather Duerre Humann

relevant to Native Son. Bigger is caught between an urge to be


autonomous and societys expectations of him.
Ironically, it is only by becoming what society has seen him as all
along (a dangerous criminal) that Bigger is able to achieve any sort of
autonomy. As Margolies points out, by identifying himself with the
world of violence and strife he knows to be true, Bigger has given his
life meaning and clarity (116). In fact, the time when Bigger
arguably exhibits the most agency is when, after accidentally killing
Mary, he lies to her parents and the police and then plots his escape.
In his article, Giving Bigger a Voice: The Politics of Narrative in
Native Son, John M. Reilly comments on this. He argues that Bigger
takes the first premeditated action of his life against the white world
by concocting alibis, false charges, and conspiracy to extract ransom
from the Daltons (Reilly 54). A further irony is the fact that it is
Marys death that initiates Bigger fully into society. As Reilly asserts,
only after killing Mary does Wright represent Bigger as instructed by
the facts of black life (55).
Though it is Marys death that initiates Bigger into society,
previous events have contributed to both his situation and his
worldview. The now famous battle between Bigger and the rat in his
familys squalid, tiny apartment (which occurs in the novels first few
pages) is one such example. In this scene, Bigger attempts to kill the
rat, an effort which Wright describes as both violent and trapped:
Bigger looked around the room wildly, then darted to a curtain and
swept it aside and grabbed two heavy iron skillets from a wall above a
gas stove. He whirled and called softly to his brother, his eyes glued
to the trunk (Wright 4). This passage highlights the oppressive
environment in which Bigger lives by detailing how a rat roams freely
in the familys tiny residence. Further, this scene emphasizes that this
rat has more freedom than Bigger and this passage also underscores
the filthy living conditions under which Bigger suffers. Also, Bigger
is shown here to be capable of violence; without hesitation, he grabs
onto makeshift weapons (the two skillets) and readies himself to kill
the animal. Further, this scene foreshadows both Biggers killing of
Mary (by placing him in the position of aggressor) and how he, too,
will remain trapped just as he is trapped in a rat-infested apartment
now.
Another scene that proves telling is the one where Bigger reveals
to his friend Gus that hed like to fly a plane:

Bigger: I could fly a plane if I had a chance.


Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 151

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)

As Biggers statement here indicates, he does have aspirations in life.


He is in need of and searching for an identity, but, despite this desire,
the stultifying conditions under which he lives preclude any real
possibility for him to develop as an individual. As Gus relays to
Bigger, it is precisely because Bigger is black and has no money
that the possibility of becoming a pilot is closed off to him. Right
after their conversation about the airplane, Bigger and Gus play a
game, entitled white, where the boys act as they think wealthy,
white people do. That the boys see the relationship between their race,
poverty, and lack of opportunity is apparent here, as well.
In the case of all three of these scenes, what emerges is that Bigger
is oppressed by society. Whats more important is the fact that he
realizes as much. Further, these passages underscore how Bigger is
trapped between wanting to set and achieve his own goals and being
prevented from attaining any autonomy because of harsh conditions
under which he is forced to live. Because Bigger is caught between
societys expectations and his own desires, he is enacting a dilemma
familiar to the bildungsroman (recall how Moretti asserts that such a
struggle is a typical part of the bildungsroman). However, most, if not
all, of Biggers problems (as they are spelled out in these passages)
arise from his material conditions of existencehis poverty and lack
of opportunity are, as I read them, tied directly to his race and class.
Because Wright is so vehemently speaking out against the
discrimination and disenfranchisement that plagues Bigger, the same
struggle that paints Native Son as a bildungsroman also speaks to the
claim that Native Son is a work of social protest.
What further complicates this discussion is the importance of
individuality and identity. As both Moretti and Holmans assertions
imply, the notions of individuality and identity are paramount to a
bildungsroman. Bigger, deviating from how the traditional hero of the
bildungsroman is usually depicted, never fully comes across as an
individual, nor does he seem to have his own, unique identity. When
Bigger seems to have the most agency is when, as I have discussed
previously, he plots to dispose of Marys body after he has
accidentally killed her and attempts to deceive her parents and the
police. Even Wrights explanation as to how he invented the character
of Bigger points to this lack of individuality and agency. In his essay,
How Bigger Was Born, Wright comments on how Bigger is a
type. Of Bigger as a character, he explains he is a product of a
152 Heather Duerre Humann

dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all


of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he
is looking and feeling for a way out (446-447). Wright reveals in this
same essay that he had conceived of writing about Bigger for a while
and that he viewed Bigger as a symbol (rather than an individual):
For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a novel in which a
Negro Bigger Thomas would loom as a symbolic figure of American
life (447). Indeed, as Wrights own comments indicate, Bigger,
instead of existing as an individual, has a largely symbolic function in
the novel.
There is no doubt that Wrights Bigger Thomas represents those
who are disgruntled and disenfranchised by mid-twentieth century
America and that Wright invented Bigger (as a type) from witnessing
others in related situations with similar mindsets. Wright notes that he
can recall encountering no fewer than five Biggers (How Bigger
Was Born). He acknowledges how seeing different people occupy
this role encouraged him to create the Bigger of Native Son while also
admitting that [i]f I had known only one Bigger I would not have
written Native Son (435). Wright saw in these people a certain
attitude about the world. According to Katherine Fishburns
assessment of the novel: The Biggers that Wright remembers stand
out in his mind because they stubbornly challenged the system that
sought to keep them in their place. In their own desperate and pitiful
ways they fought the status quo (60).
Instead of speaking of Bigger as having a unique identity, Wright
refers to Biggers longing for self-identification (How Bigger
Was Born 447). Unlike the hero of the traditional bildungsroman,
Biggers lack of individuality is in itself one of his defining
characteristics. As Craig Werner argues in his essay, Biggers
Blues, this inability to sound his call is his call; his despair of
envisioning a response is his response to the alienation of the Afro-
American community (147). Fishburn also sees Bigger Thomas as a
type. She claims that he wants to be an individual, but the world in
which he inhabits will not allow him to function as one:

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)

Indeed, it is through acting as a type (the stereotypical criminal


that he becomes) that Bigger is able to relate to the world. Because of
Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 153

how others see him (and because he is not altogether sympathetic),


Bigger could, as Fishburn argues, accurately be called an anti-hero
(Fishburn 62). Furthermore, since Bigger fails to emerge as an
individual, he differs from the traditional hero of the bildungsroman
(also, that Bigger functions as a type also highlights the political
nature of both his character and the novel, as a whole).
Finally, Native Son also has some of the characteristics of a crime
fiction/courtroom drama. The Book of the Month Club that selected
the censored version of the novel seems to have chosen this title on
the basis of this genres selling power. Several scenes in Native Son,
and in particular the long, courtroom monologue by Biggers lawyer
Max (which takes place within the novels third section, Fate),
support such a categorization. One example occurs when, in a
courtroom speech, Max points to Biggers lack of choices: Listen,
Ive talked with the boy. He has no education. He is poor. He is black.
And you know what weve made these things mean in this country
(Wright 403). Here, like the stereotypical courtroom advocate, Max is
making an impassioned plea on behalf of his client and, in this light,
this scene makes him seem like a character typically found in
courtroom dramas. Yet, the specific way that Max refers to Bigger
highlights the social protest aspect of the novel.
Something similar occurs when Max speaks out about the futility
of executing Bigger:

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)

Again, Maxs zealousness as Biggers attorney likens him to the


lawyers present in many courtroom dramas, but, at the same time, the
way he expresses the depravity of Biggers existence underscores
social protest. Another aspect of the scene calls the readers attention
to certain traits typical of the bildungsroman, by emphasizing the
importance of Biggers identity and how that identity is crucial to
ones formation (or lack thereof).
Such multiple possibilities suggest that though Native Son has
some of the attributes of a courtroom drama, there are problems with
this categorization, as well. Margolies further complicates the way
that these courtroom scenes should be read in his discussion of the
Fate section of the novel. In this analysis, he points to how Native
154 Heather Duerre Humann

Son falls short of working as a traditional courtroom drama. He


further alleges that the courtroom scenario is unbelievable, suggesting
that it would have been more plausible for Bigger to avoid a trial
altogether:

A more realistic approach to the intensely hysterical courtroom atmosphere


Wright describes would have been for Max to plead Bigger guilty of some
sort of insanityrather than to suggest that Bigger is a helpless victim of
American civilization. (114)

Ultimately, Native Son proves to be so difficult to categorize because


it simply does not fit neatly into any one generic group. This is due in
part to the fact that Wright, as has been demonstrated, relied on the
traits of different generic formsthe bildungsroman, the social
protest novel, and (perhaps to a lesser degree) the crime/courtroom
drama. By combining these genres, Wright is able to successfully
make a political statementboth a commentary and a critiqueabout
both Bigger Thomas, as a character and a type, and about the society
in which he lives. Though Wright does employ various techniques in
his novel, the fact that it is so difficult to fit Native Son into any one
category stems, as well, from complex issues surrounding how a
novel is generically classified. Reillys comments point to the
complicated nature of genre and how a novels category is primarily
affected by how the reader approaches the text. In fact, he argues that

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)

Though Reilly makes these comments specifically about how


Wright complicates issues of race in Native Son, his assertion also
works to underscore how deciding upon a novels genre is also a
collaborative process. This is perhaps especially the case with Native
Son, a novel that readers approach in so many different ways (because
of the readers various perspectives) and one that employs such a
diverse range of techniques.

Heather Duerre Humann


University of Alabama
Genre in/and Wrights Native Son 155

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

Baldwin, James. Everybodys Protest Novel in Notes of a Native Son. 1955.


Boston: Beacon, 1984. (13-23)
Fishburn, Katherine. Richard Wrights Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow P, 1977.
Holman, C. Hugh. Windows on the World: Essays on American Social Fiction.
Knoxville, TN: U Tennessee P, 1979.
Howe, Irving. Black Boys and Native Sons in Dissent (Autumn, 1963): 353-368.
Jameson, Fredric. From The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach in Michael McKeon, ed.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. (400-413)
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale,: Southern Illinois UP,
1969.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture.
trans. by Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 2000.
Perez, Vincent. Running and Resistance: Nihilism and Cultural Memory in
Chicano Urban Narratives in MELUS 25.2 (Summer, 2000): 133-146.
Portelli, Alessandro. Everybodys Healing Novel: Native Son and its Contemporary
Critical Context in Mississippi Quarterly 50.2 (Spring, 1997): 255-265.
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)
156 Heather Duerre Humann

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.

How many are my iniquities and sins?


Job

I am just a black guy with nothing.


Richard Wright, Native Son

In 1945 Richard Wright wrote an introduction to Horace Cayton and


St. Clair Drakes study of African American Chicago, Black
Metropolis. In it he highlighted two relevant facts: the importance of
the research of the Chicago sociologists as an inspiration for his
works and the weight of their influence in his own creation and
formation as a writer:
158 Carme Manuel

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)

The findings of these sociologists, Wright asserts, explained to


him the otherwise hidden illegibility of the environment and Black
Metropolis served to illuminate and justify his narrative texts:

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)

Thus, the writer emphasized the scientific origin of his literature


and carved himself a niche within the pantheon of past and
contemporary realistic writers.
Many critics have traced back the origins of Native Son and
mentioned 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. Yet 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
also well-known. As such, many readings of the novel have
capitalized on Wrights negative view of the black community.
Unfortunately, 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. Biggers most bitter realization is 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.
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 159

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)

According to Fabre, Grandmother Wilson was responsible for the


young black boys intellectual death, since she burned the books
that he brought home. Not only was he obliged to rise and go to
sleep with the sun, but

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)

Fabre further explains that

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 French critic continues by tracing young Wrights immersion


in religious life and states that

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

Moreover, what Fabre underlines from this childhood experience


is that this compulsory church attendance, in fact, provided early
instruction in the understanding of fiction. On the one hand, Wright

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).

In a footnote to this paragraph Fabre adds that These biblical


images occur in Wrights early poems, are implied in Big Boy
Leaves Home, which is a kind of parable of earthly paradise and sin,
and are especially evident in The Long Dream and the unpublished
novel Tarbabys Dawn (534). And, as a conclusion to his
biographical research, the critic stresses the fact that

all through his life Wright remained an American (brought up in spite of


himself on Horatio Alger and the Bible), and the epithet expatriate, which
became attached to his name after a certain date, can be misleading in that it
neglects his allegiance to and membership in the American society which he
criticized so vehemently. (529, my emphasis)

As Fabre points out, Wright had already experienced the tragic


sense of life at twelve (529). In How Bigger Was Born the writer
explains that he imagined a negro Bigger Thomas who would loom
as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within
him the prophecy of our future (xx). Thus in this attempt to write a
great American novel, Wright creates a protagonist based upon a
conception which privileges an individual at war with his culture.
This basically Romantic idea of the black male, the black isolato
subject, goes hand in hand with his rejection of his own black
community and his marginality within a mainstream white culture. It
is obvious that the victimization of the black man is not an invented
shibboleth since a plethora of American attempts to crush the black
self have made his persecution clear through national history. Yet, the
way that victimization is portrayed fictionally by Wright conforms
less to naturalistic patterns than to mythical ones. Biggers
construction as a fictional hero has to do, then, with both the mythic
Adamic American male story and with sociological/historical data of
the time. Nina Bayms description of this image which pervades
American canonical male writing is of consequence here:

The myth narrates a confrontation of the American individual, the pure


American self divorced from specific social circumstances, with the promise
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 161

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)

Wrights revision of this myth might be put in the following terms:

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.

In Wrights re-imagining of Bayms assertion, America becomes a


destructive space. Native Son expresses the frustration, the self-
loathing, the sense of meaningless and worthlessness, the utter
nihilism of growing up desperately poor, black, brutalized, and
neglected in the first half of twentieth-century United States. In How
Bigger Was Born, Wright explains that Biggers revolt can be
better understood if two factors psychologically dominant in his
personality are taken into account:

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)

Bigger Thomas is the center of the action, the privileged focus of


the narrators point of viewthough this has been questioned by
several criticsbut lacks a voice. In fact, the novel tells about
Biggers journey from his position of voicelessness to one of
voicefulness, what Barbara Johnson describes as his ascension to
the status of speaking subject (149). Yet, in a way, Bigger is born
well before his physical birth, as he is advanced by an overabundance
of identities reflected in the white American definitions, images and
discourses about his black self. In that sense, his life is but a
completion of a foreordained narrative, a corruption of the word
made flesh. As a black suffering servant, Bigger is defined by his
victimhood (his calvary and death). Enchained physically and
162 Carme Manuel

spiritually by a system which negates any autonomy, he is thrown into


the world to follow a previously written script.
Wright tells the reader that Bigger Thomas is the product of a
dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all
of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he
is looking and feeling for a way out (xx). When he talks about
hearing Negroes say that maybe Hitler and Mussolini are all right
because they did things, it is because

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)

This hunger for belonging is unsatisfied since

the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual


sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance
and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam
the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and un-
channelized impulses. (xix)

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)

In contrast, in Native Son he shows how the corruption of these


values by the white world achieves such depths that it threatens to
destroy them altogether.
The citation which opens Native Son is crucial to an understanding
of the protagonists place in the world: Even today is my complaint
rebellious, My stroke is heavier than my groaning. Job. These
biblical words frame the narrative and are the first clue to recognize
the development of Biggers predicament and to understand what
Addison Gayle thinks is the key to his characterhis acute
sensitivity (204). Wright, like so many other authors, finds
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 163

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)

As J. Lee Greene explains, because it is in harmony with Wrights


adaptation of the Judeo-Christian myth of human origin, Buckleys
slogan is akin to the first law the Creator issued to regulate life in the
first human social community, as his close paraphrase of Genesis 3:2
indicates (185).
Ironically, this omniscient white eye controls blacks life and yet it
is blind to their misery, as they themselves live in blindness in this
wasteland. The Bible attributes greater importance to spiritual than to
physical sight. The apostle John declares that those who profess to be
Christians but are not conscious of their spiritual need are blind and
naked, since they do not discern their pitiful condition (Revelation
3:17). Just as being in darkness for a long period of time will cause
blindness to the natural eyes, John also points out that a Christian who
hates his brother is walking aimlessly in a blinding darkness (1 John
2:11); and Peter warns that one having love, is blind, shutting his
166 Carme Manuel

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)

In this scene, Wright introduces an old Negro spiritual. Steal


Away, steal away2 was sung by runaway slaves before embarking on
their perilous journey north. According to the music historian Mark
Miles Fisher, some slave spiritualsGo Down, Moses and Steal
Away to Jesus, among othersconveyed secret messages among
slaves in underground meetings and in plots to escape from their
plantations. Steal Away to Jesus may be construed as a communal
summons or inducement to individual slaves to steal themselves
from bondage to freedom (qtd.in Smith 126). The phrase steal
away meant escaping; Jesus and home symbolized the yearning
for freedom in the North; and the words I aint got long to stay here
meant that flight northward was imminent. However, other critics
warn against an approach that treats spirituals as coded speech
disguising for political meanings. Theophus H. Smith conjectures that
a post-emancipatory shift occurred in black religious experience
the shift from a covert use of conjurational strategies to a more
transparent mode of spirituality (127). This alternative mode of
spirituality which is contemplative and revelational is what Bigger
recognizes and, as happened with his mothers previous singing, these
lyrics stand as a stark contrast to his feelings of despondency. They
are the remainder of his origins and, as such, they offer a soothing
spiritual balm. But, unfortunately, the world he has been forced to live
in makes it impossible for him to accept this respite the song offers
168 Carme Manuel

Some critics have dismissed Book 3 as a polemic moral rant,3 yet


its richness comes into full display if we bear in mind its original
inspiration, the Book of Job, and the literary form in which biblical
wisdom presents itself. Specifically, the Book of Job takes the form of
a prose story interrupted in the middle by a poetic dialogue.4 It is,
according to Herbert M. Schneidau, the climax of the Old
Testament (6). More recently, scholars have argued that it is a
critique of the concept of tragedy in human affairs (Reed 115). It
belongs to the biblical wisdom tradition, the practical side of which
explained that playing by the rules was a guarantee of success in
life, whereas there was a contrasting side in which life was seen as
a puzzle, perhaps a meaningless one, in which someone who played
by the rules might as easily fail as succeed (Gabel et al. 55). The
Book of Job is an example of this latter form: Job is puzzled by the
apparent injustice of life and desperately seeks to understand his
unjust treatment, to get an answer to his questions. He is made to
suffer horribly as a result of a casual wager between God and Satan
or the Adversary. Consequently, Jobignorant of the wager but
aware that he does not deserve his sufferinghurls questions and
challenges at the Almighty that verge on blasphemy. In his anguish,
he interrogates Gods justice and receives a response which takes the
form of a series of more questions

intended to belittle Jobto crush him into insignificance by virtue of his


being a mere man. In the book of Job and the other wisdom writings, no
special truths are revealed from heaven; those of mens questions that cannot
be answered from the observation of nature and of human society must remain
forever without an answer. (Gabel et al. 134)

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

ambiguity of suffering, and rejects any attempt to explain human


suffering in terms of the guilt or sin of the sufferer (qtd. Schneidau
219). Just like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Job tackles the question of
whether ones behavior determines ones fate in life. Similarly, Book
3 is Wrights attempt to explain black suffering and to reject it in
terms of the guilt of Bigger Thomas as dictated by white society. This
is the reason why this part of the book turns out to be most deeply
immersed in theological motifs.
Christians used to interpret the Book of Job as an allegory
foreshadowing the life of Christ in terms of the need for suffering
(Schneidau 219-220). Bigger Thomas dies on a Friday, and
throughout the first part of Book 3, his rejection of food and drink can
be interpreted as religious fasting or as his preparation for sacrifice. In
the Bible rightly motivated fasts were intended to show pious sorrow
and repentance for past sins, but they were also fitting in the face of
great danger, when one is in sore need of divine guidance, enduring
tests and meeting temptations, or while studying, meditating, or
concentrating on Gods purposes (2 Chronicles 20:3, Ezra 8:21,
Esther 4:3, 16; Matthew 4:1, 2). Fasting was not a form of self-
inflicted punishment, but a humbling of oneself before God. Yet, to
be acceptable, the fast must be able to be accompanied by a correction
of past sins (Isaiah 58:6, 7). Biggers correction of past sins, however,
is reversed here and takes the form of an affirmation, what Keneth
Kinnamon calls the terrible knowledge of his self-realization through
murder (How Native Son Was Born 118), which leaves him in a
sort of existential solitude, facing and accepting his inexorable fate as
a suffering Christ.
For Schneidau, the Book of Job takes up the question of evil
and, meditating on suffering and guilt, its author comes to a daring
conception: Job suffers not because of his sins but because of his
righteousness (218). To accept Biggers murders, the reader must
willingly suspend rational belief and accept the idea of a universe in
which murder is not a mark of mans inhumanity, but of his
humanity, not an act denoting the degenerate, but the hero, not an
effort at self-destruction, but an attempt to validate manhood, states
Addison Gayle (204). From this perspective, Bigger becomes a
righteous man and indeed there are some elements in the novel which
support such a reading of Native Son. For example, the apostle Peter
refers to trials or sufferings as a fire that proves the quality of the
Christians faith. Later, he associates suffering for the righteous to a
burning when he tells his fellow Christians: Do not be puzzled at the
170 Carme Manuel

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:

When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never


accomplishes it without blood, tortures and sacrifice; the most dreadful
sacrifice and forfeitures (among them sacrifice of the first-born), the most
loathsome mutilation (for instance, castration), and the most cruel rites of all
the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom system of cruelty)all
these things originate from that instinct found in pain in its most potent
mnemonic. (213)

Biggers poignant feelings of exclusion can only be exorcised


through violence and sacrificial death; therefore Marys murder has to
be explained on a symbolic level. If Bigger stands not as an
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 171

individual, but as a representation of how black native sons in


America are treated by a system which deprives them of their rights to
life, Marys sacrifice becomes a communal activity. Anthropologists,
such as Mary Douglas, affirm that such a sacrifice purges a threatened
social world and that it resolves a specific crisis of transition through
the shedding of blood. Yet, Bigger kills alone, and this reinforces
even more his isolation within his own community, especially when
the ritual he performs will be mirrored by a covert system of
sacrifice (23), that is to say, the modern judicial system at the end of
the novel.
Biggers killing is a sacrificial act which not only initiates him into
knowledge but also into liberation. Ren Girards treatment of ritual
scapegoating may prove useful to understand the mythical and
religious meaning of this act. Girard insists that Christian traditions of
scapegoating and ritual violence are consistent with the sacralization
of violence typical in all religious cultures throughout history. This
equation between violence and the sacred is called the primitive
sacred of the human species. Within the world which Bigger is
forced to inhabit, Mary stands as an ultimate threat to his existence, as
the epitome of white evil.6 To exorcise the danger she poses to him,
Bigger kills her following a most sacred ritual. She is smothered to
death, beheaded and burnt to ashes.
Beheading was a form of execution in ancient Israel. When a
beheading was performed, it was usually after the individual had been
slain and was generally done to bring the persons death to public
attention as a reproach or as a public notice of judgment or warning.
In the same way, fire and salt were associated with the sacrifices
offered at the temple. Orlando Patterson summarizes Henri Hubert
and Marcel Mausss acute statements on sacrificial rites and stresses
the fact that the fire was important in itself, for it invariably
symbolized the deity. As the victim was consumed by the flames, he
was symbolically devoured by the god (182). On the other hand, in
biblical times the most thorough means of destruction was fire. Hence
Jesus at times used the term fire in an illustrative way to denote the
complete destruction of the wicked (Matthew 13:40-42 49, 50).
Finally, what remained of the victim after he had been killed and
burnt might be allotted completely to the sacred world, or it might be
allotted completely to the secular world, in which case it was eaten, or
parts might be given to the gods and parts kept by the sacrificers (qtd.
in Patterson 183). What is left of Mary and what will stand as final
evidence of her sacrifice is one of her earrings. The jewel, handed
172 Carme Manuel

down from her grandmother to her mother to her, is a token of the


uninterrupted white family tradition and now bears testimony to its
disruption. Yet, in Isaiah 3:16, 19, the Lord says that earrings are
among the things he would take away from the arrogant daughters of
Zion to punish their haughtiness. Marys superciliousness towards
Bigger and what he represents is thus castigated and reproached.
According to Addison Gayle, Jr, Marys sacrifice performs a vital
psychological function for Biggerthe catalyst that propels Bigger
upon the search for manhood (204). Bessies rape and murder,
however, stand on a different level. Although her killing has been
generally interpreted as an act of betrayal showing Wrights hate for
black womanhood, Sabine Sielke believes that in Native Son, the
invocation of black womens suffering constitutes black male
subjectivity (27). It is important to note here that Bessie is murdered
by having her head crushed, an action that Bigger had already
performed when killing the rat, an unclean animal (Leviticus 11:29,
Isaiah 66:17).
In the Bible, the act of killing by crushing the head is linked to the
Serpent. In Genesis 3:15, the first veiled prophecy of the coming of
the Messiah, God says to the serpent: I will put enmity between you
and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise
your head, and you shall bruise his heel. The Son will directly crush
the serpents head. For Trudier Harris, Bessies death represents
Wrights failurehis blindness, in a wayto develop her potential:
In her comments to Bigger about her life, she makes a necessary step
in the direction of self-revelation, but Wright stifles that potential by
refocusing attention on Bigger and how Bessie is a burden to him
(80). Bessie becomes, then, a serpent, what Baker calls a hated
symbol to be eradicated by aspiring black male consciousness (108)
because for Wright the black woman represents a backwash of
conscious history (Baker 101).
Yet, what makes the act racially suicidal is the fact that Bigger
drinks milk some time before committing it:

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 Promised Land is repeatedly described in the Bible as flowing


with milk and honey, denoting abundance and prosperity due to Gods
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 173

blessing; milkthe liquid which helps physical growth into


maturityis also linked to elementary Christian doctrine, a necessity
to grow and absorb solid food, the deeper spiritual truths (1
Corinthians 3:2). Bessies murder by Biggera fatherless son and a
son who rejects his motheris Biggers ultimate act of estrangement
from his origins.
What does Bigger feel after performing these sacrifices? For the
first time in his life, Marys murder forms for Bigger a barrier of
protection between him and a world he feared. And it also create[s]
a new life for himself (101). Challenging his societys interpretation,
Bigger believes that all his life had been leading to that moment:

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)

Patterson affirms that the sacrificial ritual created not only a


compact between the sacrificers and their god but a compact of
fellowship among the sacrificers themselves it strengthened the
power of the community and its most strongly held values (183).
Accordingly, as Bigger looks at the black people on the sidewalks,

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)

These feelings achieve full articulation at the end of Book 3. At


this point, Biggers murders as acts of creation can only be
accounted for, if understood as sacrificial rites. Girard affirms that the
need to create is necessitated by the threat of chaos and violence and
believes that in sacrificeas a way of dealing with violence in the
absence of legal institutionsthe victim diverts and displaces the
violence that threatens to tear both the self and the community apart.
As such, Biggers killings are rites of passage from ignorance to
174 Carme Manuel

knowledge and, paradoxically, from exclusion to inclusion into


humanity.
Book 3 starts by recreating a sense of timelessness. J. Lee Greene
highlights how the initial biblical images and allusions bring into
relief the Judeo-Christian myths of the worlds cosmogony and the
origin and the Fall of man. For this critic, this biblical imagery, the
use of which also pervades the closing section of this book, brings to
a logical culmination the thematic and structural pattern of birth-
death-rebirth, which corresponds to the novels three books (177).
But Greene does not relate this last part to any specific section in the
Bible. Although the parallelisms with Job are accentuated in the first
pages of this section when the narrator explains that Bigger has
refused to speak and eat during three days and is in the grip of a deep
physiological resolution not to react to anything, but his desire to
crush all faith in him was in itself built upon a sense of faith [] Out
of the mood of renunciation there sprang up in him again the will to
kill. But this time it was not directed outward toward people, but
inward, upon himself (255). Similarly, Job regrets his birth (3:11).
Yet, for Bigger, as for Job, the conviction that there was some way
out surged back into him, strong and powerful, and, in his present
state, condemning and paralyzing (256).
His struggle and his victory will consist of liberating himself from
being translated into a social symbol, a ritual sacrificial scapegoat:

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)

His description in the Tribune and his rejection of it makes him


spring back into action alive, contending (257) and try to carve for
himself some sense of individuality.
Bigger will have to confront three counselors in this last part:
Reverend Hammond, Buckley and Max. The three of them represent
different visions of the protagonist, but they coincide in their attempts
to explain the yet unspeaking Bigger. Reverend Hammonds words
are

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)

These images belong to the Book of Genesis, to the beginning of


time and the creation of man. Listening to the preachers words and
looking at his sad face made him feel a sense of guilt deeper than
that which even his murder of Mary had made him feel (264).
Moreover, He had killed within himself the preachers haunting
picture of life even before he had killed Mary; that had been his first
murder (264). Echoing the religious scenes which appeared in the
previous parts of the novel, Wright exposes the real tragedy of
Biggers lifehis suicidal separation from the values of his black
community.
His bitter feelings at not being included in the picture of Creation,
of not being a native son, and that sense of exclusion, as cold as a
block of ice, had made him kill, because To live, he had created a
new world for himself, and for that he was to die. In a sense, Bigger
has defied God, the only legitimate creator, and consequently has to
pay for his sinful act. Yet, he reasons that he was driven to it on the
false assumption that he lived and acted alone without realizing that
what he had done made others suffer (277). This shock of black
brotherly recognition takes place in a scene in which Mrs. Thomas
adopts the role of a black stabat mater. Observed by whites, Bigger
begs her to forget him three times. Later, in an extraordinary act of
signifying and knowing that she cannot save her childs life, she begs
the Daltons to have mercy on her family and prevent their eviction
from their rented apartment.
In a desperate act of Christian charity, Reverend Hammond gives
Bigger a wooden cross. Bigger is taken through the mob (312-313)
reenacting Jesuss passion, while he is insulted and he felt hot spittle
splashing through his face (Matthew 27:28, 30-31). At the same time
he sees a flaming cross which was not the cross of Christ, but the
cross of the Ku Klux Klan (313). Biggers hope is shattered when he
witnesses the corruption of the Christian symbol in the hands of
whites, a vision which makes him rebuke the reverends cross: The
cross the preacher had told him about was bloody, not flaming, meek,
not militant. It had made him feel awe and wonder, not fear and panic.
It had made him want to kneel and cry, but this cross made him want
to curse and kill (313).
176 Carme Manuel

Biggers horrified contemplation of the burning cross at this point


of the narrative is relevant because the scene recreates Christianitys
central symbol of Christs sacrificial death as it became identified
with the crucifixion of the Negro, the dominant symbol of the
Southern Euro-American supremacists civil religion (Patterson
218). Patterson explains that the burning cross is perhaps the most
corrupted manipulated degraded icon and manifestation of white
perversion (223). Blacks had resisted whites in their own cultural
domain by means of usurping and subverting religion. Reverend
Hammonds use of Genesis imagery as well as giving Bigger the
wooden cross is an attempt to convey black religious resistance to
Bigger, to instill in him not an act of resignation but of heroic
contemplation of the triumphant sacrified Christ. However, the
mesmerizing power of the burning cross with malevolent perfection
discards the Negro and the sacrifice of Christ (Patterson 223). The
power of white manipulation is the reason which impels Bigger to
reject the figure of the redeeming humbled Christ presented by
Reverend Hammond and, ironically, leaves him with the bitterness,
humiliation and muted rage which impel him to abandon the idea of
God. As J. Lee Greene puts it: rejecting the color white and the cross
as sacred symbols signifies Biggers repudiation of a socio-religious
philosophy that prescribes his passive suffering and sanctions his
destruction (185). The burning cross is, then, used by Wright as what
Patterson calls an obscene parody of the cross of Christ (218).
Biggers search for voicefulness to counteract the crushing
burden of his categorization by whites ends up in his declaration of
guilt to his second counsellor and white God, Buckley. His
confession is introduced with the following words: Listlessly, he
talked (287). This recalls the citation from Job which frames the
novel, since another translation for Job 23:2 (The New King James
Version), says: Even today my complaint is bitter; my hand is listless
because of my groaning. Job believes that if he talked to God I
would be delivered forever from my Judge (23:7). Similarly, Bigger
feels indifferent. His confession to Buckley is an act which implores
understanding from the powerful watcher, but which, paradoxically,
leaves him more lost and undone than when he was captured (287).
Schneidau explains that Jobs friends offer the clichs that had been
developed to obscure the starkness of the Yahwist vision: you must
have sinned, for only the wicked suffer, etc. But Job mercilessly
demythologizes these assurances (218). Similarly, Bigger cannot
comfort himself with any promises about Gods care for man from
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 177

Reverend Hammonds words or indeed from Buckleys racist


listening.
Boris Max becomes the third counselor Bigger faces. As Paul N.
Siegel points out, (518) his speech is not an address to a jury. He does
not dare to put Biggers fate in the hands of a white jury and enters a
plea of guilty, which by the laws of Illinois permits him to reject a
trial by jury and to have the sentence rendered by the presiding judge.
In the same way as Elihu contradicts Jobs friends, Max speaks to this
judge and tries to make him understand the significance of Bigger.
That understanding, however, is built upon the Mosaic Law, which
included extensive legislation regarding the taking of human life. It
differentiated between deliberate and accidental slaying. Factors
considered as weighing against a person claiming to be an accidental
murder were: if he had formerly hated the slain person; had lain in
wait for the victim; or had used an object or implement capable or
inflicting a mortal wound. Unintentional murderers (those who had
not felt hatred toward the victim) could preserve their lives by
availing themselves of the safety accorded them in the cities of refuge
where an accidental shedder of blood could find protection and
asylum from the avenger of blood (Nu 35:6-32). Max affirms that
Bigger has murdered Mary Dalton accidentally, without thinking,
without plan, without conscious motive (364). In fact, Max tries to
commute the death sentence to life imprisonment, which actually
equals entering a city of refuge since this might give him an
opportunity to build a meaning for his life and steel bars between
him and the society he offended would provide a refuge from hate and
fear (370).
On the other hand, and following the biblical tradition, Max
equates hatred with murder. Fear and hate and guilt are the keynotes
of this drama!, he says (357), and because of white hate Bigger was
guilty before he killed! (369). In the Scriptures murders issue forth
from the heart of an individual, therefore anyone hating his brother
would be a manslayer: Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and
you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.
According to 1 John 3:15, Jesus also associates murder with wrong
attitudes such an individuals continuing wrath with his brother,
speaking abusively to him, or wrongly judging and condemning him
as a despicable fool (Matthew 5:21, 22). Such hatred may lead to
actual murder, as appears in the words of James 5:6 (You have
condemned, you have murdered the just), and Jesus believes that one
who acts like this figuratively murders the Son of God. Maxs last
178 Carme Manuel

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

draws on William Jamess law of dissociation in explaining the dual nature


of symbolic objectstheir tendency to be both man and beast or both man
and monster. [] The association of blackness first with humans, then with
beasts, leads to the disassociation of blackness from both, thereby becoming
an object of intense contemplation. This not only thoroughly alienated
blackness, but the exclusive humanness of whiteness. (211)7

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)

In the same way, racist and Marxist discourses dissatisfy Bigger


because none of them serve him right, and both, blind to his real
needs, misinterpret him. The Book of Bigger, then, appears to call
white paradigms into question as privileged descriptions of the way in
which blacks stand in America. At the end of Native Son, only Jan
Erlone recognizes Bigger as a human being; therefore, Bigger can say
of Jan that the word had become flesh (268). This paraphrase of
John 1:14 supports the theme of Biggers self-creation through
language to dwell among the rest of humanity. The record of
Biggers strugglehis yearning for communication and for a
wholeness which had been denied him all his life (335)ends in a
transcendental optimism capable of overcoming Americas perverted
racism implying that new images are needed to mediate the
communication and draw what was common and good between
white men and black men and all men (335).
In the same way that through his long debate with his
comforters, Job pleads that God appear (in court, as it were) and
state plainly what wrong Job has committed that warrants such ill
fortune (Gabel et al. 137), Bigger tries desperately to cast off the
images and definitions which describe his ontological being in
American society, and instead he wishes to be recognized for his
humanity. Yet, in contrast to the Book of Job, where the problem of
suffering can never be solved, but humankind must forever maintain
the anguished attempt to solve it, Native Son argues that the search for
meaning in the constant flux of everyday events in America is not
unending but starts with the recognition of the humanity of blackness
and the implementation of justice heretofore unseen. Michel Fabre in
his article The Poetry of Richard Wright explains that Wrights
poetry, especially after 1937, centered on the world of the workers
and the poor. He continues by contending that readers are first struck
by the fact that Wright is as realistic in his poetry as he is in his
novels. However, the real world, naked and violent, is never
Biggers Rebellious Complaint: Biblical Imagery in Native Son 181

incorporated in its everyday form: either the Marxist interpretation


transforms it into a significant universe or else the authors
imagination recreates it through a religious, elemental, or mythical
symbolism. This is so because in a paradoxical component of these
Communist poems there are a wealth of Biblical references (272).
Native Son drinks from the same fountains.

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

The problem of authorial intrusiveness in Native Son becomes acute


because Biggers inability to express himself conflicts with the very nature
of literature, which is a medium of words. This disparity is exacerbated
with protest literature whose discourse is rhetorical and loaded with
messages. In this view, the cinema, with its seemingly unmediated way of
addressing spectators, appears to be the appropriate medium for Bigger
Thomasa detail that did not elude Wright as he intended his prose to
exude cinematic qualities. But Native Son proved deceptively easy to
adapt onscreen.

In 1940, Richard Wrights novel Native Son appeared on the Book of


the Month Club, and its success has continued unabated ever since.
Native Son, the first bestseller by a black writer, brought African
American literature in the limelight. The story was made into film
twice: first in 1951 by French director Pierre Chenal, and more
recently in 1986 by American director Jerrold Freedman. Through a
close reading of Wrights seminal essay How Bigger Was Born,
the first part of this reflection explores Wrights craftsmanship and
endeavors to show how Bigger Thomas, the central character in
Native Son, was conceived by Wright in terms akin to film
techniques. This part suggests that the cinema, with its intrinsic
qualities, may have been a better medium for the Bigger Thomas
character to blossom to its full potential. The second part of this
reflection focuses on both film adaptations of Native Son in some
detail since Chenals and Freedmans respective works were made
more than four decades apart and in very different circumstances but
both responded to Wrights provocative novel with significant
modifications. What posed problems to both directors was not so
much the formi.e., the style or syntactic structure of the novelas
the content of the story itself, and both Chenal and Freedman had to
188 Raphal Lambert

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.

1. What Is Bigger Thomas Made of?

In his 1937 manifesto Blueprint for Negro Writing, Richard Wright


stigmatized African American literature for being under the cultural
and financial tutelage of white society. Embarrassed by the
outpouring of good sentiment that followed the publication of Uncle
Toms Children a year later, Wright commented that Uncle Toms
Children was a book even bankers daughters could read and weep
over and feel good about [and] 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
(How Bigger Was Born 454). That unyielding book is of course
Native Son, which is raw, candid, and intransigent. Native Son tells
the story of Bigger Thomas, a youth of the Great Depression era,
whose deterministic environmentChicagos South Side ghetto
leads to double homicide. Bigger first accidentally smothers to death
Mary Dalton, a wealthy college girl he chauffeurs around. He
proceeds to cut her body up and cremate her in the basement furnace
of the Daltons mansion. A few days later, and for no other apparent
reason than anger and frustration, Bigger smashes open the brain of
his dipsomaniac girlfriend, Bessie Mears. The last part of Wrights
novel, The Trial, is a straightforward indictment of the American
judicial system and its racist ideology. The Court focuses exclusively
on Biggers murder of the white girl Mary Dalton, while his
slaughtering of his black girlfriend, Bessie Mears, is totally
overlooked. As for the long, compassionate, and socially oriented plea
of Communist defense lawyer Boris Max, it is dismissed as
preposterous and completely ignored by the jury. Bigger is sentenced
to death for an unpremeditated murder he committed out of fear.
Although the commercial success of Native Son suggested a
genuine need for a more socially conscious art, many critics deplored
the fact that Wrights urban realism had done away with aesthetics
altogether. James Baldwin was one of the first to pinpoint the
symptomatic shortcomings of both Native Son and protest literature.
Such books, Baldwin argued, are forgiven on the strength of [their]
good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 189
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations

excessive demands they make of credibility (15). Baldwin also


denounced Native Sons sordid depiction of the black community,
contending that it reinforced the stereotypes it meant to challenge in
the first place. In his essay, Richard Wrights Blues, Ralph Ellison
went a step further as he captured what can be viewed as an artistic
lapse in Native Son:

In order to translate Biggers complicated feelings into universal ideas, Wright


had to force into Biggers consciousness concepts and ideas which his
intellect could not formulate. Between Wrights skill and knowledge and the
potentials of Biggers mute feelings lay a thousand years of conscious culture.
(89)

With the exception of a few scholars, such as Valrie Smith who


argues that Wrights use of free indirect speech enables Bigger to find
a voice, most critics concur with Ellisons observation and point out
that the discrepancy between the elegant speech pattern of the literate
third person narrator and the dialect of the uneducated main
protagonist tends to take credibility away from the Bigger character.1
If the authors intrusive voice makes Bigger Thomas less plausible
as a fictional character, it is this very issue Wright struggles with in
How Bigger Was Born, originally a speech delivered at Columbia
University shortly after the first publication of Native Son and now
considered an appendage to the novel. Wright wants to make Bigger a
living personality (448), and Bigger is to be the embodiment of the
black youthresentful toward whites, sullen, angry, ignorant,
emotionally unstable, depressed and unaccountably elated at times
(448). Bigger also corresponds to actual people with whom Wright
interacted when he was a bareheaded, barefoot kid in Jackson,
Mississippi (434).
In Wrights descriptions, Bigger is always associated with verbs of
emotion such as to feel and to sense. Bigger does not think. He
is a sort of a brute who lives in the realm of the sensory rather than in
the realm of the rational. Ultimately, Wright wants the reader to feel
what Bigger feels, but Biggers inability to voice his own feeling
thwarts such an endeavor: Then Id find it impossible to say what I
wanted to say without stepping in and speaking outright on my own
(458). Tellingly, Wright finishes this statement in a quasi-apologetic
tone:

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

This problem of characters authenticity can be inferred from the


very first lines of How Bigger Was Born as Bigger Thomas does
not represent one but multiple characters. Wright starts his essay
picturing different kinds of Biggers, and he numbers them: Bigger
No.1, Bigger No.2, etc. The Bigger we know from the novel is a
combination of at least five Bigger Thomasesa montage that tends
to objectify Bigger. Wright also sees these Biggers as types more than
actual individuals. Later in the essay, the autobiographical Bigger
becomes more allegorical as Wright adds that not all Biggers are
black and that in fact, there are millions of white Biggers everywhere.
All Biggers are the same regardless of race, borders or nationalities
a statement apparently serving his Marxist ideals. The fictional veneer
of Native Son is too thin for its didactic purpose.

As burdensome as authorial presence may be in the text, Native Son


remains a rich, multilayered story in which Richard Wright
experimented with modernist techniques such as stream of
consciousness, interior monologue, and direct rendering of a dream
stateso many literary tools meant to compensate the so-called loss
of realism inherent to written fiction. According to Russian Formalist
thinker and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the best alternative to this
verbally-constructed reality is the cinema where reality materializes
directly on-screen. The belief that the camera does not lie is of course
a nave belief, since, as a medium, the cinema is an agent of
communication between two entities. By essence, the cinema is the
bearer of messages, points of view, and ideologies. Eisensteins
opinion, however, can help the reader / viewer understand a major
distinction between literature and the cinema.
What distinguishes both arts can be grasped in the difference of
meaning between two verbs with the same etymology, to construct
and to construe. Fiction readers must interpret the words in order to
picture what they read. They have to construct knowledge, to combine
and arrange the elements they are given into something coherent. Film
screening is more passive. The picture first assails the viewers, who,
then, must read, i.e., construe the stark reality presented to them.
Therefore, film images first appeal to the viewers sensorial system
whereas the literary text first appeals to the readers intellect.
This immediacy and this spontaneity typifying the cinematic
experience must have appealed to Richard Wright as many of his
remarks in How Bigger Was Born suggest that his intention was
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 191
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations

to recreate on the page the kind of emotions the film spectator


undergoes:

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)

Considering Quinns observation along with films capacity to


make us believe that we are experiencing reality, we may fancy that
Bigger was really born onscreen, that both his physical and
192 Raphal Lambert

psychological reality were restored when French director Pierre


Chenal first adapted Native Son in 1951, with Richard Wright himself
as the scriptwriter and in the lead role. Unfortunate circumstances,
however, impaired the quality of Chenals work.

2. Bigger Goes to the Movies

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)

As much as he identified with his fictional character, Richard


Wright was not an actor and the rest of the cast was quite amateurish
too. For instance, a young Californian tourist played Jan Erlone; an
archeology major at the University of Chicago, Gloria Madison,
played Bessie; and a former conductor from California who was
living in Argentina, Don Dean, played Boris Max, Biggers
From Page to Screen: A Comparative Study of Richard Wrights 193
Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations

Communist lawyer. According to contemporary reviews, Richard


Wright as Bigger Thomas was the most unconvincing and
unsatisfying portrayal of all. It must be said that professional actor
Canada Lee, who had embodied Bigger in Paul Greens stage
adaptation in 1941, was hospitalized at the time of the films shooting
and was only then replaced by Richard Wright. To play the role,
Wright lost almost 35 pounds. Unfortunately, Wright was already in
his forties and his natural compunction, as well as his features,
demanded too much effort and indulgence from the audience that
witnessed the immature behavior of an adult to his deterministic
environment instead of the desperate response of a tormented and
alienated black youth. Wrights unskilled embodiment of Bigger
Thomas is not the only shortcoming in Chenals movie. Reviewers
and scholars have pointed out, helter-skelter, the embellishment of
Ernies Kitchen Shack, a modest South Side honky-tonk, which was
turned into a fashionable nightclub with a ring for boxing matches, a
jazz band, cabaret singers and habitus all dressed up; the
transformation of Bessie Mears from a depraved alcoholic into a
very proper graduate of a white-gloves Southern black girls
academy (Brunette 134); Bigger and Bessies surreal romantic
interlude in the Daltons limousine shortly after Bigger is hired as the
Daltons chauffeur; and more conspicuously, the absence of the snow
so important and symbolic in the book. However, these changes did
not modify the story thematically.
There are other changes that are much more disturbing in Chenals
adaptation. As mentioned earlier, the American censorship deleted
most of the trial scene. In that scene, Boris Maxs defense speech
stigmatizes American society and judicial system and aims at
convincing the jury (and the reader) that racism is the true culprit in
Bigger Thomass dilemma. In the truncated version, Max seems to
have metamorphosed into a complacent, almost conniving ally of
Farley, a malicious, prejudiced reporter, and a symbol of perverted /
unfair American justice in general.

More surprisingly, the trial is not given prominence in Jerrold


Freedmans 1986 version either. As Washington Post reviewer
Richard Harrington notes: The defense lawyers final plea, a
blistering indictment of American society, is condensed from 18
pages to 2 nonspecific sentences. Although the 1980s in President
Ronald Reagans America were marked by a revival of anti-
Communism, this time period cannot be compared to the hysterical
194 Raphal Lambert

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

(Bessie), is killed but by a policemans bullet. On several occasions,


Wright had consented to significant modifications of his story. The
publication of the unexpurgated version of Native Son by the Library
of America in 1991 reveals that in order to see his novel published in
1940, Wright had been constrained to edit his own text, deleting
important explicit sexual descriptions.3 The fact that the original text
of Native Son underwent so many modifications in the 1940s and
1950s by a film director, a playwright, and the author himself is not so
surprising considering the socio-political pressure at the time. As the
first bestseller by an African American author, Native Son surely
contributed to heighten public awareness of the African American
communitys lot, and most certainly changed many a biased view
about African Americans. Alterations of the original were
unfortunate, but Wright also knew it was the price to be paid for his
work to be endorsed and published. And as we will see shortly, the
treatment and reception of Native Son by later generations suggest
that in spite of Wrights self-censorship and editing, Native Son still
retained enough provocative scenes and ideas to prompt further blue-
penciling and revisions.
When Richard Wright died in Paris in November 1960, he had
been living in France since 1947 and had witnessed from afar only the
premises of significant improvements in race relations in the United
States. The Civil Rights movement, however, became the major issue
of the next two decades and eventually spawned better, if still
strained, race relations. The situation is far from perfect in 1986,
when novice producer Diane Silver sets about to adapt Native Son to
the screen, but real progress has been made, and, in a personal
interview, Silver posits herself as one of those who wanted to keep the
flame of greater race cooperation ablaze. In fact, one of her alleged
motivations for choosing Native Son was that it might be possible to
make the human connection with Bigger as an emblem of Black
unemployed youth in the 1980s, even though the setting is the 1930s
(McHenry 16). At that time Silvers enthusiasm was commendable,
but her view of Bigger Thomas (an emblem of black unemployed
youth) suggests a limited understanding of the novels complexity.
Surely, Bigger Thomas is an emblem and is timeless, but Wrights
focus is not solely on the predicament of black unemployed youth. In
fact, this is only a pretext to hit the true target: readersespecially
white readersfor whom Biggers unbearable violence challenges the
distorted (and sometimes buried) feelings towards people of color.
196 Raphal Lambert

Just like her predecessors, but without the alibi of a similarly


hostile socio-political environment, Diane Silver modified the story
revealing of a whole new mentality for this new adaptation of
Wrights masterwork. Silver imposed on Richard Wesley, her
scriptwriter, and Jerrold Freedman, her director, cuts that severely
affected Wesleys script (which was quite faithful to the original).
Indeed, most reviewers have pointed out Silvers oversimplification
of the novel. New York Times columnist Vincent Canby wrote a
scathing review: The original work has been so softened that it
almost seems upbeat, which would have infuriated Wright (Canby
C14). Richard Harrington for the Washington Post echoed Canby
stating that Silver turned the novel into a pious liberal document
(Harrington B8).
What started the controversy over the 1986 adaptation is Silvers
excision of Bessies murder from the story. Director Jerrold Freedman
was strongly opposed to Silvers cut for, as he suitably explained, By
deleting Bessies murder, Miss Silver has tampered with Mr. Wrights
intended statement (Harmetz C.14). But Freedmans disapprobation
did not stop Silver. She actually fired Freedmans postproduction
team so that, according to Silver herself, the money would not fall
apart. Furthermore, she managed to raise another $250,000 to modify
the film at her convenience (qtd. in McHenry 17). There are several
interpretations of Silvers decision. In her article for Ms., Susan
McHenry retraces Silvers career and life until the making of Native
Son. She emphasizes her feminist sympathies and reports that Silver
agreed with feminists who denounced Richard Wrights misogynist
prose. In order to assert his manhood, Bigger kills two womenone
by accident, the other deliberately and for no good reasonand never
shows any emotion or regret for it. By eliminating Biggers murder of
Bessie, Silver made it easier for feminists to respond to the story.
Bessies appalling death erased from the plot, women do not look so
much as disposable tools for Biggers self-realization, and therefore,
McHenry argues, the revision allows for greater compassion for
Biggers predicament. Another justification for Silvers cut came
from Lindsay Law, the producer of the PBS series American
Playhouse who partly financed the 1986 film.

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)

In her righteous, sentimentalist tone, Silver tells us that her


moviemade on a shoestring budget and in dire need of making a
profitis good for us; and, in a way, shes right: it is good for us in
the sense that it leaves our consciousness unsullied. The 1986
adaptation of Native Son refuses to be thought-provoking
entertainment. Silver had the best conditions ever combined for a
controversial filmtalented scriptwriter, director, actors, and
auspicious time periodshe had the potential to do justice, at last, to
Richard Wrights masterpiece. Instead, by making Bigger a victim
only, Silver did what Wright, as quoted earlier, feared most: write a
198 Raphal Lambert

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.

The problem of authorial intrusiveness in Native Son becomes acute


because Biggers inability to express himself conflicts with the very
nature of literature, which is a medium of words. This disparity is
exacerbated with protest literature whose discourse is rhetorical and
loaded with messages. In this view, the cinema, with its seemingly
unmediated way of addressing spectators, appears to be the
appropriate medium for Bigger Thomasa detail that did not elude
Wright as he intended his prose to exude cinematic qualities. But
Native Son proved deceptively easy to adapt onscreen.
Thus the murder of Bessie Mears, Biggers girlfriend, is either
modified in order to look justifiable, like in the 1951 version, or
completely done away with, like in the 1986 version. The murder of
Bessie makes everyone feel uneasy because it is morally indefensible,
as has been shown, and probably accounts for producer Diane Silvers
decision to omit it altogether in the second attempt to film the novel.
PBS producer Lindsay Law backed up Silver, but she also invoked
the multi-layered quality of the novel and the impossibility to explore
it all in a two-hour film. Respecting the book to the letter and giving
as much weight to the murder of Bessie as to the murder of Mary
Dalton might prove too ambitious a project for a film. It would force
the film to re-center its attention on Bessie and give prominence to the
trial scene used by Richard Wright to hammer home his political
agenda. With two very distinct murders, the importance of the trial
scene would grow exponentially and would likely become quite
confusing within the frame of an average feature-length movie. In
addition, while a novel can deal with several topics and swing back
and forth between them at will, narrative cinema operates according
to a rather linear causal structure. There is a considerable gap between
both murders when it comes to Biggers motive, and it may prove
difficult for a cinematic version to deal with both at the same time
without giving the impression of a disorderly amalgam. Thus, the
deletion of Bessies murder is not only meant to make Bigger the
200 Raphal Lambert

object of viewers empathy. It also streamlines the story so that


viewers can easily relate to it.
One last question is left unresolved: so far, the idea of adapting
Native Son with the murder of Mary Dalton out of the picture has
occurred to no one. And it probably never will because, ultimately,
what fascinates people in Native Son is that a poor, uneducated black
hoodlum has the guts and the wits to cut out and cremate the body of
a wealthy white girl. In the novel, the reporters cannot believe it.
Neither can many readers today. More than six decades after Native
Son was written, many in our society still associate Biggers
blackness with brutality and brainlessness. This is what Richard
Wright had understood and wanted readers of his time to confront.
This is what a politically correct society has also understood and
wants us never to confront.

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 Bigger Figures in Hip Hop Culture investigates a


continuum/trajectory of African American expressive culture from
Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas to Hip Hop culture and several of its
lyricists who report similar cultural, racial, social, and economic
phenomenon. The essay extracts lyrical examples from the artistic
repertoires of Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.), Tupac Shakur, DMX, and
Eminem. Through these examples specific connections are made between
several important aspects of Richard Wrights most significant literary
figure, Bigger Thomas. Although the relationship between the authors and
their narrative characters are explored, the arguments find their greatest
strength in the unfortunate similarities between the oppressive environs
detailed in Native Son and the realities articulated and reported on by
some of the most popular and most gifted lyricists of 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

My mission in this essay is to explore sociological and aesthetic


relationships between the powerfully drawn portrait of Bigger
Thomas, an original thug, in Richard Wrights modernist classic,
Native Son and certain emcees within Hip Hop Culture who have, in
turn, achieved big success by mimetically returning to the socio-
economic mapping referenced in the epigraph above. The transition
from literary Bigger figure to oracular thug/Bigger figures in Hip Hop
culture reflects a continuum of social conditions that continue over
204 James Braxton Peterson

time to contribute to the existential challenges of these figures (and


those they represent).1
If, as Houston Baker asserts, Biggers culture is that of the black
American race, and he is intelligible as a conscious literary projection
of the folk hero who embodies the survival values of a culture (11),
then the oral narratives and characters that reflect certain conceptual
and social resonances with the character of Bigger Thomas can be
considered examples of a similar representational characterization
within Hip Hop Culture.
My reflections in this essay revolve around three interlocking
culturally significant issues. Firstly, the character, Bigger Thomas,
created by the late Richard Wright, confronts a set of racial and socio-
economic challenges and forces within the urban environs of America
that are still readily present in our society. Secondly, these conflicts
between the individual and society are most poignantly articulated by
and through various rapperssome of whom are relegated to the
category of gangsta rappers. And thirdly, the importance of the
autobiographical factor in the construction of these Hip Hop personae
and characters parallels the importance allowed to Wrights vital
experience as factors in the characterization of Bigger Thomas and of
the social situation portrayed in Native Son. Similarly, the general
lack of economic opportunity along with the police brutality that
characterize the post-industrial inner cities of Hip Hop era are
rendered through realistic and naturalistic techniques that match those
employed by Wright to articulate similar challenges in the urban
environment of Native Son.
There are dozens of rappers that could be used to explicate this set
of relationships. Many rappers hail from post-industrial inner city
environments where the educational systems are dilapidated, the
communal relationship with the police force is violent and
contentious, and the lack of economic opportunity is a continuous fact
of urban living. I have deliberately chosen the most popular artists
who fit this Bigger Figure paradigm within Hip Hop Culture in order
to demonstrate the pervasiveness of these reflective themes. Thus the
Bigger Figures in Hip Hop discussed in this essay are several of many
that reflect and represent even more and certainly much more
anonymous Bigger figures in Hip Hop culture. They are as follows:
Christopher Wallace whose rapper/character sports the names he is
better known by, Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G.; Earl
Simmons, only known as DMX (which stands for Dark Man X);
Marshall Mathers, also known as Eminem; and Tupac Shakur, whose
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 205
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

rapper moniker, 2Pac, maintains a powerful homological and


ideological connection to his real name.
Each of these rappers exemplify particular aspects of the ways in
which Bigger Thomas is reflected in Hip Hop Culture. Yet it must be
pointed out here at the outset that Richard Wright and these alleged
artistic counterparts in Hip Hop are operating through very different
media and although there are ways in which Wrights urban
naturalism is readily apparent in the works of these rappers, the
distinction between 1940s American novel and 1990s rap is certainly
worth noting here in a proper definition of the form known as gangsta
rap.

Gangsta Rap is an expressive art form that originates from a complex


set of cultural and sociological circumstances. The term itself is a
media term partially borrowed from the African American vernacular
form of the word gangster. When the popularity of rap music shifted
from NYC and the east coast to Los Angeles and the west coast, this
geographic re-orientation was accompanied by distinct stylistic shifts
and striking differences in the content and sound of the music. West
Coast rap sampled more Parliament and Funkadelics than it did James
Brown (if it sampled at all). The funkified aesthetics of George
Clinton and Bootsy Collins (synthetic sounds with extraordinarily
catchy bass rifts) form the musicality of the Funk movement. The
musics content focused on a politics of escape centered on multi-
layered allusions to space travel via the Mother Ship. James Brown,
on the other hand provided the soul of Hip Hops musical origins
most often and still regularly exemplified through break beat samples
of James Browns most contagious rhythms such as those found in
Funky Drummer. Accordingly, the beat-per-minute rates in gangsta
rap were less, not signifying a slower pace of life but a more
stretched-out landscape. But these are only the stylistic differences.
West Coast rappers embraced (in their music and lyrics) the nihilistic
attitudes that resulted from unchecked gang warfare, police brutality,
and the injection of crack cocaine in its poorest communities.
According to Eithne Quinns brilliant investigation into the world of
gangsta rap: Although clearly the outcome of highly mediated and
commercialized forces, Gangsta rap is in most ways a natural
extension of badman lorea hyper-mediated version of the folk
process in which stories about the exploits of real men fueled and
informed myth (19). My emphasis is on stories here because these
gangsta raps are narratives. The hyper-mediated reporting on the
206 James Braxton Peterson

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

When poets put themselves or their thoughts into a poem, they


present a version of themselves; that is, they present a person who in
many ways is like themselves but who consciously or unconsciously,
is shaped to fit the needs of the poem. We must be very careful
therefore about identifying anything in a poem with the biography of
the poet. (25)

Gangsta rap lyrics are poetic narratives deliberately based on


reality for the desired literary effects traditionally known as Realism
and, in the case of Wright, urban Naturalism. The style (exaggeration,
rhyming, and signifying), and content (misogyny, murder, and
antisocial behavior) of the music clearly reveal that so-called gangsta
rap is in reality a recent manifestation of the African American oral
and folk tradition; a tradition that obviously includes the work of
Richard Wright and his anti-hero, Bigger Thomas, in Native Son. This
tradition originates in the verbal practices of slaves, develops through
the spirituals and the blues, through Jazz music and Harlem
Renaissance poetry, and finds its most comparable links to gangsta
rap in/through the tradition of toasting. Toasting is a black folk oral
practice involving the spontaneous performance of long and
occasionally improvised narrative poems. These toasts were most
typically performed and exchanged by men in street corner
conversations, barbershops, and prisons (Quinn 17). Moreover, along
this trajectory there are very direct connections/reflections between
Richard Wrights Bigger Thomas and several emcees/rappers and
their narrative personase.g. Christopher Wallace and Biggie Smalls
or Notorious B.I.G. and Marshall Mathers and Eminem or Slim
Shady.
In order to conceptually organize these reflections on the Bigger
figures in Hip Hop Culture I rely heavily on Richard Wrights
taxonomy of Bigger Thomases detailed in thedictatedessay How
Bigger Was Born. Not long after the earliest critiques and praise
directed at Native Son, Richard Wright lectured on the ethnographic
experiences that introduced him to the nihilistic subjectivity of a
number of Bigger Thomases with whom he crossed paths in the Jim
Crow south as well as the industrially developing Midwest/North of
the mid-20th Century. With a tinge of obituary-like prose, Wright
summarizes five Bigger Thomases biographically in How Bigger
Was Born. Each of these Biggers met a terrifically predictable fate
due to to their behavior and the racial climate in which they acted out.
Bigger 1 was basically a bully. Bigger 2 deliberately hustled his way
through every outpost of white economic power. Bigger 3 bum-rushed
208 James Braxton Peterson

the movie theater every week. Bigger 4 ended up in an insane asylum


and Bigger 5, who deliberately and blatantly flouted the separatist
rules of Jim Crow, more than likely ended up dead: They were shot,
hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were
either dead or their spirits broken (Wright 27). For a young Richard
Wright these Bigger Thomases were the only indication that there was
any kind of willful resistance in the South due to the conditions of
white supremacy and racial terror.
Similarly, Richard Wright had lived and observed many of the
experiences expressed in Native Son. The Bigger types inhabiting the
South Side of Chicago were familiar to Wright because he spent over
a decade living and working in cramped and dirty flats with his aunt,
mother, and brother, and [he] had visited scores of similar dwellings
while working as an insurance agent (Kinnamon 120):
The general similarities between Wright at the age of twenty and the
fictional character (Bigger Thomas) are obvious enough: both are
Mississippi-born blacks who migrated to Chicago; both live with
their mothers in the worst slums of the Black Belt; both are
motivated by fear and hatred; both are rebellious by temperament;
both could explode into violence (Kinnamon 119).

Interestingly, it is not difficult to identify several of the most


popular and successful figures in Hip Hop culture with Wrights
Bigger figures. They are, in no particular order, nor specific
referential connection to Wrights delineation of Bigger Thomases:
Biggie Smalls, DMX, Eminem, and Tupac Shakur. Each of these
emceesall in some way connected to or representing the gangsta
rap subgenre of Hip Hophas a particular relationship to their own
artistic personas, the sociological conditions of their respective post-
industrial urban environments, and the millions of people who
purchase and listen to their music.
However, the oratorical authors enacting the Bigger Figures in Hip
Hop shift identities within their narratives and over various
songs/albums and film performances, sometimes taking on the
personas of multiple characters. This proliferation of characters does
not necessarily distance the author from the characters realities. Thus
the relationships between Christopher Wallace/Biggie Smalls and the
album Ready to DieBiggies equal parts suicidal thug and
Dionysian recording debutare comparable to the canny authorial
and at times autobiographical connections between Richard Wright
and Native Son. That is, as Kinnamon notes in the excerpt above (and
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 209
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

as I argue with regards to the Bigger Figures) certain specific claims


can be made about the common circumstances and/or challenges that
exist for both the author and his creation(s).
Furthermore, the economic success of both Wrights novel and
gangsta rap, thug tales that span cultural eras at least 30 years apart,
may force critics to wrestle with the socioeconomic realities at play in
the sales and circulation of these narratives. Stories that depict violent
(if at times strategic) responses to economic and racial oppression in
the narrow spaces and places of depression-era ( la Wright) or in
post-industrial Black life (via Biggie Smalls) undeniably have
extraordinary cultural and monetary capital. Native Son and Ready to
Die both exemplify this.
In the preface to his now classic critical assessment of black youth
cultural expression in The Hip Hop Generation, Bikara Kitwana
reflects on the plight of Bigger Thomases of this generation:
Understanding the new crises in African American culture that have
come about in my generations lifetimehigh rates of suicide and
imprisonment, police brutality, the generation gap, the war of the
sexes, Blacks selling Black self hatred as entertainmentI often
wonder what life will be like for the generation of African
Americans that follows. (xi)

With so many racial and socio-economic challenges in common,


Bigger Thomas the literary figure, functions as the sui generis focal
point of an artistic trajectory that employs a mimetic two-step as it
depicts the lived realities of African American men.2 For example, the
resonance of certain real life exigenciestake for example the
institutional racism of the American Justice systemis central to the
authentic connection between the Bigger Thomas figure in the
American literary tradition and the broader reading public of the
1940s and beyond.3 This original Bigger Figure, wrestling with a
cruel urban environment, an abiding sense of misogynistic retribution
and socio-economic worthlessness, finds eloquent re-articulation
in/through the narratives of the MCs who will be glossed in this essay.
In the examples that follow I will pinpoint these similarities.

Christopher Wallace

Since Biggie Smalls bears such striking resemblances to Bigger


Thomas in both nomenclature and in their shared nihilistic narrative
210 James Braxton Peterson

content, exploring his debut album is an important point of entry to


the discussion of the Bigger Figures in Hip Hop Culture. Especially
important is Ready to Die, his initial album which was released in
September 1994. In order to fully understand the impact and
significance of this momentous debut we must also understand the
state of Hip Hop at this time. Two years earlier Dr. Dre had released
The Chronic. This multi-platinum g-funk inspired West Coast gangsta
rap record crystallized the dominance of West Coast artists on the
international rap landscape. Although New York City, the birthplace
and mecca of Hip Hop culture had not produced a multi-platinum star
in years, West Coast styled gangsta rap had dominated the culture and
industries of Hip Hop. However, as Dee explains,
He single-handedly shifted the musical dominance back to the East
Coast. From [19]91 to [19]94, the West Coast style of rap was the
dominant force in Hip Hop. Biggie, with the guidance of Puffy, used
familiar melodic R&B loops, combined with his voice texture and
rhyme skills, and caused a Hip Hop paradigm shift (Dee 264).

In many ways, the New York/East Coast audiences were given to


the belief that the center of the Hip Hop universe had shifted to Los
Angeles. But [i]n just a few short years the Notorious B.I.G. went
from Brooklyn street hustler to the savior of East Coast hip hop . . .
(Huey 359).
Ready to Die was East Coast raps saving grace for many reasons.
The cinematic intro to the album promised a fresh and gritty portrait
of the urban underground hustler turned rap artist. The intro track on
Ready to Die features snippets of four previously released songs with
various voiceover skits corresponding with key moments in B.I.G.s
life. The first scene is B.I.G.s birth featuring an ironically proud
pappawho isnt in B.I.G.s life too much beyond his toddler
yearscoaxing B.I.G.s mother to push! The soundtrack for this
portion of the intro interpolates snippets from Curtis Mayfields
classic, Super Fly released during the year of B.I.G.s birth, 1972.
The second scene begins with Sugar Hill Gangs Rappers Delight,
the single that inaugurated Hip Hop culture in the mainstream music
industry circa 1979. The voiceover here is an argument started by
B.I.G.s father who finds out that his son has been caught shoplifting.
Of course he wonders profanely why neither he nor B.I.G.s mom can
control the youngster.4 The music snippet here is important because it
provides listeners with a sense of where B.I.G. was when Rappers
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 211
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

Delightand by extension modern popular rap musicexploded


onto the American pop cultural landscape.
The third and most powerful scene features B.I.G. in a heated
conversation with an anonymous crime partner. B.I.G. challenges his
partner in crime to get this money just as they are about to rob a
New York City subway train. The musical snippet for this scene is the
classic single by Audio Two, Top Billin released in 1987. As Top
Billin fades out and then back in, B.I.G.s shouts, gunshots, and
screams from his victim flesh out the scene.
The final cinematic portrait of the intro track features an exchange
between B.I.G. and a prison CO. As B.I.G. is leaving prison the CO
claims that he will be back, you niggas always are (B.I.G.). The
musical snippet for this scene is taken from Tha Shiznit on Snoop
Doggs debut album, Doggystyle, released in 1993. Even though this
particular sample/snippet gives no credit to Snoop in the Ready to Die
liner notes, listeners can actually hear Snoop rapping in the
background of the final piece of B.I.G.s cinematic introduction.
Moreover Snoops Doggystyle was an important model for Ready to
Die because of its extraordinary success and its ability to straddle the
hardcore gangsta rap tensions and a lighter sensibility with popular
mainstream appeal. The remainder of Ready to Die realizes the power
and complexity of this four-part introduction and indeed went on to
achieve extraordinary success.
What is most important is the fact that Biggie Smalls enacts a
Bigger figure in Hip Hop as Wallaces persona reifies the nihilistic
pathologies that continue to permeate the lives and mentalities of
inner city youth. Most of the tracks on B.I.G.s Ready to Die flip back
and forth between two polar opposite themes. One theme is the
celebration of success in the music industry. Perhaps the most
significant distinction between Wrights Bigger figures and the ones
in gangsta rap narratives is the nihilistic willingness to attain
economic success by any means necessary in Hip Hop. Partying,
running through numerous anonymous women, and flashing (or
flossing) newly acquired monetary resources dominate the content of
these songs. On the opposite side of the spectrum, other songs are
much more thematically aligned with the album title. These rhymes
reflect a pursuit of material sustenance and/or wealth that transcends
relentlessness: These [s]ongs . . . express the futility of ghetto life in
terms explicit and real enough to speak to the streets, but human
enough to avoid myopia (Mao 309). In each of these darker tracks,
B.I.G.s narrators are literally ready to die for material gain, but this
212 James Braxton Peterson

preparedness is not glorified. It is not sexy or appealing. In fact,


B.I.G. makes it clear that being ready to die for material things is in
many real life cases, the equivalent of already being dead.
This peculiar relationship between material desire and the thin
existential line between life and death are also apparent in certain
reflections that appeal to Bigger Thomas early on in Book Two:
Flight of Native Son. After he has experienced the material wealth of
the Daltons lives, he engages in a deep moment of self-hate with
regards to himself and his own familys abode
He hated this room and all of the people in it, including himself.
Why did he and his folks have to live like this? What had they done?
. . . Maybe they had to live this way precisely because none of them
had ever done anything right or wrong that mattered much. (105)

Biggers self-directed hate here is a growing death wishhe is in


fact ready to diethat results from the utter lack of opportunity and
options in his life. After contemplating his gruesome murder of Mary
Dalton, he inverts his logic regarding material lack and inactivity into
the following conclusion: He had murdered and had created a new
life for himself (105).
Along with several other debut albums from New York City
artistsNas Illmatic, Wu-Tangs Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers,
and Black Moons Enta Da Stage, Ready to Die recaptured the flag
for East Coast Hip Hop when it went on to sell millions of records. It
was solidified as a quadruple platinum release on October 19, 1999.
But none of these other artists enjoyed the meteoric rise to fame that
Biggie enjoyed and most, if not all of them, avoided the ultra-violent
pitfalls of over exposure that surely contributed to B.I.G.s early and
unfortunate death. Spoken word poet and self-professed Hip Hop
head, Saul Williams explains this clearly in perfect Hip Hop idiom:
We nodded our heads in affirmation and then when Biggie named
his first album Ready to Die we all acted surprised when it happened.
Word is bond, son. Plain and simple (171).

Marshall Mathers

Besides the similarity between Biggie Smalls and Wrights


protagonist, the relationship between Marshall Mathers and his
rapping alter egos, Eminem and Slim Shady also parallels that of
Wright and his fictitious and autobiographical characters, Big Boy,
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 213
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

Bigger Thomas, and himself (especially in Black Boy). This authorial


relationship is constructed in order to artistically wrestle with severe
social and familial alienation. Of all the Bigger Figures in Hip Hop,
Eminem represents most poignantly the familial and natal alienation
articulated through the character of Bigger Thomas. Eminems
oedipal hatred for his mother has been documented in his music, in
the media, and in the film 8 Mile, a loosely based bio-picture in which
a voluptuous, drugged-out Kim Basinger plays his mother. A brief
excerpt from Eminems Cleaning Out My Closet will bear all of
these points out.

Now I would never diss my own momma just to get recognition


Take a second to listen for who you think this record is dissin
But put yourself in my position; just try to envision
witnessin your momma poppin prescription pills in the kitchen
Bitchin that someone's always goin throuh her purse and shit's missin
Goin through public housin systems, victim of Munchausen's
Syndrome
My whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn't
'til I grew up, now I blew up, it makes you sick to ya stomach
doesn't it? Wasn't it the reason you made that CD for me Ma?
So you could try to justify the way you treated me Ma?
But guess what? You're gettin older now and it's cold when your lonely
(Mathers)

Here Eminem references his own (earlier) diatribe against his


mother in the song, Mommy, on the previously released Slim Shady
EP. His mother responded with a CD of her own and he answers her
here in Cleaning Out My Closet. Aside from his troubled
relationship with his mother Eminem also references Mathers
economic challenges in the public housing system as well as his sense
of the public health communitys response to his troubled childhood.
Each of these elements is reminiscent of the challenges encountered
by Bigger Thomas and the real life subjects from which Richard
Wright drew the Bigger inspiration. In the second verse of Rock
Bottom off of the Slim Shady LP, Eminem fleshes out key socio-
economic and domestic aspects of his Bigger figure resonance:
My life is full of empty promises and broken dreams
I'm hopin things look up; but there ain't no job openings
I feel discouraged, hungry and malnourished
Living in this house with no furnace, unfurnished
And I'm sick of workin dead end jobs with lame pay
And I'm tired of being hired and fired the same day (Mathers)
214 James Braxton Peterson

The corollary experiences in the narratives of Bigger Thomas and


Eminem obscure the characters attendant racial distinctions. Bigger
Thomas also abhors his living conditions and reflects upon them
immediately following the residential perspective granted to him
through his initial experience working with the Daltons. He reflects
thus on his familys one-room public housing unit: He hated this
room and all the people in it, including himself. Why did he and his
folks have to live like this? What had they ever done? (105). He
ultimately concludes that his familys socio-economic condition is a
result of the fact that none of them had ever done anything either good
or bad. Biggers contemplation here reveals a burgeoning psychotic
rationale for his murderous actions. That is, committing any action,
even that of murder is better than the economic stasis to which he
feels utterly condemned.
The economic humiliation of public housing is not the only
challenge that Eminem and Bigger have in common. They both share
a healthy disdain for their mothers. Eminems hatred stems from his
mothers neglect, her drug abuse, and her general ineptitude at
providing for the family unit. Biggers humiliation does not derive
from any substance abuse on the part of his mother although one can
interpret Wrights depiction of Biggers mothers Christian piety in
the Marxist vein through which Wright often castes the opiate-like
qualities of religion. The most striking similarity here though is the
willful alienation from the mother manifested in thoughts of hatred
and disgust. Bigger is humiliated daily by the fact that his entire
family must dress in their one room unit with little or no privacy,
much less, dignity. The morning after he murders Mary Dalton and
stuffs her dismembered body into the Daltons furnace, he is extra
anxious when his mother awakes as he is packing for the flight
section of the novel: He heard her getting out of bed; he did not dare
look around now. He had to keep his head turned while she dressed
(101). The reader is drawn to this moment because in it a daily
humiliation (having to dress/undress in front of ones family)
engenders epic significance through Biggers guilt and anxiety
stemming from his crime. He needs to look his mother in the eye and
appear to be normal in order to avoid too many questions from her but
he cannot adequately cover-up his guilt because of the economic
oppression built into his residential space.
Lastly though, Bigger exudes sheer hatred for his mother in certain
key passages of the novel. In this same scene, before his mother rises
to dress herself to his turned back she asks him several questions
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 215
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

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

Yet a third gangsta rapper who mirrors Wrights Bigger Thomas is


DMX. Coming from extreme poverty in post-industrial New York,
Dark Man X emerges artistically as a simulacrum for abused stray pit
bulls abandoned first by society and sometimes by owners who breed
them for internecine battle royals that often maim and kill. DMX
(government nameEarl Simmons), hails from Yonkers, New York.
Close examination of His Ruff Ryders/Def Jam debut, Its Dark and
Hell is Hot, reveal that this release is rife with imagery and themes
that directly reflect and riff on the most potent themes in Richard
Wrights Native Son.
First, the narrator/rapper, DMX is a self-professed robber. This is
an important distinction amongst most gangsta rap narratives since for
the most part these narratives tend to focus on drug dealing, gang or
drug organization violence, sexual exploits and consumerism. DMX
narrates the exploits of a thug-thief who robs not because he wants to,
but because he has to. Bigger Thomas is also confronted with this
apparent option: He walked home with a mounting feeling of fear.
When he reached his doorway, he hesitated about going up. He didnt
want to rob Blums; he was scared. But he had to go through with it
now (35). Biggers decision to rob is not clear to him. He knows that
he has an opportunity to work for the Daltons, but subconsciously this
opportunity to work presents its own challenges of racial and
economic humiliation which are both manifest in his first night as
216 James Braxton Peterson

Marys chauffeur. His anticipation of these dehumanizing elements in


his singular option for employment are what force him to decide to
rob Blum even as his plans for this robbery are dogged by his
subconsciously inclinations and the general incompetence of his crew.
The robber-theme develops and segues into other imagery for
DMX such as bestialized references to Black men. These references
are central to understanding DMX as one of several Bigger figures in
Hip Hop Culture. In the lead single, Get at Me Dog, Dark Man X
crystallizes his rationale for embracing various forms of canine
imagery throughout all of his music: What must I go through to show
you shit is real/And I ain't really never gave a fuck how niggaz
feel/Rob and I steal, not cause I want to cause I have to . . . (DMX).
This embrace includes countless references to dogshis pets as well
as his crew, friends, boys, etc, growling and barking sounds and
several paradigmatic rehearsals of the traditional dog-cat power
dynamic. These canine themes reflect agency, ferociousness, loyalty,
and undying dedication. Similarly, Bigger reads several bestial
references to himself in the newspaper coverage of the manhunt to
bring him to justice. Also, during his trial the prosecutor Mr. Buckley
refers to him as follows: In due time the relief authorities send
notification to the oldest son of the family, Bigger Thomas, this black
mad dog who sits here today, telling him that he must report to work
(409). This black mad dog reference is one of manyothers
include: moron, subhuman, savage and beastsuch references
designed to utterly diminish Biggers humanity in the eyes and minds
of the white jury with his fate in their hands.5 This strategy works to
perfection as the judge needs little deliberation to sentence Bigger to
death.6
These bestial images that both DMX and Bigger Thomas engage
and employ with vastly different results reflect a confrontational,
empowered engagement with what cultural critic Karla Holloway
refers to in Codes of Conduct as turning over to others, who do not
have our best interests at heart, the power of the image:
[K]nowing what others may imagine they see when they look at us is
necessary and critical information. Without this awareness, we
behave as if our bodies and our color do not provoke a certain
stereotype and initiate a particular response. (34)

DMX is aware of the subhuman bestial ascriptions directed toward


young men of color and depicted in/by the media and various
institutions (especially the criminal justice system). He simply uses
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 217
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

the art form of rapping to play on these ascriptions in order to detail


the human elements of modern-day economic oppression and to
personally profit from the mainstream consumption of the bestial
African American image. DMX assumes canine imagery as an artistic
and narratalogical strategy to harness the power of the stereotypical
black male bestial image. He is somewhat successful in this
strategyIts Dark and Hell is Hot purportedly achieved multi-
platinum record salesbut the striking interactive engagement with
Wrights native son is even more remarkable.
In the refrain to Let Me Fly, DMX chants: Either let me fly, or
give me death/ Let my soul rest, take my breath /If I don't fly I'ma die
anyway, I'ma live on /but I'll be gone any day (DMX). These lyrics
ruminate on the conversation between Gus and Bigger very early on
in the novel. In this conversation, Bigger and Gus lament that the
freedom to fly is granted only to white men. As many scholars have
suggested, this scene is a metaphor for how Bigger envisions his
socio-economic limitations in a white supremacist society: Maybe
they right in not wanting us to fly . . . Cause if I took a plane up Id
take a couple of bombs along drop em as sure as hell (15). Thus
DMXs Let Me Fly distills Biggers sense of frustration into a
spiritually inflected lyric that wrestles with multiple meanings of
flight, including freedom, transcendence, and existence itself. This
trope of flight can ultimately be traced back to the classic folk tale in
the African American oral tradition, The People Who Could Fly.7
In addition, DMXs role in the Ernest Dickerson film, Never Die
Alone, is the emblematic gem of his macabre career reflections of the
Bigger figure. DMX plays King, a mid-level hustler who flees
literally flying across countryhis hood in order to avoid conflict
with a super-thug boss. After taking flight from New York City to Los
Angeles, he quickly sets up shop as a dealer in LA. He immediately
hooks an attractive blonde-haired Caucasian woman on heroin. He is
calculated as he seduces her and secretly gives her heroin rather than
cocaine. After he takes control of her body sexually and
physiologically, he takes pleasure in ruining her life and nearly killing
her. King executes the same design for his African American love
interest with some startling differences. King has genuine feelings for
his Black (Bessie-like) girl friend. It is only after she rejects his
sincere and serious approach to their relationship that he turns on her,
hooks her on heroin through deception, and finally rapes her as
payment both for her inability to pay for drugs and her unwillingness
to be with him in a serious, committed relationship.
218 James Braxton Peterson

Kings relationship to his black and white love/lust interests


echoes Bigger Thomas existential and ultimately violent interactions
with the females in Native Son, Mary Dalton and Bessie Smith.8
Unfortunately Biggers limited sense of his own humanity is projected
first onto Mary because they are in a sense both alienated outsiders in
their respective worlds. This feeds their illicit attraction for each other
but ultimately also provides the taboo circumstances that encourage
Bigger to brutally murder and dismember her. Similarly, Bigger
projects his environmental frustrations onto Bessie even as he coerces
her into his criminalized existence. Since Bessie reflects the forces of
racism and urban naturalism that hauntand huntBigger, he
ultimately cannot act out his desire to control her very existence in
any other way but through rape and murder. Robert Butlers essay on
the function of violence in Native Son makes this point clearly:
Biggers consciously formulated thoughts [about Bessie] therefore
have little to do with his actual treatment of Bessie. Their entire
relationship, especially his murder of her, is instead a revelation of
his deepest subconscious drives. (15)

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

streets is a delusion/Even a smooth criminal one day must get


caught/Shot up or shot down with tha bullet that he bought . . . Here
Pac probes the reduction of ghetto spaces to a naturalist
environmental prison. The narrators seclusion, a stark kind of
alienation captured by many gangsta rap narratives, works hand in
hand with his delusion with happiness and life in the streets. In this
realm everyone gets caught or captured, suggesting literal
imprisonment or they are faced with the rampant homicidal suicides
that constantly claim the lives of young black people in America.9
Walter Edwards explains: Tupac had gained first-hand knowledge of
central behaviors in the urban 'hood, including its rich vernacular
language, its thug subculture and the crime, violence and nihilism
which result from poverty and social neglect (64). Lyrics from the
song, Trapped will bare this out:
Cause they never talk peace in tha black community
All we know is violence, do tha job in silence
Walk tha city streets like a rat pack of tyrants
Too many brothers daily heading for tha big penn
Niggas commin' out worse off than when they went in (Shakur)

These lyrics from Trapped cover the sociological template for


Tupacs T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. movement which was designed to harness
the nihilism spreading amongst young Black males in order to channel
constructive energy toward the systemic forces that continue to
oppress urban Black Americaespecially the criminal justice system.
In the absence of peace, violence is the central episteme for the Black
community according to the environment outlined in Trapped.
Laboring in silence is the order of the day and peoplemost likely
Black men in this instanceare rat-like tyrants. Finally, Tupac
critiques the prison system that so readily incarcerates but rarely
rehabilitates.
T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. is an acronym for The Hate yoU Gave Little
Infants Fucks Everybody. These sociological conditions foster
generations of dispossessed alienated Black youth. Tupac fully
realized his representational status beyond the discourse of his Bigger
figure narratives. He also understood that through the experiences
detailed in his lyrics he could leverage a more directly political
influence over his listeners and constituents. This understanding was
essentially what birthed the THUG LIFE movement. He immediately
inducted those in his immediate artistic circle to this movement by
dubbing them The Outlawz and set about making music that spoke
directly to thugs. The alienated figure or the THUG, may be reached
The Hate U Gave (T.H.U.G.): 221
Reflections on the Bigger Figures in Present Day Hip Hop Culture

through narratives such as Native Son or Trapped and his/her


alienation and angst could then be channeled toward political
consciousness and socio-economic progress. The culpable U in the
acronym begs the question of who is responsible for the rampant inner
city conditions of poverty in the United States. Whether this U
takes the form of the US government, white supremacists, or the at
times self-righteous Civil Rights generation, it plants a seed of
understanding the challenges of inner city living beyond the
Moynihanian ascriptions of deficiency and the nihilistic framings of
Cornel West.10 In this sense, the U also interprets the violence and
the narratives that treat inner city violence as a mechanism to cope
with a fierce environ that must be faced daily. Everybody is fucked
by the hate that results. Moreover the violence and its accompanying
mimetic narrativesespecially gangsta rapwill spill over into the
larger society. Thus, the emphasis on everybody.
We might now come to terms with Tupacs more violent lyrics that
took hold on his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993) but
found their fullest initial expression on his first collaborative project
entitled: T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. Volume One (1994). In Under Pressure,
Tupac raps: Right before I die I'll be cursin the law/Reincarnated
bitch, even worse than befo' / My fo'-fo' screamin payback / My
underhanded plan to get them niggaz while they laid back . . .
Arguably, this kind of violent intensity in Pacs narratives is not
merely the glorification of lawlessness and gun-toting reincarnation. It
is similar to the strategy that scholars such as Robert Butler and
Walter Edwards perceive in Wrights Bigger configurations. Thus,
Butler explains that Wrights extensive portrayal of violence in
Native Son . . . is neither gratuitous nor sensationalist. Rather it is a
powerful reflector of both the central characters drive for selfhood
and the social environment which is intent on wasting that drive
(24).

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

Bigger in the newer form of artistic production that is gangsta rap, a


double conclusion is reached. If, on the one hand they mirror our own
realities, they also underline the continued desire to consume artistic
narratives of misogyny and violence that results from lack of money
and goods.

James Braxton Peterson


Pennsylvania State University

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

Baker, Houston. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son: A Collection of


Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972.
B.I.G., Notorious. Intro on the album Ready to Die. New York: Bad Boy Records,
1994.
Butler, Robert James. The Function of Violence in Richard Wrights Native Son in
Black American Literature Forum 20. 1-2 (1986): 9-25.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Keepin It Unreal: $elling the Myth of Black Male Violence,
Long Past Its Expiration Date in Mickey Hart, ed. De Capo Best Music Writing
2004. New York: De Capo Press 2004. (51-60)
De Genova, Nick. Gangster Rap and Nihilism in Black America: Some Questions of
Life and Death in Social Text 43 (1995): 89-132.
Dee, Kool Moe. Theres a God on the Mic: The True 50 Greatest MCs. New York:
Thunders Mouth Press, 2003.
Edwards, Walter. From Poetry to Rap: The Lyrics of Tupac Shakur in The Western
Journal of Black Studies 26.2 (2002): 61-70.
Holloway, Karla. Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character.
New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1995.
Huey, Steve. The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) in Vladimir Bogdanov,
Chris Woodstra, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, and John Bush, eds. All Music Guide
to Hip Hop: The Definitive Guide to Rap and Hip Hop. San Francisco: Backbeat
Books, 2003. (359-360)
Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and
Society. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1972.
Kitwana, Bikari. The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African
American Culture. New York: Basic Civitas, 2002.
Mao, Chairman. If You Dont Know . . . Now You Know: Discography in Cheo
Hodari Coker, ed. Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of The Notorious
B.I.G. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003. (301-331)
Mathers, Marshall. Cleaning Out My Closet on (the album) The Eminem Show. Los
Angeles: Interscope / Slim Shady Records, 2002.
Perrine, Laurence and Thomas R. Arp. Sound and Sense: Introduction to Poetry.
Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1992
Quinn, Eithne. Nothing but a g Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap.
New York: Columbia UP, 2004.
Shakur, Tupac. Trapped on the album 2Pacalypse Now. Los Angeles: Interscope
Records, 1992.
224 James Braxton Peterson

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

Herman Beavers is Associate Professor of English at the University


of Pennsylvania. He the author of the book Wrestling Angels into
Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson
(U of Penn Press, 1995), as well as over 30 articles and book chapters.
His creative works include the chapbook, A Neighborhood of Feeling
as well as poems that have appeared in Rain, Black American
Literature Forum (now African American Review), Dark Phrases,
The Cincinnati Poetry Review, Cave Canem I and II, XConnect.
Peregrine, and most recently, Callaloo and the anthology, Gathering
Voices.

Caleb Corkery is an Assistant Professor of English at Millersville


University of Pennsylvania. His recent publications include: New
Negroes, Clean Names: How 19th Century African American Women
Changed Their Reputations from Strumpets to Straightlaced. (The
Middle-Atlantic Writers Association Review. June/December 2002),
Literacy Narratives and Confidence Building in the Writing
Classroom (Journal of Basic Writing. Spring 2005), Shaping
American Literary Traditions from African Stories Rewritten for
American Children: A Rhetorical Case Study of Sundiata (Sankofa:
A Journal of African Childrens and Young Adult Literature).

Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos teaches at the University of Salamanca,


Spain. She has published Planteamientos estticos y polticos en la
obra de Zora Neale Hurston (2003), as well as a number of articles on
canon formation, ethnicity, diaspora, and gender for different national
and international journals, among which is her essay on Toni
Morrisons Paradise (MELUS 28.4 (2003): 3-33). She has also
contributed to the Rodopi Perspectives of Modern Literature series
with chapters about the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker,
Gayl Jones, and Joy Kogawa, and is the editor of bilingual (English/
Spanish) editions on the works of Jacob A. Riis, Como vive la otra
mitad (2001), Langston Hughes, Oscuridad en Espaa (1998), and
Zora Neale Hurston, Mi gente! Mi gente! (1994). She is currently at
work on a project about writing by blacks in Canada.
226 Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

Philip Goldstein earned his Ph.D. in English from Temple University


in 1984 and in 2001 was promoted to Professor of English at the
University of Delaware. Recently he has published PostMarxism: An
Introduction (SUNY-Albany Press 2005) and, with James Machor,
has edited Reception Study: Theory, Practice, History (Routledge
2000) and Reception Study: Reconsiderations and New Prospects
(Oxford University Press 2007).

Carol E. Henderson is Associate Professor of English and Black


American Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark campus. Her
publications include the edited book James Baldwins Go Tell It on
the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays (Peter Lang, 2006) and
Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African
American Literature (U of Missouri P 2002). In addition to numerous
articles in professional journals and critical volumes, she has two
forthcoming essays: in James Baldwin and Toni Morrison:
Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays, Eds. Lovalerie King
and Lynn O. Scott (Palgrave 2006), and in Folklore and Popular
Film, Eds. Mikel Koven and Sharon Sherman (Utah State U P 2007).
She is currently at work on an edited collection entitled Imag(in)ing
America: The African American Body in Literature, a monograph
entitled The Hottentot Venus Revisited: Literary Responses to Sarah
Baartmans Story, and an international reader that considers the
impact of Sarah Baartmans story on world culture.

Heather Duerre Humann received her M.A. in English from The


University of Alabama. Her articles and book reviews have been
published in African American Review, Chelsea, Indiana Review,
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Obsidian III, and Southern
Historian, and she is a contributor to Home Girls Make Some Noise!:
Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction
Era, and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore.
She currently serves as an assistant fiction editor for the literary
journal Black Warrior Review and teaches in the English Department
at the University of Alabama, where she is a doctoral candidate.

Yvonne Robinson Jones is a full Professor in the Department of Fine


Arts, Languages and Literature at Southwest Tennessee Community
College where she teaches courses in composition and literature. She
is a Richard Wright specialist, and one of the advisory members of the
Richard Wright Circle. She is a contributing writer for the first
Notes on Contributors 227

African American anthology textbook for high school students titled


African American Literature: Voices in a Tradition (Holt Rinehart,
Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1992). Also, an essay on Censorship
and the African American Writer is included in The Oxford
Companion to African American Literature (U of Oxford P, 1997).

Raphal Lambert is a French citizen and graduated from the


University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in June 2001. Currently, he is a
research fellow with the Japanese Society for the Promotion of
Science. His research project, Fictionalized History and Historical
Fiction: The Telling of History in African American Novels and their
Film Adaptations expands on his doctoral work.

Carme Manuel is Associate Professor of American Literature at the


Universitat de Valncia (Spain). She is general editor of the
Biblioteca Javier Coy destudis nord-americans (Universitat de
Valncia) and co-editor of Biblioteca de Autoras Norteamericanas
(Ellago Ediciones). She has written books and essays on American
literature and has translated Emily Dickinson, Gerald Vizenor, Anne
Bradstreet and a selection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Afroamerican Women Poets, among other American authors, into
Catalan. She is currently working on a book about African American
Women and the Bible.

Babacar MBaye teaches African American and Pan-African


Literature at Kent State University. His research is on Black Atlantic
theories, slave narratives, and Black travel writing. He has published
numerous essays about the works of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah
Equiano, Martin Delany, Mary Prince, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard
Wright, and James Baldwin.

James Braxton Peterson is an Assistant Professor of English at


Pennsylvania State University (Abington College). He is a visiting
lecturer and preceptor in African American Studies at Princeton
University and was the founding Media Coordinator for the Harvard
University Hiphop Archive. He has written numerous scholarly
articles on Hip Hop Culture, African American Literature and
linguistics as well as Urban Studies which have been published in
Black Arts Quarterly, XXL, Technitions, and Lexani magazine. He is
currently working on a co-authored project on the influence of Hip
Hop Culture on marketing, branding and advertising with Bikari
Kitwana (The Hip Hop Generation, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop).
Index

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

Hakutani, Yoshinobu, xxiii, 5, 17, 19, Mao, Chairman, 211, 223


30, 32, 33, 89, 140, 182, 183 Margolies, Edward, xiv, 22, 30, 34,
Harlem Renaissance, 86, 207 143, 146-148, 150, 153, 155
Harmetz, Aljean, 196, 201 Marxism, xii, xxii, 10-11, 22, 26-28,
Harrington, Richard, 193, 196, 201 31-33, 48, 119-120, 124, 131, 137,
Harris, Trudier, 57, 113, 172 145, 147, 180-181, 190, 214
Herton, Calvin, 58, 67, 68, 71 Mc Henry, Susan, 201
Holloway, Karla, 216, 223 McCarthyism, 192, 194
Holman, C. Hugh, 148-149, 151, 155 Meeks, Edward, 8
homophobia, 42 Melville, Herman, 110, 122, 134,
homosexuality, 40, 42 155, 181
hooks, bell, 56, 71, 217 Menand, Louis, 93, 103, 110, 114
Howard-Pitney, David, 125-126, 128, Mencken, H.L., 11
138-140 Middle Passage, 81, 88
Howe, Irving, xi, xxiii, 5, 16, 24, 26, Miller, James A., viii, xiv, xxiii, 71,
27, 29-33, 131, 146, 155 85, 90, 96, 114, 155, 201
Huey, Steve, 210, 223 Minahen, Charles, 93, 106, 110, 111,
Hurston, Zora Neale, xiii, xxii, xxiii, 114
xxiv, 17, 25-26, 28, 33, 35, 55, 58, Modernism, xii, xvii, 21, 22, 24, 25,
61-62, 65, 70-71, 225; The 30, 32, 34, 35, 90, 127, 138, 141,
Hurston/Wright Foundation, xiii; 156
Their Eyes Were Watching God, modernity, xviii, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83,
xxii, 25, 28, 58, 61, 71 86, 87, 88, 138
Mootry, Maria K., 57, 71
Moretti, Franco, 147, 148, 149, 151,
James, Henry, 29 155
Jameson, Frederic, 121, 145, 155 Morrison, Toni, xix, 26, 67, 71, 99,
jeremiad, vi, xix, 119, 121, 123, 125- 119, 122-124, 127, 131, 136, 138,
128, 130-132, 134, 137, 139-140 140, 225-226; Works; Paradise,
Jim Crow, 50, 77-78, 111, 136, 207 140, 225; Playing in the Dark.
John Reed Club, 22, 145 Whiteness and the Literary
Johnson, Barbara, 161 Imagination, 71, 122, 140; The
Joyce, James, 11 Bluest Eye, 99
Joyce, Joyce Anne, 28-33, 121, 131, Moses, Wilson, 126
139-140, 164, 183 Multiculturalism, xvii, 29, 30
232 Dialogue: Richard Wrights Native Son

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

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