Native Son (Vintage Classics)

by Richard Wright

“All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel,” he declared in Black Boy, “and I could not read enough of them.” He was born in Mississippi in 1908, the first of two sons of a sharecropper who deserted his family when Richard was five or six. Soon after, his mother suffered paralytic strokes that left her dependent on her own mother, a devout religious fundamentalist and stern disciplinarian who apparently tried to crush Wright’s childhood interest in the world of the imagination. While his mother sank in he eyes into the embodiment of passivity and victimization, he found it almost impossible to forge warm ties with other human beings. For a while, Wright and his brother lived in an orphanage. Later he would recall his childhood as a time of hunger—for food, but also for affection, understanding, and education. A good student, he never finished high school. His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it. In 1927, he fled the South for Chicago. If

Wright knew that much of that life was quite beyond hope, that racism and segregation were not forces to be eradicated easily by programs, much less by slogans, and that even the most graphic evocations of suffering would not be enough to move readers to see racism for what it was. As he himself put it, Wright discovered that in Uncle Tom’s Children he had written “a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and feel good about.” He then swore that the one that followed would be different. He would make sure that “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.”

“I had spent years learning about Bigger, what had made him, what he meant; so, when the time came for writing, what had made him and what he meant constituted my plot.” Translating this idea into a narrative also came easily; the plot “fell out, so to speak.” In truth, Wright heavily revised the manuscript as he worked, and the dramatic opening scene, featuring Bigger and his rat, was a late addition; but almost everything else took shape swiftly in response to a mighty effort by Wright to complete his novel.

The existence of Bigger across racial lines enabled Wright both to come to terms with the limitations of black American culture, of which he would write with almost abusive force in his autobiography Black Boy, and to set the problems facing blacks alongside those facing whites and thus allow a reciprocity of interest and influence that he had never guessed at in his youth. Nevertheless, the task of representing Bigger in fiction remained daunting. Unlike the dogmatic Communist ideology Wright was in the process of repudiating, the social and political criticism implicit in these marginal lives was by definition incoherent.

After his arrest, Bigger Thomas is falsely accused of the rape of Mary Dalton, a crime obviously worse than murder in the minds of some whites; however, Wright took pains to show that the rape of Mary Dalton was indeed a possibility with Bigger. In material expurgated by the Book-of-the-Month Club (but restored in this edition of the novel) Bigger responds sexually to a newsreel that shows Mary and other apparently wealthy, carefree, young white women cavorting on a beach in Florida. In a scene that particularly appalled the Club, Bigger and a friend masturbate soon after in the movie house. Bigger essentially rapes his girlfriend Bessie before killing her. Wright makes it clear that Bigger’s harsh upbringing has left his sexuality contaminated with feelings of aggression and violence toward women, black and white. Because the sexuality of white women is flaunted in movies and magazines but absolutely forbidden to black men, Bigger and men like him sometimes develop a potentially murderous fixation on these women.

Set to be published in 1939 by Harper’s (which had brought out Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938), Native Son was selected by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club and issued as a main selection in 1940 (after Wright made revisions demanded by the club). That year, it sold some 250,000 copies, no doubt mainly to members of the club. However, sales of the book fell off sharply, according to at least one report, once prospective buyers understood that Native Son was not an entertaining detective story, as some had supposed, but a serious, even harrowing, text.

In 1945, his autobiography, Black Boy, was also a bestseller; but Native Son remained the cornerstone of his success. In 1948, his reputation suffered undoubtedly from the adverse criticism of James Baldwin, who essentially launched his own career that year with an essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which dismissed Native Son as a piece of mere “protest” fiction, reductive of human character and thus fatally limited as art. In 1952, the appearance of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with its dazzling modernist techniques, its lyricism, humor, and final optimism about America, also tended to make Native Son seem crude in comparison.

When the men were through they gathered up their pails and brushes and got into the truck and drove off. He looked at the poster: 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 tall red letters: YOU CAN’T WIN!

From three o’clock to four o’clock in the afternoon there was no policeman on duty in the block where Blum’s Delicatessen was and it would be safe. One of them could hold a gun on Blum and keep him from yelling; one could watch the front door; one could watch the back; and one could get the money from the box under the counter. Then all four of them could lock Blum in the store and run out through the back and duck down the alley and meet an hour later, either at Doc’s poolroom or at the South Side Boys’ Club, and split the money.

“Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me,” Bigger spoke with a tinge of bitter pride in his voice. “What you mean?” Gus asked, looking at him quickly. There was fear in Gus’s eyes. “I don’t know. I just feel that way. Every time I get to thinking about me being black and they being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me….” “Aw, for Chrissakes! There ain’t nothing you can do about it. How come you want to worry yourself? You black and they make the laws….” “Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships….” Gus hunched Bigger with his elbow and mumbled good-naturedly, “Aw, nigger, quit thinking about it. You’ll go nuts.”