Native Son

by Richard Wright

The dehumanization of African Americans during slavery had been followed in the long aftermath of the Civil War by their often brutal repression in the South and by conditions of life in many respects equally severe in the nominally integrated North.

humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America . . . dressed in the knee-pants of servility. . . . For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks.”

no one quite like Bigger Thomas had ever been seen before the publication of Native Son.

While his mother sank in his eyes into the embodiment of passivity and victimization, he found it almost impossible to forge warm ties with other human beings.

recall his childhood as a time of hunger—for food, but also for affection, understanding, and education.

The former defines identity mainly through the instrument of economic determinism; economic, social, political, and historic factors, above all, determine consciousness. The latter, existentialism, shares with naturalism a gloomy sense of fundamental human relations but emphasizes the power of the will in creating identity.

Communist party offered him and other writers, in the midst of the Great Depression, a sense of ideological and political purpose and consistency,

in 1938, Wright was already questioning the authority of the Communist party where it mattered most to him, that is, where his autonomy as an artist was concerned.

even the most graphic evocations of suffering would not be enough to move readers to see racism for what it was.

These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization—the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harshness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor.

...and still to this day (as I type from my Amazon Kindle. Time is cyclical and history repeats itself.)

(Wright seems never to have conceived of Bigger in female terms)

lol, men

Around the centrality of Bigger, Wright set a cast of characters meant to stand for the principal players on the American stage where race is concerned.

Fear, Flight, and Fate—is

To Wright, it was also absolutely necessary that Bigger should learn from his ordeal; the problem was to find the appropriate degree of redemption or growth for a character who had been established at such a low point on the scale of humanity.

“It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.”

Life is like a mountain railroad With an engineer that’s brave We must make the run successful From the cradle to the grave. . .

YOU CAN’T WIN!

In a movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back in a seat and keep his eyes open.

And it would be their last job.

It never is

They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes.

it would be a symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them;

“What’s the matter?” “They don’t let us do nothing.” “Who?” “The white folks.” “You talk like you just now finding that out,” Gus said. “Naw. But I just can’t get used to it,” Bigger said.

Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the time I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in the fence. . .

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. . .

“That’s why you feeling like something awful’s going to happen to you,” Gus said. “You think too much.”

Like a man about to shoot himself and dreading to shoot and yet knowing that he has to shoot and feeling it all at once

He hoped the fight he had had with Gus covered up what he was trying to hide.

He had an overwhelming desire to be alone;

He was relieved and glad that in an hour he was going to see about that job at the Dalton place.

Oh, I see now. That's one way to do it.

his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness.

That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.

wow this is resonating with me right now

he had not thought that this world would be so utterly different from his own that it would intimidate him.

he was feeling angry and uncomfortable.

For a moment his impulses were deadlocked; he did not know if he should pick up his cap and then find the paper, or find the paper and then pick up his cap. He decided to pick up his cap.

I know this feeling and i hate it; wish i could just make a decision and deal with the outcome. no, i must wade and sludge through this moment and make it last. Then feel dumb for how simple the task was. Anyway...

He hated himself at that moment.

Ah, the embarrassment!

The guarded feeling of freedom he had while listening to her was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do.

“You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses,” she said, pointing to the tall, dark apartment buildings looming to either side of them, “and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro home. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human. . . . There are twelve million of them. . . . They live in our country. . . . In the same city with us. . . .” her voice trailed off wistfully.

I know she means well, but it's very "i don't see color."

“Oh, Bigger, I’m going to Detroit at nine in the morning and I want you to take my small trunk down to the station. Tell father and he’ll let you make up your time. You better come for the trunk at eight-thirty.”

You ask this of all your friends?

Bigger smiled derisively. Hell, that ain’t the tune, he thought.

LMAO!!

The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. They would never know.

Wild take

Mary had served to set off his emotions, emotions conditioned by many Marys.

he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried.

He was tensely eager to stay and see how it would all end, even if that end swallowed him in blackness.

If only someone had gone before and lived or suffered or died—made it so that it could be understood!

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 mother’s 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.

He had an almost mystic feeling that if he were ever cornered something in him would prompt him to act the right way, the right way being the way that would enable him to die without shame.

There was no day for him now, and there was no night; there was but a long stretch of time, a long stretch of time that was very short; and then—the end.

Why not kill that wayward yearning within him that had led him to this end?

Maybe the confused promptings, the excitement, the tingling, the elation—maybe they were false lights that led nowhere.