Native Son

by Richard Wright

He 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 what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

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.

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.

These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger—like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force.

And rich white people were not so hard on Negroes; it was the poor whites who hated Negroes. They hated Negroes because they didn’t have their share of the money. His mother had always told him that rich white people liked Negroes better than they did poor whites. He felt that if he were a poor white and did not get his share of the money, then he would deserve to be kicked. Poor white people were stupid. It was the rich white people who were smart and knew how to treat people.

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.

He was going among white people, so he would take his knife and his gun; it would make him feel that he was the equal of them, give him a sense of completeness.

There was an organic conviction in him that this was the way white folks wanted him to be when in their presence; none had ever told him that in so many words, but their manner had made him feel that they did.

He remembered seeing many cartoons of Communists in newspapers and always they had flaming torches in their hands and wore beards and were trying to commit murder or set things on fire. People who acted that way were crazy. All he could recall having heard about Communists was associated in his mind with darkness, old houses, people speaking in whispers, and trade unions on strike. And this was something like it.

He was very conscious of his black skin and there was in him a prodding conviction that Jan and men like him had made it so that he would be conscious of that black skin. Did not white people despise a black skin?

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.

Race Prejudice on Trial. The Negro Question in the United States. Black and White Unite and Fight. But that did not seem so dangerous. He looked at the bottom of a pamphlet and saw a black and white picture of a hammer and a curving knife. Below it he read a line that said: Issued by the Communist Party of the United States. Now, that did seem dangerous.

Maybe they had to live this way precisely because none of them in all their lives had ever done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much.

Though he had killed by accident, not once did he feel the need to tell himself that it had been an accident. He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed, therefore he had killed her.

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.

To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.

“All my life’s been full of hard trouble. If I wasn’t hungry, I was sick. And if I wasn’t sick, I was in trouble. I ain’t never bothered nobody. I just worked hard every day as long as I can remember, till I was tired enough to drop; then I had to get drunk to forget it. I had to get drunk to sleep. That’s all I ever did. And now I’m in this. They looking for me and when they catch me they’ll kill me.”

in front of those whose hate for him was so unfathomably deep that, after they had shunted him off into a corner of the city to rot and die,

And he had heard it said that black people, even though they could not get good jobs, paid twice as much rent as whites for the same kind of flats.

Most Negro businesses were funeral parlors; white undertakers refused to bother with dead black bodies.

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

Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him.

White people never searched for Negroes who killed other Negroes. He had even heard it said that white people felt it was good when one Negro killed another; it meant that they had one Negro less to contend with.

“Aw, hell, Mr. Max. They wouldn’t listen to me. They rich, even though the white folks treat them almost like they do me. They almost like the white people, when it comes to guys like me. They say guys like me make it hard for them to get along with white folks.”

“Yeah; I voted twice. I wasn’t old enough, so I put my age up so I could vote and get the five dollars.” “You didn’t mind selling your vote?” “Naw; why should I?” “You didn’t think politics could get you anything?” “It got me five dollars on election day.”

They want your life; they want revenge. They felt they had you fenced off so that you could not do what you did. Now they’re mad because deep down in them they believe that they made you do it. When people feel that way, you can’t reason with ’em.

“The relationship 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. And Mr. Dalton, a decent man, tried to salve his feelings by giving money. But, my friend, gold was not enough! Corpses cannot be bribed!