Native Son

by Richard Wright

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

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.

Bigger felt inadequate without weapons; however, the White people’s weapons weren’t arms but money, education, race, and power. Bigger felt the need to make it “equitable.”

Suppose a police saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody. He grew angry.

Written 90 years ago and it’s STILL a valid point. Sick.

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.

Whether he did it or not, he was guilty.

That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said. And in a certain sense he knew that the girl’s death had not been accidental. He had killed many times before, only on those other times there had been no handy victim or circumstance to make visible or dramatic his will to kill His crime seemed natural; he felt that all of his life had been leading; to something like this. It was no longer a matter of dumb wonder as to what would happen to him and his black skin; he knew now The hidden meaning of his life—a meaning which others did not see and which he had always tried to hide—had 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 fulfil to himself in accepting the deed.

He did because HE COULD. There was nothing else in his life that he controlled. Not his job, his living conditions, his family, his looks, his opportunities. He stunned the white people by making them think twice about black men being “dumb”.

He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear and shame. He never thought of this in precise mental images; he felt it; he would feel it for a while and then forget. But hope was always waiting somewhere deep down in him.

We need those men and women NOW.

Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was

It was when he read the newspapers or magazines, went to the movies, or walked along the streets with crowds, that he felt what he wanted: to merge himself with others and be a part of this world, to lose himself in it so he could find himself, to be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black.

The core of Bigger Thomas.

Never again did he want to feel anything like hope. That was what was wrong; he had let that preacher talk to him until somewhere in him he had begun to feel that maybe something could happen.

Hope can be a double edged sword.

“Bigger, I know my face is white,” Max said. “And I know that almost every white face you’ve met in your life had it in for you, even when that white face didn’t know it. Every white man considers it his duty to make a black man keep his distance. He doesn’t know why most of the time, but he acts that way. It’s the way things are, Bigger. But I want you to know that you can trust me.”

Still true.