Native Son

by Richard Wright

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 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; none had ever told him that in so many words, but their manner had made him feel that they did. He laid the cap down, noticing that Mr. Dalton was watching him closely.

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. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.

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 rape.

They keep us bottled up here like wild animals, he thought. He knew that black people could not go outside of the Black Belt to rent a flat; they had to live on their side of the “line.” No white real estate man would rent a flat to a black man other than in the sections where it had been decided that black people might live.

“Bigger, I’ve never done anything against you and your people in my life. But I’m a white man and it would be asking too much to ask you not to hate me, when every white man you see hates you. I—I know my. . . . my face looks like theirs to you, even though I don’t feel like they do. But I didn’t know we were so far apart until that night. . . . I can understand now why you pulled that gun on me when I waited outside that house to talk to you. It was the only thing you could have done; but I didn’t know my white face was making you feel guilty, condemning you. . . .”

“I was in jail grieving for Mary and then I thought of all the black men who’ve been killed, the black men who had to grieve when their people were snatched from them in slavery and since slavery. I thought that if they could stand it, then I ought to.” Jan crushed the cigarette with his shoe. “At first, I thought old man Dalton was trying to frame me, and I wanted to kill him. And when I heard that you’d done it, I wanted to kill you. And then I got to thinking. I saw if I killed, this thing would go on and on and never stop. I said, ‘I’m going to help that guy, if he lets me.’”