Native Son

Native Son
by Richard Wright
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #20, Guardian 1000 Novels


It's hard for me, a white, middle-class man who group up largely with other white, middle-class people, to understand a character like Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright's Native Son. Bigger lives in a studio apartment with his mother, brother, sister, and, in the opening scene, a rather large rat. His life choices pretty much boil down to a life of petty crime or one of menial labor. Only when Bigger accidentally murders a white girl does a third option present itself.

Native Son is aware of the psychological factors that lead to the creation of Bigger and those like him. An early scene at the pool room highlights Bigger's mental state. To his friends, Bigger looks like a tough, a bully, a loose cannon - but underpinning his outward machismo is fear. He knows he can't back out of the robbery he planned, but he's terrified to go through with it, so he picks a fight with one of his friends to sabotage the plan. He lives in a constant state of fear, but cannot at any time admit that he is afraid. Ultimately, this same fear leads him to commit two murders.

The sociological factors loom even larger than the psychological ones, though. Bigger's fear does not come from nowhere, nor it unique to him. It is constantly reinforced through his interactions with white people, both seen and unseen. He lives in a crowded, overpriced apartment while apartments elsewhere in the city remain vacant, because the real estate moguls will only rent to African-Americans in the "black belt." He robs blacks but knows the penalties will be much more severe for robbing whites. He knows being alone with a white girl is grounds for accusations of rape. Even the kindness shown him by two liberal communists just reinforces the wall between Bigger and the white world:

[T]hey made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him, one holding his hand and the other smiling. He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin. It was a shadowy region, a No Man's Land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood upon.

The sociological factors are summed up in lawyer Boris Max' long, didactic monologue late in the book.

I see a lot of parallels between Native Son and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The plots mirror each other, and both Dreiser and Wright are much more concerned about what motivated the crime than the crime itself, and what those motivations say about society in general. It wasn't surprising to learn that Wright was a fan of Dreiser and the school of naturalism. Wright carefully avoids absolving Bigger for his actions, but neither does he hold society blameless. Native Son arguably is as significant a sociological text as it is a literary one.

Black Boy

Black Boy (American Hunger)
by Richard Wright
read: 2012

I recently discovered iTunes U and I decided to follow a Yale English course taught by Amy Hungerford, "The American Novel Since 1945."  The first book covered in the class is Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger), which is unusual as it's normally classified as an autobiography, not fiction.  Professor Hungerford points out two things: 1) there are elements of the book that are fictionalized, exaggerated, or happened to other people, and 2) an autobiographer has to make many of the same decisions a novelist does.  What stories should be included, and which should not?  How much of the subject's internal thoughts should be revealed?  Even the voice of the work is subject to manipulation, as the autobiographer can write about early events from his perspective at the time or from his perspective now, looking back.  And in both the novel and the autobiography, there is the fundamental question behind all art: why make it at all?  What is the artist trying to convey?

Wright mentions throughout the novel that he is looking for a model for how a young black man can live of a life of dignity in American, but he cannot find it.  The books he takes his refuge in are the classics as written by Dead White Men.  While he finds some kindred spirits in the Communist organizations he joins in Chicago, he finds their oppression of the individual for the sake of the party's goal nearly as constricting as the overt racism he encountered in the South.  He is looking to grow as a man, but it does not seem inevitable that he will do so; he is surrounded by people who gave up on the path to self-actualization, whether the submissive religion of his family, the accepted ignorance of his co-workers (most clearly rendered in the elevator man who literally let a white man kick his ass for a dollar), or the blind allegiance of the Communists.  Black Boy suggests that perhaps the quest itself is a triumph in its own right.

And if it is, if Wright succeeds in creating a model for young black men to pursue a live of dignity and a never-ending quest for self-improvement, does it detract from the accomplishment that he plays fast-and-loose with the truth at times?