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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
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Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd
Today!
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The Negro
Novel: Richard Wright
[A Review of Native Son]
By David L. Cohn
Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born Negro, has
written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel
entitled Native Son. The race hatred of his hero, Bigger
Thomas, is directed with equal malevolence and demoniac
intensity toward all whites, whether they are Mary Dalton, the
moony Negrophile whom he murdered, or the vague white men who
seemed to bar his youthful ambition to become an aviator or join
the navy. This book has far-reaching qualities of significance
above and beyond its considerable virtues as a novel, because
Mr. Wright elects to portray his hero not as an individual
merely but as a symbol of twelve million American Negroes.
Bigger is very young. His exact age is not
stated, but we are told he is too young to vote, and he is
therefore under twenty-one. Although his life has hardly begun,
his career and hopes for the future have been blasted by the
Negro-hating whites of Chicago. On page 14 of Native Son, Bigger
and his friend Gus are watching an airplane above the city. “I
could fly a plane if I had a
chance,” Bigger says. “If you wasn’t black and if
you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation
school, you could fly a plane” Gus answers. And time after
time, throughout the length of the book, bigger bitterly
complains that he is denied access to the broad, glittering
world which the whites monopolize for themselves to the exclusion
of Negroes. Toward the end of the novel (p. 3020, Bigger, in
jail for murdering a white girl and his Negro mistress, says:
“I ain’t asking nobody to be sorry for me . . . I’m black.
They don’t give black people a chance” (my italics).
Bigger’s crimes and his fate in the electric chair, the author
makes clear to us, are consequently to be laid at the door of
white society.
In the speech of Bigger’s lawyer at his
trial, one finds the fullest summation of Mr. Wright’s point
of view toward the Negro question in America, and the most
explicit statement of his use of Bigger as a symbol of the
oppressed Negro. “this boy,’ says lawyer Max, “represents
but a tiny aspect of the problem whose reality sprawls over a
third of a nation. . . . Multiply Bigger Thomas twelve million
times, allowing for environmental and temperamental variations .
. . and you have the psychology of the Negro people. . . . taken
collectively, they are not simply twelve million; in reality
they constitute a separate nation, stunted, stripped, and held
captive within this nation, devoid of political, social,
economic and property rights.”
Mr. Wright might have made a more manly and
certainly more convincing case for his people if he had stuck to
fact. In all of the non-Southern states, Negroes have complete
political rights, including the suffrage, and even in the south
Negro suffrage is constantly being extended. So powerful,
indeed, is the Negro vote, and so solidly is it cast en bloc in
Negro-populous eastern and Midwestern states, that in closely
contested Presidential elections the Negro vote may decide who
shall become President of the United States. Hence the scramble
of both parties for the Negro vote. Nowhere in America save in
the most benighted sections of the South, or in times of passion
arising from the committing of atrocious crime, is the Negro
denied the equal protection of the laws. If he is sometimes put
in jail for no reason at all in Memphis, so too are whites put
in jail for no reason at all in Pittsburgh. This is the unjust
fate, not of the Negro alone, but of the poor, the obscure, and
the inarticulate everywhere, regardless of pigmentation. The
ownership, also, of more than a billion dollars’ worth of
property by Negroes in the South alone, and the presence of
prosperous Negro business concerns throughout the country, are
some refutation of the sweeping statement that Negroes are
denied property rights in this country.
Through the mouth of Bigger’s lawyer we are
told in unmistakable terms that the damning up of the Negro’s
aspirations, and the denial to him of unrestricted entry into
the whole environment of the society in which he is cast, may
lead Negroes, in conjunction with others, toward a new civil war
in America. Mr. Wright seems to have completely forgotten the
unparalleled phenomenon – unique in the world’s history –
of the first American Civil War, in which millions of
white men fought and killed one another over the issue of the
black slave. If it be granted that the original enslavement of
Negroes was a crime against justice, then it must also be
granted that its bloody expiation was filled with enough death
and destruction to satisfy even the most hate-consumed Negro.
But it doesn’t seem to satisfy Mr. Wright. A second civil war
must begin where the first left off in order to bring about the
eventual freeing of the Negro minority, even if it means the
destruction of the society of the majority. Justice and
understanding are to come through the persuasive snouts of
machine guns.
Bigger’s lawyer is a Jew. As a member of a
race which has known something of oppression, -- not for three
centuries, the length of the Negro’s residence in America, but
for more than twenty centuries in nearly every country of the
world, -- he pleads extenuation for his client both on broad
grounds of justice and on the ground that white society drove
Biggers to crime by repressing him. If repression of the members
of a minority drives them to slay members of the majority, it
would follow that the principal occupation of Jews in Tsarist
Russia, Poland, Rumania, and other bitterly anti-Semitic
countries would have been to use their oppressors as clay
pigeons.
Jewish revolutionists there have been,
indeed, but over the whole sweep of two thousand years of dark,
Jewish history the mass of these people, enduring greater
oppression than Negroes knew here even in slavery, created
within the walls of their ghettos an intense family and communal
life and constructed inexhaustible wells of spiritual resource.
They used their talents and energies as best they could, serene
in the belief either that a messiah would ultimately come and
deliver them out of bondage into the Promised Land or that
justice would ultimately triumph. Mr. Wright uses a Jewish
lawyer as his mouthpiece, but he has learned nothing from Jewish
history, nor gleaned anything of the spirit of that group whom
Tacitus called “a stubborn people.”
It is beyond doubt that Negroes labor under
grave difficulties in America; that economic and social
discrimination is practiced against them; that opportunities
open to whites are closed to blacks. It is also beyond doubt
that the position, if not the status, of the Negro is constantly
improving in the United States. The evidence on this point is
overwhelming. But there is one hard and inescapable fact which
must be courageously faced. The social structure of America,
despite many racial admixtures, is Anglo-Saxon. And nowhere on
earth – save in isolated instances – do whites and Negroes
in Anglo-Saxon communities intermingle social or intermarry. And
so long as this is a fact, neither the Negro – and this is
what completely escapes Mr. Wright – nor the white man will
function as a full-fledged personality. It could easily be
demonstrated that Southern whites living in the presence of
masses of Negroes, and maintaining at least tolerable racial
relations through the exercise of exquisite, intuitive tact on
both sides, suffer aberrations and distortions of the spirit
only slightly less severe than those suffered by Negroes.
It is no fault of the Negro or of the present
generation of whites that the Negro is here. But the preaching
of Negro hatred of whites by Mr. Wright is on a par with the
preaching of white hatred of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan. The
position, moreover, of a minority struggling toward the sun must
be gauged at any given time by its relative rather than its
absolute state, and in accordance with this postulate it is
clear that the Negro’s lot in America is constantly being
ameliorated.
It is highly significant of the whole
hate-headlong point of view of Mr. Wright that he has chosen to
make his hero so hopelessly despairing of making a good life for
himself because of white repressions, that he drives him to
crime and execution when his adult life has hardly begun.
Contrast this with the experience of the Jews in England, who
were first granted full civil rights only after five centuries
of living in the country.
Mr. Wright obviously does not have the long
view of history. He wants not only complete political rights for
his people, but also social equality, and he wants them now.
Justice demands that every right granted to others shall be
granted to Negroes, but men are not gods. A hard-headed people
will be conscious of the Pauline law of expediency: “All
things are lawful unto men, but all things are not expedient.”
Justice or no justice, the whites of America
simply will not grant to Negroes at this time those things that
Mr. Wright demands. The Negro problem in America is actually
insoluble; all profound, complex social problems are insoluble,
and only a politically naïve people will believe otherwise. In
the meanwhile, recognition by both sides that the question is
insoluble, followed by tempered, sincere efforts to make the
best of the situation within its frame of reference, will
produce the most equitable results for both. Hatred, and the
preaching of hatred, and incitement to violence can only make a
tolerable relationship intolerable.
Even Abraham Lincoln did not envisage a time
when the Negro question would be solved upon Mr. Wright’s
terms. In 1862 he said to a Negro delegation who called on him:
“ You and we are different races. . . . But even when you
cease to be slaves you are yet far from being placed on an
equality with the white race. . . . The aspiration of men is to
enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this continent
not a single man if your race is made the equal of a single man
or ours. . . . Go where you are treated best, and the ban is
still upon you.”
And Mr. Wright’s hero kills and dies in Mr. Lincoln’s
state of Illinois. Source: The Atlantic Monthly (May 1940) * * * *
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updated 11 June 2008 |
