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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
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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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Richard Wright's
Native Son A
review by Edward Skillin, Jr. It is nearly twenty years since Theodore
Dreiser published his bulky American Tragedy, an
indictment of America's heartless worship of money and business
success. Environment was meant to be the real villain in his
rough-hewn tale of crime and inevitable punishment. However he
produced a rather different effect. His hero Clyde Griffiths'
sense of guilt was developed so painstakingly and he seemed so
normal an individual that the reader came to identify himself
individually with Clyde and feel personally guilty of the crime.
Richard Wright has followed a strikingly
similar pattern in Native Son. In this case it is more
difficult for the reader to identify himself with young Bigger
Thomas, who, by the time the story opens, is in a highly
pathological state. Besides, the environment of South Side
Chicago's Negro district is far more vicious, more potent for
evil, than Clyde Griffiths' smaller mid-western factory town.
Finally, Mr. Wright handles the problem of style with far
greater ease than Mr. Dreiser. Except for the defense attorney's
long speech toward the end of the book--a wholly unnecessary
pointing of the moral--Native Son fairly races along both
in narrative and dialogue. So Mr. Wright really does succeed in
making environment the principal villain in this new American
Tragedy.
Even compared with Dreiser this volume is
strong meat. from the moment a giant black rat steals into the
Thomas family's one-room flat, on the opening pages, till Bigger
in his death cell bids his attorney farewell on page 359, Native
Son is a "shocker." It is brutal, frank, sordid.
It is no book for adolescents or for squeamish adults. but this
brutality is skillfully subordinated to a wider purpose.
To be sure most Americans are no longer
ignorant that the Negro over here is a victim of the most unjust
discrimination. Many have heard, for instance, that in some
parts of Harlem people sleep in three shifts in order to meet
the rents. Negroes have to pay the piper since they are barred
from other sections of Manhattan. Lynching in the South and
border states and the mental-emotional outlook that violence
manifests are also widely known. But from most of us these
situations are as far removed as a Chinese flood or the
inhumanities of a French penal colony in the Guianas. Yet the
problem is at our very doors.
Mr. Wright makes it real by reducing it to
very simple human terms. When young Bigger Thomas goes to work
for a wealthy family which might eventually have him, he already
is a problem case. He is a member of a poolroom gang that has
not yet pulled off a major crime but might well do so any day.
He regularly has illicit relations with a young waitress. And
deep in his breast rankles a burning resentment against the
white race which seems to thwart his ambitions at every turn and
keeps his family in abject misery. He cannot bear to face his
true situation squarely.
What makes Native Son doubly tragic is that Bigger's first victim is a white girl who is sincerely trying to
be his friend, to treat him as a fellow human being. Mary's
sweetheart is a communist who also tries to befriend Bigger to
the very end. Her mother, who is blind, loves to encourage
Negroes to study and get ahead. the only poetic justice is that
Mary's father was one of the landlords whose exorbitant rents
cause such widespread misery in Chicago, New York, and in all
other cities where Negroes are so harshly segregated.
The very first night of his new job Bigger
finds that he has accidentally killed Mary Dalton. The story
then rushes through a series of other crimes to Bigger's arrest
and conviction with a sort of grim inevitability. Again, it is
highly reminiscent of the even more acute sense of impending
doom that comes upon Dreiser's Clyde Griffitths who knows and
makes the readers of the American Tragedy painfully aware
that nothing will save him from the chair.
Here and there Richard Wright gives hints as
to the way out of the tragic situation he has epitomized so
stirringly in Bigger Thomas. Boys' clubs and ping pong tables he
holds in contempt; palliatives such as settlement houses do not
provide the answer either for the injustices to his race.
Religion appears in his pages as well-meaning but futile. Some
new social system--not necessarily the Marxist one-- is
implicitly his prescription. As is so often the case in real
life, only the communists in this novel succeed in convincing
the Negro that they sincerely believe and act on the principle
of the brotherhood of man.
There is one final reason that this startling
book provides such a challenge to all Americans. Bigger knew
that he, like many innocent lynch victims, would be presumed
guilty as a matter of course if he was apprehended under
suspicious circumstances. To be looked upon as ignorant, lazy,
shiftless, vicious, subhuman by a white master race was what
enraged him most. His deepest satisfaction is to know at the
very end something that might have saved him six months earlier,
that one white man really accepts him on equal terms as a man.
Is that an impossible prescription for a starter?
Source: Commonweal (March 8, 1940)
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updated 5 October 2007 |
