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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works /
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! /
A Father’s Law
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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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The Weight and
Substance of A Father's Law
Book Review by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Wright, Richard.
A Father’s Law. New York:
HarperPerennial, 2008. 288 pp. $14.95.
Fiftieth anniversaries
provide opportunities for reassessing a past or for
reinventing one, for remembering. It seems to matter
little whether the object for inspection is a marriage,
an ordination, a war, a presidency, acts of genocide, or
a book. We anatomize it in the often distorting glare
of the present. Such seems to be the habit of the
contemporary mind.
For reasons about which
we may only guess, we gave minimal attention to the
fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wright’s
Pagan Spain
(1957). Perhaps we did not want to offend our Spanish
allies or to reawaken the issue of Basque nationalism.
Perhaps we forgot. It is unlikely, however, that the
Richard Wright Centennial (2008) will permit us the
luxury of amnesia. Or sanction a spate of elegant but
empty aesthetic discourses. On the contrary,
commemoration of Wright’s birth and his legacy demands
serious commentary of the kind usually found in the
arena of ethics, the hard sciences, and foreign policy.
His works have weight and substance. And much of our
talk will be about ethics and morality, because Wright’s
last novel,
A Father’s Law, obligates us to adjust our
thinking about his relentless exploration of the human
condition.
Wright’s forte was the
creation of stories and cultural meditations that do not
permit readers to be complacent, passive, or
indifferent. He inspired argument about the values and
acts which generate conflict or peace, wretchedness or
prosperity. Indeed, in
A Father’s Law, Wright provides fresh evidence
of his talent for spinning tales which catch our
conscience. He demonstrates, in a novel that is
slightly more reader-friendly than either
The Outsider
(1953) or
The Long Dream
(1958), why the confluence of psychology, philosophy,
and criminology is a compelling tactic. It works well
in fiction that has affinities, let us say, with
Melville’s romances or Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment.
Unlike some
twentieth-century African American novels that focus on
detection and kinship—works
by Jeffery Renard Allen, Toni Morrison, and David
Bradley come to mind,
A Father’s Law dwells less on the specifics of
racialized being-in-the-world and more on ancient
prejudices, biological anxieties, and legalized mores
that frustrate people’s efforts to act morally, to do
the right thing. Wright uses some elements of the
detective novel to plot crucial moments in the
relationship of Chief of Police Rudolph Turner with his
son Tommy, but Wright subverts our expectations. We do
not have an average thriller. He is not faithful to that
genre as was his friend Chester Himes in the Coffin
Ed-Grave Digger series.
A Father’s Law denies us the pleasure we might
derive from the time-killing fictions we consume between
flights at the airport or when the thin offerings of
television bore us. It summons us to ponder what
conditions necessitate law, how strict construction of
law may debase our humanity, and how a father’s guilt
and probing may quicken a son’s embrace of real or
imagined criminality. It invites us to interrogate the
minds of two characters seemingly caught in the net of
law.
As a police chief in
Brentwood Park, an upscale Chicago suburb, Rudolph
(Ruddy) Turner relishes his achievement, and he loves
“the laws and rules of the community with an abiding and
intense passion.” Nevertheless, as a father who is
Republican, Catholic, and black, he is vulnerable. His
badge of authority is a weak shield. He has failed to
cultivate bonds of friendship with his nineteen year old
son Tommy, although he has been responsible in providing
him with material goods and educational advantages. He
feels guilty about that failure. His efforts to make
amends, to know his son better, only beget more doubts.
Is his son against him and the bourgeois values for
which he stands? Is his son a genius and a criminal?
Wright’s masterful depiction of Turner’s states of mind
and Tommy’s catalytic antagonism leads us into a vortex
where explanations of good, evil, guilt, innocence,
obedience and fathomless resentment evade us. His prose
at once charms and frightens us with the power of the
indeterminate.
For some readers,
A Father’s Law may appear to be a rewriting of
The Long Dream insofar
as it is about fathers and sons. Others, focusing on
Tommy’s character, will be reminded of the long song of
yearning in
The Outsider. The
resemblances among the books exist only on the surface
of the narratives or in our anxiousness to reinvent
Wright’s discourses on law and masculinity fifty years
after publication of
The Long Dream.. The
dice are loaded differently in Wright’s last novel. As
we descend into the depths of
A Father’s Law, we discover that Wright’s
exploration is superbly radical, pre-future rather than
modern.
In
The Long Dream, the son,
Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker, comes to despise his
middle-class father’s corruption and sycophancy; he
scorns Tyree Tucker’s wearing of a mask in the face of
racism and the “white” law’s turning a blind eye, if
sufficiently bribed, on matters of black criminality.
Under his father’s tutelage, Rex becomes savvy about the
hypocrisies of a segregated world; out of spite, he
eschews formal education, embraces “manhood,” and
becomes his father’s partner in shady dealings. The
narrative is a faithful rendering of law and desire in
the postwar South. On the other hand,
A Father’s Law is set in the “integrated” North.
Tommy has stronger intellectual yearnings than Rex, and
his life is more sheltered. His father has never
instructed him about the ways of the real world. It is
through his readings in psychology and sociology that he
develops distrust of his father’s unquestioning belief
in the rightness of law. He is poised intellectually
much like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, to challenge the
foundations of a belief grounded in the dimness of the
state of nature and some ur-social contract. He is
ill-equipped to deal with some brutal facts of everyday
life.
While father and son are
at odds about the nature of the criminal mind and
obedience to man’s law, they are of one accord in
regarding congenital syphilis as an unmistakable sign of
moral pollution. Tommy reluctantly confesses to his
father that he broke off his engagement to his
girlfriend Marie when blood tests showed she inherited
syphilis. Transferring his dread of the unclean to the
urban environment, Tommy consequently abandoned his
sociological studies of Chicago’s Black Belt. Turner is
naturally concerned about his son’s emotional state, but
he is relieved that right and just law prevented his son
from marrying “a tainted girl” who has inherited the
sins of her forefathers. Such sharply gendered irony!
There is even more irony in Turner’s assuming Tommy’s
unbalanced view of life can be cured by exposing him to
the state of affairs in Brentwood Park, so he might see
“that all areas had their tragedies, that all areas had
their poisons, their sources of contamination.” Tommy
knows more about Brentwood that his father.
Under the influence of
patriarchal law and prejudices, father and son reify the
blindness implicit in how some American males socially
construct reality. Wright’s characterization of males
tests the capability of psychological realism to
explain. If we accept that in his last days Wright was
more openly sharing the obligation of reaching ethical
conclusions with his potential readers, we better
appreciate the new turn in his experiments with the art
of fiction. The novel is a question-making instrument.
The reader must supply answers, remaining uncertain that
they are the right ones. Our transactions with the text
provoke us to consider that law qua law does not secure
order; on the contrary, it may induce chaos.
Given that
A Father’s Law is replete with echoes from such
earlier novels as
Lawd Today!,
Native Son,
The Outsider, and
Savage Holiday, the
novel is a summation of Wright’s aesthetic, his
hardboiled vision of a future for which the Cold War was
preparing us and the worlds we inhabit. We may find
ourselves agreeing with an insight Julia Wright gives us
in her introduction. “There is eeriness in my father’s
premonition,” she writes, “that criminality was doomed
to bloom among the elite, that the energies of the
Tommies of America might better be used by a cause or a
movement for justice, that syphilis would overtake us
under another name, and that youth serial killing on
American university campuses would eventually inspire a
prize-winning film in Cannes”(xi-xii).
Yes, Wright was already
prophetic in
Native Son. If external
events lend credibility to prophecy, we must not neglect
the Old Testament sources of Wright’s premonition and
vision and Wright’s struggle to find the language and
forms which speak of the terror and impediments embedded
in the law of the father. What is law? Who is its
father? What are we to make of Nietzsche’s notion that
morality is a disease? Does the enlightenment promised
by ratiocination in the modern world only intensify the
power of what Sir Francis Bacon identified as the “Four
Idols”? Even in its unfinished state,
A Father’s Law succeeds in reading mankind’s
dirty laundry and in leaving us with the option of
reading against the patriarchal grain.
November 18, 2007
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A fathers final words: Late author's daughter brings last novel
to life—"Beyond
his books and in between the books, there was the person and the
person had suffered and had come out from the hurricane of
suffering and not become inhumane," says Julia Wright. "On the
contrary, he had learned to be gentle."
Wright recalls some of the
fondest memories of her father. "When I think of him, one of the
first images that comes to my mind is of him laughing," she
says. "He had the most wonderful laugh, as if he were enjoying
some delicious food."
At the time Wright started
A Father's Law, fame, a merciless amoebic infection and the
watchful eye of the U.S. government were all conspiring against
him. He believed A Father's Law to be a new chapter in his life
and literary career.
"There was the excitement
of feeling slightly better, leaving the much-criticized
manuscript of Island of Hallucination (the intended sequel to
The Long Dream) on the back burner for a time," Julia Wright
writes. "There was the thrill of being gripped by a new powerful
idea, and even though he was still feverish and weak, of sitting
up at the Underwood for a go at what was to be the first and
last draft . . . ."
Julia had moved from London to Paris to work as an au pair, and
to be near her father as he recovered from his lingering
illness.
"I still remember getting the call. I knew something had been
dreadfully wrong, but I just couldn't put my finger on it," she
says. "I would go see him three or four times a week, shop and
cook and help with the laundry."
Julia Wright rushed to the studio, mostly to be alone with his
memory and to wait for family members. There she saw the
typescript among papers strewn on the table. She did not read it
immediately. "I just couldn't," she says softly. "But when I
finally did, I was fascinated by the book, by his notes. It was
like being inside his head."
Before long, Julia Wright, who became her father's literary
executor, "started the long work of becoming myself: a
journalist, a mother and eventually a grandmother. I didn't deal
with the depth of my mourning. I knew I would have to come back
to the book and deal with it."
Miami Herald (Audra
D.S. Burch)
The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers . It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
posted
20 November 2007
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