Around the centrality of Bigger, Wright set a cast of characters meant to stand for the principal players on the American stage where race is concerned. One group represented the black world—Bigger and Bigger’s family and friends, but also peripheral figures ready to support or betray him. Capitalism appears, in the person of Mr. Dalton; and capitalism’s fair handmaiden, liberalism, in the persons of the blind Mrs. Dalton and the warm but giddy figure of Mary; communism, cold and analytical but fallible in the person of Max, genial but susceptible in the figure of Jan Erlone, whose naiveté and paternalism help to precipitate the tragedy; religion, in the hapless, incompetent black preacher scorned by Bigger; and overt racism and reaction as represented best perhaps by the state’s attorney. The city of Chicago, too, looms as a character in itself—like Bigger much of the time, brooding, dark, and violent. Nature also participates, especially in the form of the snowfall that ultimately and pointedly, given its color, traps and delivers Bigger to his fate. Setting in motion the tragedy is the relatively simple act of bringing Bigger, with his alienations and hostilities, into contact with the hypocrisy and culpable ignorance of the Dalton world.
Wright also understood fully (as Faulkner showed he himself understood in his novels Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, both published in the 1930s) that there could be no truly probing discussion of the subject of race in America without extended reference to questions of sexuality and miscegenation. After his arrest, Bigger Thomas is falsely accused of the rape of Mary Dalton, a crime obviously worse than murder in the minds of some whites; however, Wright took pains to show that the rape of Mary Dalton was indeed a possibility with Bigger. In material expurgated by the Book-of-the-Month Club (but restored in this edition of the novel) Bigger responds sexually to a newsreel that shows Mary and other apparently wealthy, carefree, young white women cavorting on a beach in Florida. In a scene that particularly appalled the Club, Bigger and a friend masturbate soon after in the movie house. Bigger essentially rapes his girlfriend Bessie before killing her. Wright makes it clear that Bigger’s harsh upbringing has left his sexuality contaminated with feelings of aggression and violence toward women, black and white. Because the sexuality of white women is flaunted in movies and magazines but absolutely forbidden to black men, Bigger and men like him sometimes develop a potentially murderous fixation on these women. Rape may then acquire the illusion of being a political act; but the underlying threat to women is real and deadly.
Much of the composition of the novel came almost spontaneously, especially after Bigger had committed his crime, because the relationship of the white police to the black male was a story absolutely familiar to Wright and indeed to the black community as a whole. A windfall also came to Wright in May 1938 when a case similar in crucial respects to Bigger’s in Native Son broke in Chicago. That month, Robert Nixon, a young black man, along with an accomplice, was arrested and charged with the murder of a white woman beaten to death with a brick in her apartment in the course of a robbery. Securing virtually all the newspaper clippings about the Nixon case, Wright used many of its details in his novel. These details included copious examples of raw white racism, especially in depicting the black defendant as hardly more than an animal. (Confessing to an earlier murder of a woman with a brick, Robert Nixon was also implicated in the similar killing in Los Angeles of a woman and her young daughter. He was executed in August 1939.)
Although the Nixon trial material helped Wright, he was still left with the supreme problem of creating a fictional narrative with so brutalized and limited a character at its core. In a way, this was the same dilemma that faced all the major naturalist writers—for example, Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets or Frank Norris in McTeague; but Wright’s difficulties were more severe, because it is hard to think of a central character in all of literature who is less likable than Bigger Thomas. With other blacks, Bigger is bullying, surly, treacherous, and cowardly; with whites—understandably, to be sure—he is wary and deceitful. How could Wright expect such a character to hold his novel together, and hold his readers’ interest?
Rather than dismiss Bigger’s inner life as unworthy of artistic attention (or social and political attention), Wright set out not simply to recreate its principal features but to allow these features to prescribe the form of his novel. He worked hard to evoke and dramatize the sordid, unstable reality of his main character’s inner life, which matched the sordidness and instability imposed on Bigger by white racism and the deep effects of that racism on black culture. In the tripartite division of Native Son—Fear, Flight, and Fate—is seen Wright’s instinctive grasp of the elemental starkness of Bigger’s life. From Wright’s sense of the pulsing instability of Bigger’s thoughts and emotions—now flaring with rage and desire, now chilly and brackish with despair and impotence—he fashioned the peculiar prose rhythms that dominate the book and make us feel, as readers, that we are sharing in Bigger’s moods and thoughts.
Native Son is a story that is at one level a seedy melodrama from the police blotter and, at the same time, an illuminating drama of an individual consciousness that challenges traditional definitions of character. Although at least one critic has written eloquently about the tragic dimensions of Bigger Thomas, to many other critics the most that probably can be said in this respect is that, at the end of his ordeal, Bigger possesses glimmerings of the ideals that might have allowed him to be seen as a tragic hero. There are many critics of the novel who find unconvincing even the modicum of change in Bigger at the end of the book. To Wright, it was also absolutely necessary that Bigger should learn from his ordeal; the problem was to find the appropriate degree of redemption or growth for a character who had been established at such a low point on the scale of humanity. Perhaps the change is unconvincing, as some assert; but it is hardly excessive. Wright resisted the promptings of propaganda—for communism, or for the vaunted American way of life, or on behalf of black middle-class sensitivity—and of liberal sentiment, which could easily have led him to patronize Bigger and transform him, by the end of the novel, into what Bigger never could be: a sensitive, “normal” human being. Tough-minded to the end, Wright refused to compromise his commitment to the truth, as he saw it.
Virtually from the day of its publication, the artistry of Native Son has been questioned and found wanting. Citing a category of writing identified by R. P. Blackmur, one scholar-critic called the novel (the words are Blackmur’s) “one of those books in which everything is undertaken with seriousness except the writing.” This is a common accusation against naturalist writers, as well as the literature of social protest in general; Dreiser, for one, comes quickly to mind. Certainly, Wright took chances in the course of writing this novel. At one point, for example, in defiance of artistic common sense, he crowds into Bigger’s cell almost every principal character in his story (three members of Bigger’s family, three of his friends, his lawyer Max, his prosecutor, the Daltons, Jan Erlone, and a minister). Wright conceded the improbability of such a scene but gave as his reason for keeping it the fact that “I wanted those people in that cell to elicit a certain important emotional response from Bigger…. What I wanted that scene to say to the reader was more important than its surface reality of implausibility.”
The long speeches in summation by the state’s attorney and the defense lawyer also seem to some readers to be an unnecessary challenge to their powers of attention and to underscore Wright’s didactic purposes in Native Son. Wright knew the risk, but hoped that his readers would pay attention to the arguments; they were both pieces of verisimilitude that replicated the activity of a murder trial and, at the same time, indispensable extended statements of rival intellectual positions on the matter of race in America. In a way, these lectures prove Wright’s artistic power, since Native Son is already unforgettable long before they are delivered; and these speeches do not detract from the power of the last scene, and especially the last page, of the novel. With some justification, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, wh
o in her introduction to the first edition of Native Son compared the novel to Dostoevsky’s “revelation of human misery in wrongdoing,” declared that there is “no one single effect in [Dostoevsky] finer” than this last page, in which Bigger “is born at last into humanity and makes his first simple, normal human response to a fellowman.”
Set to be published in 1939 by Harper’s (which had brought out Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938), Native Son was selected by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club and issued as a main selection in 1940 (after Wright made revisions demanded by the club). That year, it sold some 250,000 copies, no doubt mainly to members of the club. However, sales of the book fell off sharply, according to at least one report, once prospective buyers understood that Native Son was not an entertaining detective story, as some had supposed, but a serious, even harrowing, text. The reviews, generally favorable, certainly remarked on the violence and gloom of the novel. Blacks were on the whole pleased by Wright’s success, although some had doubts about the wisdom of offering Bigger Thomas as an example of African American character to the white world. Alain Locke, a highly respected commentator on black American art and culture, noted that it had taken “artistic courage and integrity of the first order” for Wright to have ignored “both the squeamishness of the Negro minority and the deprecating bias of the prejudiced majority.”
Native Son made Wright easily the most respected black writer in America, and the most prosperous by far. In 1941, a stage production of the novel, directed by Orson Welles, only enhanced Wright’s fame. (A motion picture of the novel, photographed mainly in Argentina, with Wright himself cast as Bigger Thomas, was finished in 1950; however, it enjoyed little success, especially after censors in the United States ordered deep cuts.) In 1945, his autobiography, Black Boy, was also a bestseller; but Native Son remained the cornerstone of his success. In 1948, his reputation suffered undoubtedly from the adverse criticism of James Baldwin, who essentially launched his own career that year with an essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which dismissed Native Son as a piece of mere “protest” fiction, reductive of human character and thus fatally limited as art. In 1952, the appearance of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with its dazzling modernist techniques, its lyricism, humor, and final optimism about America, also tended to make Native Son seem crude in comparison.
In the 1960s, however, with the dawning of the Black Power movement after the most bloody stage of the civil rights struggle, and the shocking upsurge of violent crime in the cities, especially among young black males, Wright’s novel increasingly seemed strikingly accurate and, indeed, prophetic. Later, in the 1980s, Wright’s reputation suffered again, this time under the scrutiny of feminist literary criticism, which could hardly miss the fact that, with few exceptions, the world of his fiction is fundamentally hostile to women, especially black women.
Nevertheless, Wright seems certain to continue to enjoy a lasting place of high honor in the African American and American literary traditions, and to be recognized as an author of world-class dimensions. While his overall reputation rests on a number of texts in different genres, including autobiography, essays, and travel writing, Native Son remains his greatest achievement. In 1963 (three years after Wright’s sudden death in a Paris hospital), the acclaimed cultural historian Irving Howe summed up, perhaps for all time, the epochal significance of the novel even as he criticized several of its aspects. “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,” Howe declared. “It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.”
ARNOLD RAMPERSAD
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
BOOK ONE
FEAR
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman’s voice sang out impatiently:
“Bigger, shut that thing off!”
A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring of metal. Naked feet swished dryly across the planks in the wooden floor and the clang ceased abruptly.
“Turn on the light, Bigger.”
“Awright,” came a sleepy mumble.
Light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow space between two iron beds, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. From a bed to his right the woman spoke again:
“Buddy, get up from there! I got a big washing on my hands today and I want you-all out of here.”
Another black boy rolled from bed and stood up. The woman also rose and stood in her nightgown.
“Turn your heads so I can dress,” she said.
The two boys averted their eyes and gazed into a far corner of the room. The woman rushed out of her nightgown and put on a pair of step-ins. She turned to the bed from which she had risen and called:
“Vera! Get up from there!”
“What time is it, Ma?” asked a muffled, adolescent voice from beneath a quilt.
“Get up from there, I say!”
“O.K., Ma.”
A brown-skinned girl in a cotton gown got up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Sleepily, she sat on a chair and fumbled with her stockings. The two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed. Abruptly, they all paused, holding their clothes in their hands, their attention caught by a light tapping in the thinly plastered walls of the room. They forgot their conspiracy against shame and their eyes strayed apprehensively over the floor.
“There he is again, Bigger!” the woman screamed, and the tiny, one-room apartment galvanized into violent action. A chair toppled as the woman, half-dressed and in her stocking feet, scrambled breathlessly upon the bed. Her two sons, barefoot, stood tense and motionless, their eyes searching anxiously under the bed and chairs. The girl ran into a corner, half-stooped and gathered the hem of her slip into both of her hands and held it tightly over her knees.
“Oh! Oh!” she wailed.
“There he goes!”
The woman pointed a shaking finger. Her eyes were round with fascinated horror.
“Where?”
“I don’t see ’im!”
“Bigger, he’s behind the trunk!” the girl whimpered.
“Vera!” the woman screamed. “Get up here on the bed! Don’t let that thing bite you!”
Frantically, Vera climbed upon the bed and the woman caught hold of her. With their arms entwined about each other, the black mother and the brown daughter gazed open-mouthed at the trunk in the corner.
Bigger looked round the room wildly, then darted to a curtain and swept it aside and grabbed two heavy iron skillets from a wall above a gas stove. He whirled and called softly to his brother, his eyes glued to the trunk.
“Buddy!”
“Yeah?”
“Here; take this skillet.”
“O.K.”
“Now, get over by the door!”
“O.K.”
Buddy crouched by the door and held the iron skillet by its handle, his arm flexed and poised. Save for the quick, deep breathing of the four people, the room was quiet. Bigger crept on tiptoe toward the trunk with the skillet clutched stiffly in his hand, his eyes dancing and watching every inch of the wooden floor in front of him. He paused and, without moving an eye or muscle, called:
“Buddy!”
“Hunh?”
“Put that box in front of the hole so he can’t get out!”
“O.K.”
Buddy ran to a wooden box and shoved it quickly in front of a gaping hole in the molding and then backed again to the door, holding the skillet ready. Bigger eased to the trunk and peered behind it cautiously. He saw nothing. Carefully, he stuck out his bare foot and pushed the trunk a few inches.
“There he is!” the mother screamed again.
A huge black rat squealed and leaped at Bigger??
?s trouser-leg and snagged it in his teeth, hanging on.
“Goddamn!” Bigger whispered fiercely, whirling and kicking out his leg with all the strength of his body. The force of his movement shook the rat loose and it sailed through the air and struck a wall. Instantly, it rolled over and leaped again. Bigger dodged and the rat landed against a table leg. With clenched teeth, Bigger held the skillet; he was afraid to hurl it, fearing that he might miss. The rat squeaked and turned and ran in a narrow circle, looking for a place to hide; it leaped again past Bigger and scurried on dry rasping feet to one side of the box and then to the other, searching for the hole. Then it turned and reared upon its hind legs.
“Hit ’im, Bigger!” Buddy shouted.
“Kill ’im!” the woman screamed.
The rat’s belly pulsed with fear. Bigger advanced a step and the rat emitted a long thin song of defiance, its black beady eyes glittering, its tiny forefeet pawing the air restlessly. Bigger swung the skillet; it skidded over the floor, missing the rat, and clattered to a stop against a wall.