About the Author
Richard Wright was born near Natchez Mississippi, in 1908. As a child he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen and returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago, where in 1935 he began to work on the Federal Writers’ Project. He published Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the following year. His other tides include Native Son (1940), his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war Richard Wright went to live in Paris with his wife and daughters, remaining there until his death in 1960.
About the Book
Gripping and furious, Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman’s death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime. Native Son shocked readers on its first publication in 1940 and went on to make Richard Wright the first bestselling black writer in America.
ALSO BY RICHARD WRIGHT
Uncle Tom’s Children
Black Boy
The Outsider
Savage Holiday
Black Power: A Record of Reactions in the Land of Pathos
Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past
White Man, Listen!
The Long Dream
Eight Men
American Hunger
Rite of Passage
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR AND
AN INTRODUCTION BY
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Epub ISBN 9781446466889
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Richard Wright 1940
Introduction copyright © Caryl Phillips 2000
Richard Wright has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollanc in 1940
Published by Vintage 2000
www.penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099282938
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Richard Wright
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Caryl Phillips
Introduction: How ‘Bigger’ Was Born by Richard Wright
Epigraph
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Copyright
To My Mother
who, when I was a child at her knee, taught
me to revere the fanciful and the imaginative
THE YEAR WAS 1978. I was a twenty year old, denim-clad, backpacker who had just made his way across the United States by Greyhound bus. In common with others of my generation, I was living cheaply, moving erratically from one place to the next, and I was hungry for experience. By the time my fatigued body reached the West Coast of the United States I was ready to sit down and reflect. I had ten days or so before I had to return to England, and Oxford, where I had one more year of studying before being set loose upon the world, hopefully clutching a bachelor’s degree in English. One Californian afternoon I wandered into a bookshop and bought a copy of Native Son by Richard Wright. I had heard of neither the author nor the novel but, as I recalled in the introduction to my book The European Tribe (1987) my encounter with Wright had a profound – in fact, seminal – effect upon me.
The next morning I woke early. I walked down to the beach with the Richard Wright book, and pointed my deck chair towards the Pacific. It was a warm, but not hot, early October day. The atmosphere was a little muggy, barely holding the heat. When I rose from the deck chair it was dark and I had finished my reading by moonlight. I felt as if an explosion had taken place inside my head. If I had to point to any one moment that seemed crucial in my desire to be a writer, it was then, as the pacific surf began to wash up around the deck chair. The emotional anguish of the hero, Bigger Thomas, the uncompromising prosodic muscle of Wright, his deeply felt sense of social indignation, provided not so much a model but a possibility of how I might be able to express the conundrum of my own existence … I had decided that I wanted to try to become a writer.
In short, it was the novel Native Son which led me to my vocation.
Two years before the appearance of Native Son (1940), Richard Wright published his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of five stories which illuminate the miserable social and economic conditions that ensnared most African-American lives in the middle part of the twentieth-century. Although the collection sold well, and earned the author a reputation as a talent to watch, Wright was unhappy with the books’ reception. Uncle Tom’s Children evoked both pity and sympathy from its white readership, but Wright worried that by stirring up such emotions he had allowed white readers to assume that they were not in any way responsible for the situation that African-Americans found themselves in. As Wright states in his essay, ‘How ‘Bigger’ was born’, he had ‘written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about’. Richard Wright was a writer who, more so than most writers, sat down at his desk with a clear political and social agenda in mind. To his way of thinking, the evocation of pity was both useless and dangerous. Wright decided that the ‘mistake’ of this first book would be rectified with the publication of his second. In his debut novel he would not offer his white readers the opportunity of an escape into either pity or sympathy. Wright was determined that he would make them face the difficult facts of African-American life for themselves, and encourage them to accept their complicity in the misery of this American underclass. His novel would be ‘hard and deep’, and the narrative would move swiftly to its conclusion ‘without the consolation of tears.’
Richard Wright was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1908, the first son of Nathan and Ella. There would eventually be a brother, Leon (b.1910), and the two boys were largely brought up by their mother, who struggled to keep Richard and Leon clothed and fed. Their father left home when Richard and Leon were young, and Ella and the boys travelled between Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi in search of food and shelter. The poverty, the abandonment by his father, and the peripatetic wandering left young Richard deeply scarred and cognizant of the fact that his life lacked any coherent structure or form. As though this were not humiliating enough, Wright’s childhood also involved his having to learn to negotiate the demeaning ‘rules’ and conventions of black/white relations in the south. In 1927, when Richard Wright was nineteen, he left Memphis, Tennessee and moved north to Chicago in search of a better life, but big city life proved to be just as problematic as life in the south. Wright arrived in Chicago at a time when the whole country had been plunged deep into depression, and jobs were scarce. For a while, Wright had no choice but to apply for temporary assistance, but all the while he continued to read assiduously and develop the habit of writing. Perhaps the most important aspect of Wright’s move to Chicago was the opportunity that it afforded him to fall in with people who might help this poor Mississippi boy in his deeply-held desire to transform himself into a full-time writer.
Once in Chicago, Richard Wright became active in the Communist Party who were, at that time, one of the few groups of people who seemed to have the interests of African-Americans at heart. It was while Wright was under their ‘influence’ that he wrote Native Son, although he subsequently fell out with his ‘comrades’ and came to regard Communism as being largely antithetical to the African-American cause. Much of Wright’s subsequent personal and professional life involved his experimentation with various alternative philosophical frameworks within which he could think and act in order that he might address the problems of non-white peoples, not only in the United States, but in a Pan-African and ultimately global context. However, in the thirties it was the ideology of Communism that captured the young writers’ imagination and Native Son would be written with the controversial shadow of the ‘red’ brotherhood cast broadly across his desk. Wright’s beliefs certainly did not hurt the books’ reception or sales. Native Son was published on March 1, 1940, and it was the first novel by a black author to be chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Within the first three weeks the book had sold a sensational quarter of a million copies; within five months it had sold half a million copies, and its author had become one of the most famous writers in America.
Six years later, in 1946, and shortly after the successful publication of his autobiographical memoir Black Boy, Richard Wright and his wife left the United States and visited France as official guests of the French government. In 1947 they returned to France where they settled permanently. It has often been suggested that the difficulties that Wright experienced trying to buy a house in supposedly ‘liberal’ Greenwich Village, New York led directly to his eventual departure. These difficulties were not helped by the fact that Wright’s wife, Ellen, was white. However, the reasons for Richard Wright’s departure cannot be tied to any single incident. He was a man who felt, like many African-Americans before and since, that he would find it easier to develop and flourish as an artist if he placed himself beyond the tempestuous racial climate of the United States. Wright believed that a change of perspective might aid him in his attempts to slip the restrictive noose of the label ‘negro’ artist, and help him in his efforts to achieve recognition as a ‘universal’ artist. He also felt that his wife and six year old daughter might be safer, and enjoy a better family life, once clear of the racism and violence of the United States.
For the remaining thirteen years of his life, Richard Wright based himself in Paris where he continued to write both fiction and non-fiction. He became the leading figure in the African-American expatriate community in Paris in the fifties, a community which at various times included Quincy Jones, James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, Josephine Baker, Chester Himes, and many others. He befriended Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Malraux, and Andre Gide, and for a while he was the darling of the French literary establishment. Wright also travelled extensively, producing works that were set against the backdrop of Spain, West Africa, and the Far East. However, his writing never again achieved the commercial or critical success of the work that he had produced in the United States between 1938 and 1947. In the early fifties Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin began to publish; it became clear that a new generation of writers were emerging who seemed to be rejecting much of the polemical thrust of Native Son and Wright’s other work, in favour of a more self-conscious literary product. James Baldwin’s influential essay, Everybody’s Protest Novel (1949), not only yokes Native Son together with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin goes on to castigate both novels for reducing human complexity to stereotype.
The basic point behind Baldwin’s attack was that he viewed Native Son as more political tract than novel. According to Baldwin, the novel was conceived of not by dwelling upon character and letting a concern with character drive and determine the plot. To Baldwin’s mind it is a novel with an agenda that the author has somewhat clumsily imposed upon his characters, and by extension his readers, from the lofty vantage point of his ideological ivory tower. In fact, many critics believe the plot of Native Son to be too schematic, the central character too all knowing, and the melodramatic conclusion to be essentially unconvincing. However, whatever structural or ideological weaknesses may exist in the novel, these cannot diminish the power of the remarkable spell which Native Son has managed to cast over successive generations of readers, nor can these perceived ‘weaknesses’ undermine the almost unbearable sense of narrative tension which Richard Wright manages to achieve.
The central character in Native Son is a twenty-year-old black man named Bigger Thomas. He lives in a single cramped room on the south side of Chicago with his mother, his younger sister and brother, Buddy. Bigger and Buddy share a bed. The room is rat-infested, money is tight, there is no allowance for privacy, arguments are rife, and the rent is high. Bigger’s mother finds some solace in her religion, but for the sister and younger brother it is clear that their future is gloomy. For Bigger it is already too late. Bigger keeps a gun and a knife, and he has already carried out a series of robberies with his gang friends. Now the gang are contemplating the unthinkable; ‘crossing-over’ the colour line and robbing a white man.
At the onset of the novel, Bigger provokes an argument with, and then viciously attacks, one of his best friends. He then takes his knife to a pool table and slashes it in a manner that suggests he is hell-bent on destruction; put simply, he is out of control. It would appear that resorting to violence is the only way in which Bigger is able to articulate his despair at the racially charged inequity which daily threatens to consume his life. Bigger is offered a job as a chauffeur by a Mr. Dalton, the head of a wealthy white family who have given over five million dollars worth of philanthropic donations in an effort to ‘help’ the negroes. However, the generosity of the Dalton family makes Bigger feel uneasy. The ambiguities that envelop their charitable contributions become clear when we discover that the Dalton family owns the over-priced slum room in which Bigger and his family live. In fact, the Dalton’s have made their money by being slum landlords to the African-American community on the south side of Chicago.
Mary Dalton, the pretty young daughter of the family, is presently associating with communists much to the distress of her parents. She and her ‘red’ boyfriend, Jan, attempt to befriend Bigger. They make Bigger take them to a black restaurant so they can eat chicken with ‘authentic’ blacks, but their gestures of ‘friendship’ only arouse in Bigger deep feelings of anger and violence for he feels that he is being patronized. While it is clear to Bigger that the hostile whites do not understand him, and never wish to do so, the supposedly liberal whites appear to Bigger to be equally myopic in their understanding of ‘his’ problems. If anything, his feelings of hostility towards the liberals are more urgently felt than his feelings of fear towards the bigots. Eventually Bigger descends to violence of the most perverse kind as he allows himself to be consumed by the hate, anger and frustration which has been daily gnawing away at his young life.
Clearly there is a huge dichotomy between the morally unspeakable actions of Wright’s hero, Bigger Thomas, and the sympathy that we nevertheless feel for him. Richard Wright’s ability to have us empathize with this man in his loneliness, and Wright’s skill in enabling us to understand what has motivated his brutality, is the great achievement of the novel. Richard Wright has written a novel about an outlaw who undoubtedly derives some degree of pleasure and relief from killing, yet the reader gradually learns to recognize some glimmer of truth to the cliché ‘society’s to blame’. In his first book Wright had worried that pity would be the overwhelming emotion that the reader would be left with. In Native Son there is no such danger. Bigger Thomas conforms to the worst stereotype of the black murderer and rapist. He may be a victim of his circumstances, but Bigger is proactive and he relishes the destructive force that he unleashes for he grows to understand that whites cannot control it. In other words, Bigger Thomas makes the unsettling discovery that it is the very act of violence that, in fact, sets him free. The reader is horrified and outraged by the events and revelations of the novel, but held captive by a narrative which suggests that both blacks and whites are likely to be ensnared in a nightmare of savagery and physical and emotional pain unless somebody addresses the problems of American racism.
The novel’s first section ‘Fear’, and the second section ‘Flight’, both move with the speed and compulsion of a thriller. However, the final section ‘Fate’ is riddled with unlikely set pieces behind which one can clearly hear the voice of the author. As has already been established, Richard Wright had a political point to make, and as he tries to make his point the structure of the novel becomes aesthetically clumsy and increasingly burdened with improbability. Bigger Thomas, now incarcerated and facing the death penalty, is represented by Boris Max, a Jewish communist lawyer who understands and sympathizes with African-American people. Bigger is not only hostile towards Max, he is hostile towards Jan, the communist boyfriend of Mary, who Bigger has unsuccessfully tried to frame for murder. Jan forgives him, but Bigger’s hostility towards all things white encompasses these two ‘good’ men who are trying to save him from execution. When, at the conclusion of the novel, it becomes clear that Bigger will die, he somewhat unconvincingly recognizes the goodness of both Max and Jan. Suddenly this angry, violent, young man ‘understands’ that there are good white people as well as bad ones. It all rings somewhat untrue.
The immediate and enduring power of Native Son is obviously tied, both then and now, to the drama of race in America. Two groups of people face each other. One group is black, and one group is white. One group’s path to economic, social, and political power remains largely blocked. One group of people dominates the other, and some among this dominant group continue to invoke all manner of vague historical reasoning to justify their privileged position. In the pages of Native Son, Richard Wright reminds us that the dominated group will continue to seize upon the ‘moral’ authority of violence as the only means of true expression unless both groups begin to voluntarily overhaul this lamentable system. Until this happens many lives will be destroyed and much suffering will be engendered. Wright’s novel is a plea for the system to be dismantled by the kind of ‘mature’ communication that Bigger and Max eventually achieve; black and white fighting together for the same end against an unjust system. However, being the political animal that he was, and possessing an unquenchable ambition to be recognized as a ‘universal’ as opposed to a ‘negro’ artist, Wright was never going to be content to view the ‘struggle’ in purely racial terms. In his essay, ‘How ‘Bigger’ was born’ Wright attempts to place Bigger in a larger context.
The difference between Bigger’s tensity and the German variety is that Bigger’s, due to America’s educational restrictions on the bulk of her Negro population, is in a nascent state, not yet articulate. And the difference between Bigger’s longing for self-identification and the Russian principle of self-determination is that Bigger’s, due to the effects of American oppression, which has not allowed for the forming of deep ideas of solidarity among Negroes, is still in a state of individual anger and hatred.
Mercifully, the text of Native Son remains unencumbered by such pedantry.
In December 1960, Richard Wright died of a heart attack. He was still a relatively young man of fifty-six. Although there was immediately some controversy about his death, and speculation as to whether or not it involved foul play, what was tragically clear was that one of the most important American literary careers of the twentieth-century had come to a premature end. Most of the obituaries, while commenting on his literary exile in Paris, and his poor beginnings in Mississippi, began their analysis of his writing by referring to his masterwork, Native Son. Today, some forty years after his death, some fifty years after Baldwin’s famous essay, and sixty years after the novel was first published, Wright’s critics and commentators still joust over the aesthetics of this problematic novel. One thing, however, that nobody ever seems to disagree about is the novel’s extraordinary narrative power. This is what attracted readers back in 1940 and transformed Native Son into one of the great literary bestsellers of all time, even though the subject-matter was, to say the least, disturbing for both black and white readers alike.
I have never returned to the Californian beach where, over twenty years ago, Richard Wright’s Native Son fuelled my ambition to be a writer. I have, however, regularly visited Paris and sought out Wright’s final resting-place in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery where his ashes are interred. I have also regularly walked past 14 rue Monsieur le Prince where Wright lived during his years in Paris. These small pilgrimages have helped me to remain close to an author to whom I will be forever indebted. The final irony, of course, is that I now live in Greenwich Village, only a few short blocks from Charles Street where, back in the mid-forties, the great American writer Richard Wright endured much difficulty and unspeakable humiliation trying to live and write as a free man in the country of his birth. With chin held high, Richard Wright chose to leave for France; this ‘native son’ was not going to allow the United States to turn him into a ‘Bigger Thomas’.
Caryl Phillips
May, 2000
New York – London
I AM NOT SO pretentious as to imagine that it is possible for me to account completely for my own book, Native Son. But I am going to try to account for as much of it as I can, the sources of it, the material that went into it, and my own years’ long changing attitude toward that material.
In a fundamental sense, an imaginative novel represents the merging of two extremes; it is an intensively intimate expression on the part of a consciousness couched in terms of the most objective and commonly known events. It is at once something private and public by its very nature and texture. Confounding the author who is trying to lay his cards on the table is the dogging knowledge that his imagination is a kind of community medium of exchange: what he has read, felt, thought, seen, and remembered is translated into extensions as impersonal as a worn dollar bill.
The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glues his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Always there is something that is just beyond the tip of the tongue that could explain it all. Usually, he ends up by discussing something far afield, an act which incites skepticism and suspicion in those anxious for a straight-out explanation.
Yet the author is eager to explain. But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of his own emotions. Emotions are subjective and he can communicate them only when he clothes them in objective guise; and how can he ever be so arrogant as to know when he is dressing up the right emotion in the right Sunday suit? He is always left with the uneasy notion that maybe any objective drapery is as good as any other for any emotion.
And the moment he does dress up an emotion, his mind is confronted with the riddle of that ‘dressed up’ emotion, and he is left peering with eager dismay back into the dim reaches of his own incommunicable life. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life, and he knows that that is impossible. Yet, some curious, wayward motive urges him to supply the answer, for there is the feeling that his dignity as a living being is challenged by something within him that is not understood.
So, at the outset, I say frankly that there are phases of Native Son which I shall make no attempt to account for. There are meanings in my book of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper. I shall sketch the outline of how I consciously came into possession of the materials that went into Native Son, but there will be many things I shall omit, not because I want to, but simply because I don’t know them.
The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect. But let me start with the first Bigger, whom I shall call Bigger No. 1.
When I was a bareheaded, barefoot kid in Jackson, Mississippi, there was a boy who terrorized me and all of the boys I played with. If we were playing games, he would saunter up and snatch from us our balls, bats, spinning tops, and marbles. We would stand around pouting, sniffling, trying to keep back our tears, begging for our playthings. But Bigger would refuse. We never demanded that he give them back; we were afraid, and Bigger was bad. We had seen him clout boys when he was angry and we did not want to run that risk. We never recovered our toys unless we flattered him and made him feel that he was superior to us. Then, perhaps, if he felt like it, he condescended, threw them at us and then gave each of us a swift kick in the bargain, just to make us feel his utter contempt.
That was the way Bigger No. 1 lived. His life was a continuous challenge to others. At all times he took his way, right or wrong, and those who contradicted him had him to fight. And never was he happier than when he had someone cornered and at his mercy; it seemed that the deepest meaning of his squalid life was in him at such times.
I don’t know what the fate of Bigger No. 1 was. His swaggering personality is swallowed up somewhere in the amnesia of my childhood. But I suspect that his end was violent. Anyway, he left a marked impression upon me; maybe it was because I longed secretly to be like him and was afraid. I don’t know.
If I had known only one Bigger I would not have written Native Son. Let me call the next one Bigger No. 2; he was about seventeen and tougher than the first Bigger. Since I, too, had grown older, I was a little less afraid of him. And the hardness of this Bigger No. 2 was not directed toward me or the other Negroes, but toward the whites who ruled the South. He bought clothes and food on credit and would not pay for them. He lived in the dingy shacks of the white landlords and refused to pay rent. Of course, he had no money, but neither did we. We did without the necessities of life and starved ourselves, but he never would. When we asked him why he acted as he did, he would tell us (as though we were little children in a kindergarten) that the white folks had everything and he had nothing. Further, he would tell us that we were fools not to get what we wanted while we were alive in this world. We would listen and silently agree. We longed to believe and act as he did, but we were afraid. We were Southern Negroes and we were hungry and we wanted to live, but we were more willing to tighten our belts than risk conflict. Bigger No. 2 wanted to live and he did; he was in prison the last time I heard from him.
There was Bigger No. 3, whom the white folks called a ‘bad nigger’. He carried his life in his hands in a literal fashion. I once worked as a ticket-taker in a Negro movie house (all movie houses in Dixie are Jim Crow; there are movies for whites and movies for blacks), and many times Bigger No. 3 came to the door and gave my arm a hard pinch and walked into the theater. Resentfully and silently, I’d nurse my bruised arm. Presently, the proprietor would come over and ask how things were going. I’d point into the darkened theater and say: ‘Bigger’s in there.’ ‘Did he pay?’ the proprietor would ask. ‘No, sir,’ I’d answer. The proprietor would pull down the corners of his lips and speak through his teeth: ‘We’ll kill that goddamn nigger one of these days.’ And the episode would end right there. But later on Bigger No. 3 was killed during the days of Prohibition: while delivering liquor to a customer he was shot through the back by a white cop.
And then there was Bigger No. 4, whose only law was death. The Jim Crow laws of the South were not for him. But as he laughed and cursed and broke them, he knew that some day he’d have to pay for his freedom. His rebellious spirit made him violate all the taboos and consequently he always oscillated between moods of intense elation and depression. He was never happier than when he had outwitted some foolish custom, and he was never more melancholy than when brooding over the impossibility of his ever being free. He had no job, for he regarded digging ditches for fifty cents a day as slavery. ‘I can’t live on that’, he would say. Ofttimes I’d find him reading a book; he would stop and in a joking, wistful, and cynical manner ape the antics of the white folks. Generally, he’d end his mimicry in a depressed state and say: ‘The white folks won’t let us do nothing.’ Bigger No. 4 was sent to the asylum for the insane.
Then there was Bigger No. 5, who always rode the Jim Crow streetcars without paying and sat wherever he pleased. I remember one morning his getting into a streetcar (all streetcars in Dixie are divided into two sections: one section is for whites and is labeled – FOR WHITES; the other section is for Negroes and is labeled – FOR COLORED) and sitting in the white section. The conductor went to him and said: ‘Come on, nigger. Move over where you belong. Can’t you read?’ Bigger answered: ‘Naw, I can’t read.’ The conductor flared up: ‘Get out of that seat!’ Bigger took out his knife, opened it, held it nonchalantly in his hand and replied: ‘Make me.’ The conductor turned red, blinked, clenched his fists, and walked away, stammering: ‘The goddamn scum of the earth!’ A small angry conference of white men took place in the front of the car and the Negroes sitting in the Jim Crow section overheard: ‘That’s that Bigger Thomas nigger and you’d better leave ’im alone.’ The Negroes experienced an intense flash of pride and the streetcar moved on its journey without incident. I don’t know what happened to Bigger No. 5. But I can guess.
The Bigger Thomases were the only Negroes I know of who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away with it, at least for a sweet brief spell. Eventually, the whites who restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price. They were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken.
There were many variations to this behavioristic pattern. Later on I encountered other Bigger Thomases who did not react to the locked-in Black Belts with the same extremity and violence. But before I use Bigger Thomas as a springboard for the examination of milder types, I’d better indicate more precisely the nature of the environment that produced these men, or the reader will be left with the impression that they were essentially and organically bad.
In Dixie there are two worlds, the white world and the black world, and they are physically separated. There are white schools and black schools, white churches and black churches, white businesses and black businesses, white graveyards and black graveyards, and, for all I know, a white God and a black God …
This separation was accomplished after the Civil War by the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, which swept the newly freed Negro through arson, pillage, and death out of the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the many state legislatures, and out of the public, social, and economic life of the South. The motive for this assault was simple and urgent. The imperialistic tug of history had torn the Negro from his African home and had placed him ironically upon the most fertile plantation areas of the South; and, when the Negro was freed, he outnumbered the whites in many of these fertile areas.
Hence, a fierce and bitter struggle took place to keep the ballot from the Negro, for had he had a chance to vote, he would have automatically controlled the richest lands of the South and with them the social, political, and economic destiny of a third of the Republic. Though the South is politically a part of America, the problem that faced her was peculiar and the struggle between the whites and the blacks after the Civil War was in essence a struggle for power, ranging over thirteen states and involving the lives of tens of millions of people.
But keeping the ballot from the Negro was not enough to hold him in check; disfranchisement had to be supplemented by a whole panoply of rules, taboos, and penalties designed not only to insure peace (complete submission) but to guarantee that no real threat would ever arise. Had the Negro lived upon a common territory, separate from the bulk of the white population, this program of oppression might not have assumed such a brutal and violent form. But this war took place between people who were neighbors, whose homes adjoined, whose farms had common boundaries. Guns and disfranchisement, therefore, were not enough to make the black neighbor keep his distance. The white neighbor decided to limit the amount of education his black neighbor could receive; decided to keep him off the police force and out of the local national guards; to segregate him residentially; to Jim Crow him in public places; to restrict his participation in the professions and jobs; and to build up a vast, dense ideology of racial superiority that would justify any act of violence taken against him to defend white dominance; and further, to condition him to hope for little and to receive that little without rebelling.
But, because the blacks were so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out, because they could not help but react in some way to its incentives and prizes, and because the very tissue of their consciousness received its tone and timbre from the strivings of that dominant civilization, oppression spawned among them a myriad variety of reactions, reaching from outright blind rebellion to a sweet, other-worldly submissiveness.
In the main, this delicately balanced state of affairs has not greatly altered since the Civil War, save in those parts of the South which have been industrialized or urbanized. So volatile and tense are these relations that if a Negro rebels against rule and taboo, he is lynched and the reason for the lynching is usually called ‘rape’, that catchword which has garnered such vile connotations that it can raise a mob anywhere in the South pretty quickly, even today.
Now for the variations in the Bigger Thomas pattern. Some of the Negroes living under these conditions got religion, felt that Jesus would redeem the void of living, felt that the more bitter life was in the present the happier it would be in the hereafter. Others, clinging still to that brief glimpse of post-Civil War freedom, employed a thousand ruses and stratagems of struggle to win their rights. Still others projected their hurts and longings into more naïve and mundane forms – blues, jazz, swing – and, without intellectual guidance, tried to build up a compensatory nourishment for themselves. Many labored under hot suns and then killed the restless ache with alcohol. Then there were those who strove for an education, and when they got it, enjoyed the financial fruits of it in the style of their bourgeois oppressors. Usually they went hand in hand with the powerful whites and helped to keep their groaning brothers in line, for that was the safest course of action. Those who did this called themselves ‘leaders’. To give you an idea of how completely these ‘leaders’ worked with those who oppressed, I can tell you that I lived the first seventeen years of my life in the South without so much as hearing of or seeing one act of rebellion from any Negro, save the Bigger Thomases.
But why did Bigger revolt? No explanation based upon a hard and fast rule of conduct can be given. But there were always two factors psychologically dominant in his personality. First, through some quirk of circumstance, he had become estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race. Second, he was trying to react to and answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter came to him through the newspapers, magazines, radios, movies, and the mere imposing sight and sound of daily American life. In many respects his emergence as a distinct type was inevitable.
As I grew older, I became familiar with the Bigger Thomas conditioning and its numerous shadings no matter where I saw it in Negro life. It was not, as I have already said, as blatant or extreme as in the originals; but it was there, nevertheless, like an underdeveloped negative.
Sometimes, in areas far removed from Mississippi, I’d hear a Negro say: ‘I wish I didn’t have to live this way. I feel like I want to burst.’ Then the anger would pass; he would go back to his job and try to eke out a few pennies to support his wife and children.
Sometimes I’d hear a Negro say: ‘God, I wish I had a flag and a country of my own.’ But that mood would soon vanish and he would go his way placidly enough.
Sometimes I’d hear a Negro ex-soldier say: ‘What in hell did I fight in the war for? They segregated me even when I was offering my life for my country.’ But he, too, like the others, would soon forget, would become caught up in the tense grind of struggling for bread.
I’ve even heard Negroes, in moments of anger and bitterness, praise what Japan is doing in China, not because they believed in oppression (being objects of oppression themselves), but because they would suddenly sense how empty their lives were when looking at the dark faces of Japanese generals in the rotogravure supplements of the Sunday newspapers. They would dream of what it would be like to live in a country where they could forget their color and play a responsible role in the vital processes of the nation’s life.
I’ve even heard Negroes say that maybe Hitler and Mussolini are all right; that maybe Stalin is all right. They did not say this out of any intellectual comprehension of the forces at work in the world, but because they felt that these men ‘did things’, a phrase which is charged with more meaning than the mere words imply. There was in the back of their minds, when they said this, a wild and intense longing (wild and intense because it was suppressed!) to belong, to be identified, to feel that they were alive as other people were, to be caught up forgetfully and exultingly in the swing of events, to feel the clean, deep, organic satisfaction of doing a job in common with others.
It was not until I went to live in Chicago that I first thought seriously of writing of Bigger Thomas. Two items of my experience combined to make me aware of Bigger as a meaningful and prophetic symbol. First, being free of the daily pressure of the Dixie environment, I was able to come into possession of my own feelings. Second, my contact with the labor movement and its ideology made me see Bigger clearly and feel what he meant.
I made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too, and there were literally millions of him, everywhere. The extension of my sense of the personality of Bigger was the pivot of my life; it altered the complexion of my existence. I became conscious, at first dimly, and then later on with increasing clarity and conviction, of a vast, muddied pool of human life in America. It was as though I had put on a pair of spectacles whose power was that of an x-ray enabling me to see deeper into the lives of men. Wherever I picked up a newspaper, I’d no longer feel that I was reading the doings of whites alone (Negroes are rarely mentioned in the press unless they’ve committed some crime!), but of a complex struggle for life going on in my country, a struggle in which I was involved. I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.
Trade-union struggles and issues began to grow meaningful to me. The flow of goods across the seas, buoying and depressing the wages of men, held a fascination. The pronouncements of foreign governments, their policies, plans, and acts were calculated and weighted in relation to the lives of people about me. I was literally overwhelmed when, in reading the works of Russian revolutionists, I came across descriptions of the ‘holiday energies of the masses’, ‘the locomotives of history’, ‘the conditions prerequisite for revolution’, and so forth. I approached all of these new revelations in the light of Bigger Thomas, his hopes, fears, and despairs; and I began to feel far-flung kinships, and sense, with fright and abashment, the possibilities of alliances between the American Negro and other people possessing a kindred consciousness.
As my mind extended in this general and abstract manner, it was fed with even more vivid and concrete examples of the lives of Bigger Thomas. The urban environment of Chicago, affording a more stimulating life, made the Negro Bigger Thomases react more violently than even in the South. More than ever I began to see and understand the environmental factors which made for this extreme conduct. It was not that Chicago segregated Negroes more than the South, but that Chicago had more to offer, that Chicago’s physical aspect – noisy, crowded, filled with the sense of power and fulfillment – did so much more to dazzle the mind with a taunting sense of possible achievement that the segregation it did impose brought forth from Bigger a reaction more obstreperous than in the South.
So the concrete picture and the abstract linkages of relationships fed each other, each making the other more meaningful and affording my emotions an opportunity to react to them with success and understanding. The process was like a swinging pendulum, each to and fro motion throwing up its tiny bit of meaning and significance, each stroke helping to develop the dim negative which had been implanted in my mind in the South.
During this period the shadings and nuances which were filling in Bigger’s picture came, not so much from Negro life, as from the lives of whites I met and grew to know. I began to sense that they had their own kind of Bigger Thomas behavioristic pattern which grew out of a more subtle and broader frustration. The waves of recurring crime, the silly fads and crazes, the quicksilver changes in public taste, the hysteria and fears – all of these had long been mysteries to me. But now I looked back of them and felt the pinch and pressure of the environment that gave them their pitch and peculiar kind of being. I began to feel with my mind the inner tensions of the people I met. I don’t mean to say that I think that environment makes consciousness (I suppose God makes that, if there is a God), but I do say that I felt and still feel that the environment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expresses itself, and if that environment is warped or tranquil, the mode and manner of behavior will be affected toward deadlocking tensions or orderly fulfillment and satisfaction.
Let me give examples of how I began to develop the dim negative of Bigger. I met white writers who talked of their responses, who told me how whites reacted to this lurid American scene. And, as they talked, I’d translate what they said in terms of Bigger’s life. But what was more important still, I read their novels. Here, for the first time, I found ways and techniques of gauging meaningfully the effects of American civilization upon the personalities of people. I took these techniques, these ways of seeing and feeling, and twisted them, bent them, adapted them, until they became my ways of apprehending the locked-in life of the Black Belt areas. This association with white writers was the life preserver of my hope to depict Negro life in fiction, for my race possessed no fictional works dealing with such problems, had no background in such sharp and critical testing of experience, no novels that went with a deep and fearless will down to the dark roots of life.
Here are examples of how I culled the information relating to Bigger from my reading:
There is in me a memory of reading an interesting pamphlet telling of the friendship of Gorky and Lenin in exile. The booklet told of how Lenin and Gorky were walking down a London street. Lenin turned to Gorky and, pointing, said: ‘Here is their Big Ben.’ ‘There is their Westminster Abbey.’ ‘There is their library.’ And at once, while reading that passage, my mind stopped, teased, challenged with the effort to remember, to associate widely disparate but meaningful experiences in my life. For a moment nothing would come, but I remained convinced that I had heard the meaning of those words sometime, somewhere before. Then, with a sudden glow of satisfaction of having gained a little more knowledge about the world in which I lived, I’d end up by saying: ‘That’s Bigger. That’s the Bigger Thomas reaction.’
In both instances the deep sense of exclusion was identical. The feeling of looking at things with a painful and unwarrantable nakedness was an experience, I learned, that transcended national and racial boundaries. It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where the look of a world which one did not make or own struck one with a blinding objectivity and tangibility, that made me grasp the revolutionary impulse in my life and the lives of those about me and far away.
I remember reading a passage in a book dealing with old Russia which said: ‘We must be ready to make endless sacrifices if we are to be able to overthrow the Czar.’ And again I’d say to myself: ‘I’ve heard that somewhere, sometime before.’ And again I’d hear Bigger Thomas, far away and long ago, telling some white man who was trying to impose upon him: ‘I’ll kill you and go to hell and pay for it.’ While living in America I heard from far away Russia the bitter accents of tragic calculation of how much human life and suffering it would cost a man to live as a man in a world that denied him the right to live with dignity. Actions and feelings of men ten thousand miles from home helped me to understand the moods and the impulses of those walking the streets of Chicago and Dixie.
I am not saying that I heard any talk of revolution in the South when I was a kid there. But I did hear the lispings, the whispers, the mutters which some day, under one stimulus or another, will surely grow into open revolt unless the conditions which produce Bigger Thomases are changed.
In 1932 another source of information was dramatically opened up to me and I saw data of a surprising nature that helped to clarify the personality of Bigger. From the moment that Hitler took power in Germany and began to oppress the Jews, I tried to keep track of what was happening. And on innumerable occasions I was startled to detect, either from the side of the Fascists or from the side of the oppressed, reactions, moods, phrases, attitudes that reminded me strongly of Bigger, that helped to bring out more clearly the shadowy outlines of the negative that lay in the back of my mind.
I read every account of the Fascist movement in Germany I could lay my hands on, and from page to page I encountered and recognized familiar emotional patterns. What struck me with particular force was the Nazi preoccupation with the construction of a society in which there would exist among all people (German people, of course!) one solidarity of ideals, one