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By: Joseph Hynes In the following excerpt, Hynes discusses how Bigger could have no dreams of his own, only unobtainable aspirations fed to him by white America. Richard Wright’s novel appeared in 1940, just over half a century ago. One of his greatest problems at that time was akin to that of the other more recent black writers [Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin] I have mentioned: how to address both black and white readers while remaining true to his vision and hoping to effect a moral and social change. The faith of any serious writer (or teacher) must be that the emotional-intellectual wallop that follows upon seeing will shove readers out of ignorance and complacency, a little closer to union with other human beings. Any artist in any medium wants to communicate with some audience, of course. My point at the moment is that black writers have had special difficulty in this regard. In order to touch on the enormity of an audience problem that was much graver in 1940 than it is today, one has only to imagine Wright’s straining for a way to attack and appeal to white America, through a white publishing house, even as he sought to attract a potentially much smaller black readership. My own conviction is that his success has contributed a great deal to the gradual evolution of an American readership that now takes minority writers both seriously and in relative stride. He has made his mark, moreover, despite the fact that his reading of American culture was communist. In short, he could hardly have found a tougher task. How did he set about doing it? For one thing, he focused on Bigger Thomas as his point-of-view character. As a comparatively uneducated eighteen-year-old black on Chicago’s South Side in the late nineteen-thirties, Bigger is not up to narrating the story Wright wants to tell. Wright can, however, tell us what Bigger sees, feels, and wants, even if Bigger cannot, and Wright can thereby enable us to see Bigger as emblematic of the racial situation. In short, Bigger’s name implies his extension to cover black status in this nation in 1940. We must eventually decide whether things have changed today. Narrative point of view is not resolved, however, by Wright’s showing and telling us Bigger’s thoughts and feelings. Wright obviously wanted to put into his book, in addition, a white spokesman for Wright’s own views. To this end he created Max, a Jewish communist lawyer affected by the viciousness of Bigger’s behavior even as he believes his own communist reading of our society explains such behavior and ought to induce us to overhaul that society. In other words, Wright strives to make this a novel of and for both races by rooting it in a moral, economic, and political ground that the eloquent white, Jewish, communist lawyer—another outsider—tries to explain to an enraged judge and jury as well as to his friend, Bigger Thomas. Max’s effort is not to deny Bigger has killed a white woman and then a black woman, and that he has dismembered the white woman’s body to stuff it into a furnace and be rid of it, but is instead to elucidate his own vision of how Bigger became who he is and of how he therefore did what he did. Max is Bigger’s white lawyer and Wright’s as well. Max tries to explain to whites—judge, jury, read- ers—what Wright’s narrator has tried to show us in the character of Bigger. Max gives intellectual shape to what Bigger has experienced and what we know to be the truth of Bigger’s life. We buy Max’s rationale because we co-readers know he reads Bigger accurately. Inevitably, in this heavily naturalistic fiction, the jury will have no part of Max’s argument and decides to execute Bigger rather than imprison him. This sentence is virtually anticlimactic in its predictability. Indeed, it serves merely to reinforce Bigger’s awareness of the black-white split and Max’s explanation of that split. Neither the book nor the reader’s experience ends with Bigger’s being sentenced to death. However, before discussing the ending, I think it profitable to detail something of Bigger’s history, to rehearse the experience Max summarizes in vain for the jury. Some such particularizing seems essential if we hope to convey an idea of Richard Wright’s America, as well as to reflect on our own national situation more than fifty years later. Early on, Bigger and his friend Gus speak: "You know where the white folks live?" "Yeah," Gus said, pointing eastward. "Over across the ‘line’ over there on Cottage Grove Avenue." "Naw; they don’t," Bigger said. "What you mean?" Gus asked, puzzled. "Then, where do they live?" Bigger doubled his fist and struck his Solar plexus. "Right down here in my stomach," he said. While it is true that Cottage Grove Avenue separates black and white neighborhoods in this novel, Bigger’s point is Wright’s larger one. Bigger—who represents frustrated, aspiring American blacks in Wright’s view—feels white values and expectations right were he lives. He would like to fly an airplane, go to college, have a good job, but is conditioned to see things literally in black and white. In fact the book’s symbols reinforce Bigger’s view. In the Thomas tenement rooms, Bigger corners an enormous black rat and crushes it to death—a useful sign not only of the way Bigger himself sees a black maniac, but also of the way black turns against black, and of the fate that lies in store for the eventually cornered Bigger. Fighting breaks out among the black youths. They are afraid to rob a white merchant but not necessarily a black one. Night and coal and darkness figure prominently, especially in contrast to the prosperous white Dalton family "across the ‘line,’" who are associated with sun, snow, white hair and clothing, and even a white cat. Nearly everyone is unable to see the world they live in, and Mrs. Dalton, for all her philanthropic spirit, is literally blind. Max, Jan Erlone (another communist), and Bigger feel and know accurately. The rest operate in the dark and foster the refusal to perceive. As I have mentioned, the terms of this book are basically naturalistic, meaning that any struggle to change things by appealing to people’s freedom to choose must conquer what comes across as a decidedly deterministic culture. The whites own the property and know how to keep and augment it. They rent slums to blacks at absurd rates and resist making such dwellings livable. To ease their consciences, in those instances where consciences act up, the whites behave philanthropically by being kind to their black domestics and contributing generously to beneficent societies or scholarship funds for aspiring blacks they regard as deserving of a boost. But no basic change is contemplated, and any suggestion of genuine human proximity between the races is shunned and feared. The city-wide search for Bigger is presented as a struggle between this escaped "nigger" and "ape" who has dared to violate a white woman and the collectively outraged white social forces—police, courts, press— determined to blot out this intruder and preserve white territorial claims. The hunters care about white values, not about the value of human life. The press plays up Bigger’s fatal encounter with Mary Dalton, which we know to have been accidental homicide, but never expresses interest in Bigger’s having murdered Bessie, his black girlfriend. Obviously, Bessie does not interest the whites. As long as blacks stay in their psychological place, carry out their chores, and go back across Cottage Grove Avenue after a day’s work, all is well. But any alteration of this pattern is threatening. As for the blacks, they are acutely conscious of the need to maintain an undeclared apartheid. Bigger’s mother prays for heavenly consolation in the next life and pleads with her children to show respect to the whites, who own everything, and for whom blacks work. Her son Bigger’s psychology, the basis for Wright’s novel, shows him torn between hatred and envy felt for whites, on one hand, and contempt for himself for being the black man whom he sees the whites judging and putting in his place. When Jan and Mary attempt to befriend him and enter into his world by asking him to join them in a restaurant on his side of Cottage Grove Avenue, Bigger knows the humiliation of being laughed at by his friends for presuming to bring these white folks on a slumming tour. As a result he hates both himself and these whites even more intensely. He is conditioned to want what whites have, but because he is acutely aware of how he is evaluated by them, he is ashamed of wanting a "white" life and loathes himself even more profoundly. This psychology emerges with an almost wrenching irony when Bigger and his friend Jack attend a neighborhood double feature. The first movie, called The Gay Woman, portrays a rich young white woman abandoning a career of adventurous infidelity with her lover in order to return contritely to her business-driven, mill-owning husband when she realizes his life is threatened by a bomb-throwing communist. Bigger is so smitten with the woman’s beauty, with the glamour and ornate trappings of her existence, that he is thoroughly sympathetic to what he supposes her life to offer and is accordingly opposed to the young communist. All he sees is that if he takes the Dalton job he may meet some such beautiful white woman and come in for sexual adventure and economic opportunity. He is swayed completely by this Hollywood version of good white capitalism and bad "red" communism. So involved is he in his daydreaming, in fact, that he misses out on Trader Horn, the second feature, which of course is at least marginally about black African "roots," as distinct from black history, the development of the slave trade. The narrator of the novel describes men and women freely and happily dancing in Africa, and the movie shows Horn’s belatedly coming to love Africa and its people. What happened after that we know because we are reading Wright’s novel—even if we somehow failed to notice the American black’s condition before we read this book. The point is that Bigger misses this second film completely because he is so blinded by the Hollywood propaganda of the first movie. Instinctively, he accepts the white producer’s simple-minded political and social reading of good and evil, a version imbibed as automatically by this black man as by the mass audience of whites. Wright is obviously interested in having us think about why the communist might want to kill the capitalist, but all Bigger sees is the silk-and-satin erotic fantasy conjured by capitalistic white society. When Bigger subsequently picks a fight with Gus, he does so because he is afraid of failing if the black group goes through with their plan to rob a white merchant, but also because he feels robbery and other violence are just that behavior of which whites always accuse blacks, and because he doesn’t want to ruin his chances of winning the Dalton job now that The Gay Woman has infatuated him with the possibilities that might flow from his involvement with whites. Thus, Wright does a grimly beautiful job of showing that the only values to be seen as worthwhile and good are white values. Not to want what whites have renders one unworthy and subhuman (a "gorilla" is Jack’s word). Yet to dare to reach across that "line" is tantamount to suicide. This is the psychological bind Bigger experiences. It is demonstrated vividly by his surrealistic dream, in which he sees himself trapped by his pursuers. To repel them he decapitates himself and throws his head at them. Bigger has no words for this nightmare, but Wright is making manifest Bigger’s impossible simultaneous needs to fight off the whites and to express his selfloathing death wish. Let us return to the courtroom at this point, to Max’s appeal before the jury, now that we have briefly examined Bigger’s psychology. What this white lawyer tells the white jury is that Bigger is the creature of white America, that he represented a whole category of human beings nurtured from literal slavery to virtual slavery, that he is one of us, the native son of Wright’s title. Max works to persuade the courtroom that Bigger and his fellow blacks cannot be expected to live by the code now being broadcast, printed, and ambiguously touted as virtuous, civilized, decent American. Rather, Max asserts, Bigger has been so conditioned to regard himself and his race as inferior and subservient that it took his acts of violence to instill in him a feeling of life, creativity, and freedom—as if for the first time he had taken control of his actions and done something on his own, irrespective of what the dominant whites might expect or condone. Max’s argument we know to be true, for we are privy to that feeling of exhilaration he is talking about. Bigger does experience a sense of release and personal worthiness after taking Mary’s life—however unintentionally—and disposing of her body. Max is perfectly ready to agree that according to white values such an attitude is perverse, but he wants his listeners (and Wright’s readers) to understand that such an attitude is quite under- standable in the kind of native son white society has shaped. Max emphasizes that a careful reading of black and white psychologies will clarify Bigger’s behavior and should lead to a sentence of imprisonment rather that execution. In developing his argument Max hangs psychology on the terms of guilt, fear, and hate. He points out that the Daltons, for all their goodheartedness, and indeed because of it, typify white guilt at the way whites keep blacks down and build fortunes by employing blacks and shunting them off to white-owned slums at the end of the working day. By corollary, his thesis holds that whites therefore hate themselves for this behavior and likewise hate and fear the oppressed persons whose existence sustains white guilt and who may sometime rebel against such treatment and thereby overturn the social arrangement that both supports and punishes whites. Looking to the blacks, Max then argues that guilt fills them because they are trained to see themselves as inherently less than white, which means less than human. Guilt intensifies, then, when they contemplate improving their lot by approaching whiteness. Yet they are simultaneously conditioned to believe whiteness holds all worth, at least on earth. Blacks are accordingly filled with hatred for their unworthy selves and for their white enemy. Finally, blacks fear whites but also fear their own potential for turning violent. Such are the American scene and psyche as Max reads things. As readers, we must accept his argument as valid for Bigger, whom we have lived with throughout the narrative. The very condition Max describes obviously assures a white jury’s refusal to attend to his words, and guarantees Bigger’s execution. He cannot be imprisoned as a permanent reminder of white involvement in creating him and the racial schema Max outlines. Bigger must be obliterated to prove Max is wrong and white authority is right and good. However, the book does not end in the courtroom. Rather, it ends with discussion between Max and Bigger in a jail cell on the eve of Bigger’s execution. Bigger, who has not understood Max’s public presentation, asks him to put the matter more clearly. Bigger wants to know himself before he dies. Max at first dodges this appeal, seeing it as futile, and would prefer simply to carry any last messages Bigger may want to convey. But when Bigger persists, Max takes him to the window and points to the buildings in the Loop. Max explains that the people who own the buildings may have doubts about the rightness of the dream that impelled them to build those properties, but they will do whatever is necessary to retain their property and acquire more. Max’s meaning is that the capitalistic system created Bigger and will kill him for threatening it. Bigger, however, thinks Max is assuring him that whites kill to get and create what they want, just as he killed to protect himself and create for himself the only experience of freedom he had ever known. For Bigger, then, his communist friend’s parting lesson has the effect of making Bigger think he is just like the whites, at least in possessing an acquisitive drive and the determination to protect his gains from all competition. Thus Max fails to reach the jury and likewise fails to reach his client and friend. Bigger dies with a smile having felt that in the end he, too, is in some sense white and that all humans are one in following the capitalistic spirit. Max is crushed; Bigger is as happy as such a situation enables him to be.… My modest advice is to read Native Son, make political decisions based not exclusively on the "me" principle, think about what makes for a good life, as distinct from a fat one, for all people.… Readers who derive sane conclusions from a study of Richard Wright will have taken a large human stride and will indirectly honor a powerful book after half a century and millions of lifetimes. Source: Joseph Hynes, "Native Son Fifty Years Later," in Cimarron Review, January, 1993, pp. 91-97.
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