Native Son (2 page)

That next book was
Native Son
. As Wright later recalled, when he started to write the story of Bigger Thomas, the basic story flowed almost without an effort. In a real sense, he had been studying Bigger Thomas all of his life. Wright’s essential Bigger Thomas was not so much a particular character caught in a specific episode of criminal activity as a crime waiting to happen; all the elements to create Bigger’s mentality were historically in place in America, stocked by the criminal racial situation that was America. “I had spent years learning about Bigger, what had made him, what he meant; so, when the time came for writing,
what had made him and what he meant
constituted my plot.” Translating this idea into a narrative also came easily; the plot “fell out, so to speak.” In truth, Wright heavily revised the manuscript as he worked, and the dramatic opening scene, featuring Bigger and his rat, was a late addition; but almost everything else took shape swiftly in response to a mighty effort by Wright to complete his novel.

At the center of
Native Son
is Bigger’s consciousness. Where had
Bigger come from? In his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” also published in 1940, Wright conceded that as with any sincere artist, his work of art had a life of its own: “There are meanings in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper.” On the other hand, he was well aware from the start of the fundamental nature of his central character, who epitomized for Wright the most radical effect of racism on the black psyche. He recalled having met at least five specific Biggers in his youth. The first had been an ugly, brutish bully who, impervious to notions of justice or fair play, had intimidated and abused Wright and other black boys. The remaining prototypes of Bigger, however, distinguished themselves by the way in which their antisocial behavior was linked to their hatred of whites. That behavior moved on a spectrum from a devious opposition to white power to an open defiance of even its most intimidating shibboleths. Surviving miraculously in some cases, the most aggressive Biggers could not be cowed by threats of violence or by the law.

Bigger, however, was not an exclusively black phenomenon. Wright himself declared that the turning point for him in his understanding of social reality—“the pivot of my life”—was his discovery of the ubiquitousness of Bigger: “there were literally millions of him everywhere.” White Biggers abounded in response to the same fundamental environment that had helped sponsor, in situations that involved blacks, the secondary conditions that produced black Biggers. These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization—the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor. White Biggers, too, were as cut off from nurturing communal values and as emotionally ravaged by a gnawing sense of alienation as the black Biggers who had impressed themselves on Wright’s imagination. These men (Wright seems never to have conceived of Bigger in female terms) saw in a garish light the failure of their society, its cultural and political ideals and promises, and refused to accept the compromises that most individuals make for simple self-preservation.

The existence of Bigger across racial lines enabled Wright both to
come to terms with the limitations of black American culture, of which he would write with almost abusive force in his autobiography
Black Boy
, and to set the problems facing blacks alongside those facing whites and thus allow a reciprocity of interest and influence that he had never guessed at in his youth. Nevertheless, the task of representing Bigger in fiction remained daunting. Unlike the dogmatic Communist ideology Wright was in the process of repudiating, the social and political criticism implicit in these marginal lives was by definition incoherent. “Their actions had simply made impressions upon my sensibilities as I lived from day to day,” Wright recalled, “impressions which crystallized and coagulated into clusters and configurations of memory, attitudes, moods, ideas. And these subjective states, in turn, were automatically stored away somewhere in me. I was not even aware of the process. But, excited over the book which I had set myself to write, under the stress of emotion, these things came surging up, tangled, fused, knotted, entertaining me by the sheer variety and potency of their meaning and suggestiveness.”

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, who 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.”