Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Now we have come to a Supernova among Black American writers: Richard Wright (1908-1960.)
Born in Mississippi, he was the grandson of slaves; some of his ancestors se served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Richard Wright was an outstanding student; as an eight grader he wrote a short story that was published in a newspaper covering his Black community It is nothing short of miraculous that Wright was able to excel in studies under the shadow of school segregation. The unfair conditions under which Black children endeavored to learn would only begin to ameliorate in 1954 with the Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education.
Though Richard Wright had been born well after the turn of the century, his right to an education was doubly threatened--not merely by "separate but equal" statutes but by the dictates of customs held over from the in the antebellum South as well. Before the Civil War the idea of educating black children and adults was forbidden not merely by individual slave owners but by iron-clad laws in several states. Both blacks and whites faced severe punishments for attempting to teach a black person to read. A fictional example of this can be found in the novels of Charles Johnson and more recently in a Independent Lens documentary broadcast on PBS.
Such an insidious aspect of racism continued through the early decades of the 20th century with subtle yet insidious barriers against Blacks pursuing higher learning. From his youth well into adulthood, Wright relied on his own resources for learning since he could not depend on any school system willing to fulfill his educational needs. In any case, circumstances impelled him to abandon formal schooling around the age of 12 in order to support his disabled mother and younger brother. A lifelong autodidact, Wright found comfort and illumination through reading.
In his comprehensive essay on Richard Wright, Louis Menand of The New Yorker illustrates how reading provided not only enlightenment but also solace. “Wright loved literature intimately,” Menand writes, “as you might love a person who has rescued you from misery or danger. Literature, he said, was the first place in which he had found his inner sense of the world reflected and ratified. Everything else, from the laws and mores of Southern apartheid to the religious fanaticism of his own family (he grew up mostly in the house of his maternal grandmother, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, who believed that storytelling was a sin), he experienced as pure hostility.”
A well-known anecdote illustrates how institutional barriers warred against him by denying him lending privileges at a public library. As he related in one of the chapters in his autobiography, Black Boy, he found a “workaround” to evade this injustice. A white co-worker lent Richard his own library card along with a note asking the librarian to allow Richard borrow books.
When Wright and his family moved to Chicago in 1927, his literary activities brought him into the realm of leftist organizations, including the Communist Party among whose members opportunistically latched onto the Black cause in order to advance their broader ideology. Such exploitation apparently was common; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man includes a fictional representation of duplicity within a Communist cell. Initially embracing some of the revolutionary policies, Wright eventually grew disillusioned with the party, after some members exhibited their own racist tendencies, and in at least one incident, a violent way. In a later volume of his autobiography, Wright wrote about his experiment with communism, also published in Richard Crossman’s anthology, The God That Failed.
By 1937, Richard Wright had moved out of Chicago to New York. As Wright’s literary career evolved, a different problem –- aesthetic rather than sociological, this time -- presented in the fact that Richard Wright could not find any substantial bodies of literary works by Black authors. This cultural gap or literary divide meant that at the time Richard Wright decided to express the experience of being a black person in America, there were no models or precedents. Everything up to that point had been filtered through what Toni Morrison called “the white gaze.” As Wright himself put it, “[F]or my race possessed no fictional works dealing with such problems, had no background in such sharp and critical testing of experiences no novels that went with a deep and fearless will down to dark roots of life.”
It was around this point that his writing had begun to venture out beyond appearances in periodicals and literary journals with the publication of a book-length collection of his short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938. The subject matter of the pieces authentically represented the experience of black people under dominant white rule.
By 1940 Wright created this very novel for which there had been no precedent: Native Son. Just as the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s 1993 novel Beloved was based on a historical figure, Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, derived from the notorious case of a real-life criminal named Robert Noxon. In the early sections of the novel Bigger Thomas trudges through deprivation and squalor in Depression era Chicago. Not far into the book the reader gets the impression that it is as much the environment as the titular character who is the villain.
In order to defuse what is actually an innocent action, Bigger causes a death, the unintended consequences of which escalate into another murder and extortion. The final section of the book deals with his arrest and trial in which Bigger is represented by an attorney who sees Bigger as a case study with ideological underpinnings. The defense attorney does present the argument that the actual cause of Bigger’s crime was that this corrupt culture driven by institutional racism caused Bigger’s crime, whereas, the prosecutor attempts to prove that Bigger was responsible for his own actions. At this point, Bigger has been further diminished as he has become a pawn in the legal tug-o-war, on one side a sociological symbol and on the other a vicious criminal. In both instances, is deprived of autonomy as an individual. Though conventionally unrepentant, Bigger is subtly shown to have reached some point of self-recognition.
Across the country Native Son earned by critical and commercial success. The first best-seller by a Black novelist, Native Son also was the first such novel be chosen as a selection for the Book of The Month Club. Likewise it was a best-seller and ultimately The Modern Library named it Number 20 on its list of the Best 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century.
Evidently readers were divided into two camps: one faction regarded the “literary honesty” of Native Son as an extraordinary work of art rather than a sociological treatise. As Irving Howe proclaimed in his 1963 essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons”: “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, 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." Howe said that white liberals were moved by the shock of recognition and acknowledged their tacit complicity in the system.
On the other hand, one can surmise that a smaller group of readers saw Bigger Thomas’s rage and lack of control not as a metaphor of oppression but rather as a representation of a long-held stereotype of the “angry black man”– confirming their age-old bias in printed form. This is exactly the kind of reaction some of Wright’s fellow writers worried about. James Baldwin, tempered his initial enthusiasm for his mentor’s novel by criticizing its “unmitigated violence,” as he championed for more positive images in Baldwin’s critical book, Notes on a Native Son, which, as Irving Howe points out, urges Black writers to move beyond “the novel of protest” toward heroes who are neither victims nor revolutionaries.
Louis Menand’s view differs from that of both Howe and Baldwin. He writes, “The evil of modern society isn’t that it creates racism but that it creates conditions in which people who don’t suffer from injustice seem incapable of caring very much about people who do.”
This revelation, as well as Wright’s other positions on race and society were, as Menand points out, formed by his own experiences such as related in the 1945 appearance of Black Boy, the best known of his autobiographical volumes. It is through Wright’s own accounts that we discover how his attitudes toward society were formed.
Richard Wright spent the later years of his life as an expatriate in Paris, where he wrote his last works including The Outsider, published in 1953. A posthumous collection of short stories called Eight Men contains the story “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” a superb account of an incident of a youth’s attempt to venture into manhood, symbolized by the purchase of a shotgun. This story, like part of the plot of Native Son, shows how outside forces can affect one’s life despite the individual’s intentions.
Richard Wright’s literary reputation has endured because of his impact upon America’s consciousness – and conscience – but also for his artistic achievement in presenting truths about the universal human condition.
Sources:
Louis Menand, “The Hammer and The Nail” in The New Yorker, July 20, 1992. (A brilliant, eminently readable piece by a 2016 winner of the Medal of Honor from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons“ originally published in Dissent, Autumn, 1963, available online from Univ. of Penn.org.
“Tell Them We Are Rising,” an excellent documentary film shown on the Independent Lens series, airdate February 20,2018. Check pbs.org
Reader’s Encyclopedia
The Story and Its Writer, edited by Ann Charters, published by Bedord Books, St. Martin’s Press, 1995. (A comprehensive anthology that includes essays by the writers themselves, this volume is invaluable for students of modern and contemporary short fiction.)
