The Negro Novel: Richard Wright
RICHARD WRIGHT, a Mississippi-born Negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled Native Son. The race hatred of his hero, Bigger Thomas, is directed with equal malevolence and demoniac intensity toward all whites, whether they are Mary Dalton, the moony Negrophile whom he murdered, or the vague white men who seemed to bar his youthful ambition to become an aviator or join the navy. This book has far-reaching qualities of significance above and beyond its considerable virtues as a novel, because Mr. Wright elects to portray his hero not as an individual merely but as a symbol of twelve million American Negroes.
Bigger is very young. His exact age is not stated, but we are told he is too young to vote, and he is therefore under twenty-one. Although his life has hardly begun, his career and hopes for the future have been blasted by the Negro-hating whites of Chicago. On page 14 of Native Son, Bigger and his friend Gus are watching an airplane above the city. ‘I could fly a plane if I had a chance,’ Bigger says. ‘If you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane,’Gus answers. And time after time, throughout the length of this book, Bigger bitterly complains that he is denied access to the broad, glittering world which the whites monopolize for themselves to the exclusion of Negroes. Toward the end of the novel (p. 302), Bigger, in jail for murdering a white girl and his Negro mistress, says: ‘I ain’t asking nobody to be sorry for me . . . I’m black. They don’t give black people a chance’ (my italics). Bigger’s crimes and his fate in the electric chair, the author makes clear to us, are consequently to be laid at the door of white society.
In the speech of Bigger’s lawyer at his trial, one finds the fullest summation of Mr. Wright’s point of view toward the Negro question in America, and the most explicit statement of his use of Bigger as a symbol of the oppressed Negro. ‘This boy,’ says lawyer Max, ‘represents but a tiny aspect of the problem whose reality sprawls over a third of a nation. . . . Multiply Bigger Thomas twelve million times, allowing for environmental and temperamental variations . . . and you have the psychology of the Negro people. . . . Taken collectively, they are not simply twelve million; in reality they constitute a separate nation, stunted, stripped, and held captive within this nation, devoid of political, social, economic and property rights.’
Mr. Wright might have made a more manly and certainly more convincing case for his people if he had stuck to fact. In all of the non-Southern states, Negroes have complete political rights, including the suffrage, and even in the South Negro suffrage is constantly being extended. So powerful, indeed, is the Negro vote, and so solidly is it cast en bloc in Negropopulous Eastern and Midwestern states, that in closely contested Presidential elections the Negro vote may decide who shall become President of the United States. Hence the scramble of both parties for the Negro vote. Nowhere in America save in the most benighted sections of the South, or in times of passion arising from the committing of atrocious crime, is the Negro denied the equal protection of the laws. If he is sometimes put in jail for no reason at all in Memphis, so too are whites put in jail for no reason at all in Pittsburgh. This is the unjust fate, not of the Negro alone, but of the poor, the obscure, and the inarticulate everywhere, regardless of pigmentation. The ownership, also, of more than a billion dollars’ worth of property by Negroes in the South alone, and the presence of prosperous Negro business concerns throughout the country, are some refutation of the sweeping statement that Negroes are denied property rights in this country.
Through the mouth of Digger’s lawyer we are told in unmistakable terms that the damming up of the Negro’s aspirations, and the denial to him of unrestricted entry into the whole environment of the society in which he is cast, may lead Negroes, in conjunction with others, toward a new civil war in America. Mr. Wright seems to have completely forgotten the unparalleled phenomenon — unique in the world’s history — of the first American Civil War, in which millions of white men fought and killed one another over the issue of the black slave. If it be granted that the original enslavement of Negroes was a crime against justice, then it must also be granted that its bloody expiation was filled with enough death and destruction to satisfy even the most hate-consumed Negro. But it doesn’t seem to satisfy Mr. Wright. A second civil war must begin where the first one left off in order to bring about the eventual freeing of the Negro minority, even if it means the destruction of the society of the majority. Justice and understanding are to come through the persuasive snouts of machine guns.
Bigger’s lawyer is a Jew. As a member of a race which has known something of oppression, — not for three centuries, the length of the Negro’s residence in America, but for more than twenty centuries in nearly every country of the world, — he pleads extenuation for his client both on broad grounds of justice and on the ground that white society drove Diggers to crime by repressing him. If repression of the members of a minority drives them to slay members of the majority, it would follow that the principal occupation of Jews in Tsarist Russia, Poland, Rumania, and other bitterly anti-Semitic countries would have been to use their oppressors as clay pigeons. Jewish revolutionists there have been, indeed, but over the whole sweep of two thousand years of dark Jewish history the mass of these people, enduring greater oppression than Negroes knew here even in slavery, created within the walls of their ghettos an intense family and communal life and constructed inexhaustible wells of spiritual resource. They used their talents and energies as best they could, serene in the belief either that a Messiah would ultimately come and deliver them out of bondage into the Promised Land or that justice would ultimately triumph. Mr. Wright uses a Jewish lawyer as his mouthpiece, but he has learned nothing from Jewish history, nor gleaned anything of the spirit of that group whom Tacitus called ‘a stubborn people.’
It is beyond doubt that Negroes labor under grave difficulties in America; that economic and social discrimination is practised against them; that opportunities open to whites are closed to blacks. It is also beyond doubt that the position, if not the status, of the Negro is constantly improving in the United States. The evidence on this point is overwhelming. But there is one hard and inescapable fact which must be courageously faced. The social structure of America, despite many racial admixtures, is Anglo-Saxon. And nowhere on earth — save in isolated instances — do whites and Negroes in Anglo-Saxon communities intermingle socially or intermarry. And so long as this is a fact, neither the Negro — and this is what completely escapes Mr. Wright — nor the white man will function as a full-fledged personality. It could easily be demonstrated that Southern whites living in the presence of masses of Negroes, and maintaining at least tolerable racial relations through the exercise of exquisite, intuitive tact on both sides, suffer aberrations and distortions of the spirit, only slightly less severe than those suffered by Negroes.
It is no fault of the Negro or of the present generation of whites that the Negro is here. But the preaching of Negro hatred of whites by Mr. Wright is on a par with the preaching of white hatred of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan. The position, moreover, of a minority struggling toward the sun must be gauged at any given time by its relative rather than its absolute state, and in accordance with this postulate it is clear that the Negro’s lot in America is constantly being ameliorated.
It is highly significant of the whole hate-headlong point of view of Mr. Wright that he has chosen to make his hero so hopelessly despairing of making a good life for himself because of white repressions, that he drives him to crime and execution when his adult life has hardly begun. Contrast this with the experience of the Jews in England, who were first granted full civil rights only after five centuries of living in the country.
Mr. Wright obviously does not have the long view of history. He wants not only complete political rights for his people, but also social equality, and he wants them now. Justice demands that every right granted to others shall be granted to Negroes, but men are not gods. A hard-headed people will be conscious of the Pauline law of expediency: ‘All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.’
Justice or no justice, the whites of America simply will not grant to Negroes at this time those things that Mr. Wright demands. The Negro problem in America is actually insoluble; all profound, complex social problems are insoluble, and only a politically naïve people will believe otherwise. In the meanwhile, recognition by both sides that the question is insoluble, followed by tempered, sincere efforts to make the best of the situation within its frame of reference, will produce the most equitable results for both. Hatred, and the preaching of hatred, and incitement to violence can only make a tolerable relationship intolerable.
Even Abraham Lincoln did not envisage a time when the Negro question would be solved upon Mr. Wright’s terms. In 1862 he said to a Negro delegation who called on him: ‘You and we are different races. . . . But even when you cease to be slaves you are yet far from being placed on an equality with the white race. . . . The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. . . . Go where you are treated best, and the ban is still upon you.’
And Mr. Wright’s hero kills and dies in Mr. Lincoln’s stale of Illinois.