Making It New: 1900–1945 501myth of personal reinvention, the making of an identity. And it did not stop him
either, from responding with sensitivity to the speech and sounds of black culture.
In his fiction, in particular, Wright’s feeling for the pain and pathos of black life – his
sense that living for blacks, in a world they never made, is “like living in a dream, the
reality of which might change at any moment” – gives to his work the resonance, the
melancholy residue, of the blues.
Despite the success of Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright was uneasy about its potential
for sentiment. It was, he suspected, a little too like the work the title of which it
parodically echoed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: one that “even bankers’ daughters could read
and weep and feel good about.” So, he resolved that his next fiction would be so
“hard and deep” that readers “would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”
The result was his most important book, Native Son (1940). Set in the black ghetto
of the South Side of Chicago, it presents a protagonist who would deny any attempt
to see him as a figure of pathos. Bigger Thomas kills two women, one white and one
black. The first killing is an accident but, recalling the pivotal murder in An American
Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, it is seen as an accident waiting to happen. It issues out
of the fear that is the emotional condition of Bigger’s life; it is seen as the product,
not of will, but of circumstance and the desperate violence it engenders. And the
second, more deliberate killing follows from this. Waiting in prison for his trial,
Bigger feels for the first time a sense of freedom because, he believes, he has broken
out of the prison of himself. Previously, there had been “two worlds” for him,
“something the world gave him and something he himself had; something spread out
in front of him and something spread out in back.” “Never in all his life,” he senses,
“with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind,
aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness.”
Now, he begins to feel it. So, despite the attempts of his communist lawyer, Max, to
move him from a sense of identity built on “hate,” “resistance and defiance,” to one
founded on “hope,” a recognition of others similarly suffering, he cannot do so. He
cannot deny what he sees as the logic of his actions, the imperative of violence. He
lacks the social consciousness, the capacity for articulation that Max requires of him.
All he can say, and it is much, is “what I killed for, I am!”
Native Son is a story that brilliantly combines intense involvement with
interrogation. The reader shares the fear, the pulsating terror of the protagonist, can
understand the reasons why Bigger revels in his violence but can also see exactly how
and why he is in error. It also mixes Naturalism with the Gothic, even surreal. The
irreality of Bigger’s life, on the shadowy edges of white society, lends a dreamlike
quality to many of his experiences. The constant terror he feels, surrounded by
circumstances that vacillate between the threatening and the baffling, makes the
streets he travels through seem both naturalistically mean and supernaturally eerie.
And Chicago, as Bigger moves through its dark tenements frightened by the
whiteness of the snow, takes on the qualities not only of the gritty urban landscapes
described by Dreiser or James T. Farrell, but the unreal cities of Hawthorne, Melville,
and, above all, Poe. Standing at the narrative center, although by no means limiting
the narrative perspective, is a character who gradually assumes multiple dimensions,GGray_c04.indd 501ray_c 04 .indd 501 8 8/1/2011 7:54:05 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 05 AM