like a moving blackout. Above the top of the
poster were tall red letters: “IF YOU BREAK
THE LAW, YOU CAN’T WIN!” (11)Bigger can only vicariously escape this world
through the games of empowerment he plays with
his friends, in which he is a pilot, the president
of the United States, and the wealthy financier
J. P. Morgan at the movies, where he wastes his
blighted manhood in masturbatory rituals with
his friends to further confirm their stunted status
as perpetual “black boys.”
When the Daltons, wealthy slumlords and
philanthropists, hire Bigger as a chauffer, his first
assignment is to drive their daughter, Mary, to a
lecture at the University of Chicago. Mary, rather
than attending the lecture, instructs Bigger to drive
her and Jan, her communist boyfriend, to a Marx-
ist lecture followed by dinner in a restaurant in
the black community. When Mary becomes drunk
and passes out, Bigger, aware of his responsibility
to guard Mary’s welfare, is forced to deliver her
safely to her bedroom. Afraid he will lose his job
not only if her parents discover Mary in a drunken
stupor but especially if he is found breaking well-
known southern racial taboos if he is caught in
Mary’s bedroom by her blind meandering mother,
Bigger instinctively attempts to protect himself.
He covers Mary’s face with a pillow when Mrs.
Dalton enters Mary’s bedroom. When he removes
the pillow after Mrs. Dalton leaves, Bigger discov-
ers he has accidentally smothered Mary to death.
He dismembers and burns her body in the base-
ment furnace to erase, he thinks, any trace of his
heinous crime.
Ultimately, however, Bigger is forced to take
flight when his crime is discovered. Like the
trapped rat he kills at the beginning of the novel,
Bigger attempts to escape. Running into the cold
Chicago winter night, through labyrinthine cor-
ridors and atop ghetto roofs, Bigger is flushed out
of hiding with a water hose, caught, and dragged
to the street level. Bigger’s capturers
started down the stairs with him, his head
bumping along the steps. He folded his wet
arms about his head to save himself, but soon
the steps had pounded his elbows and armsso hard that all his strength left. He relaxed,
feeling his head bounding painfully down the
steps. He shut his eyes and tried to lose con-
sciousness.... He was in the street now being
dragged over snow. His feet were up in the air,
grasped by strong hands. (228–229)Bigger is tried for the rape and murder of white
Mary Dalton. Although he killed his black girl-
friend, Betsy, during his flight, he is not tried for
that crime.
Bigger is defended by Max, a Jewish Marxist.
The Library of America 1991 edition of Native
Son highlights Max’s role, whereas the censored
1940 edition deletes, among other things, all the
references to Max’s being Jewish. Himself a vic-
tim of racial prejudice, Max is painfully aware of
the racist tone of the press against Bigger and of
“the silence of the church.” Max asks, “Were Ne-
groes liked yesterday and hated today because of
what he [Bigger] has done?” Max’s objective vi-
sion contrasts sharply with the racist attitude in
the prosecutor’s probing. However, it is equally
important not to overlook Max’s socialist per-
spective. He asks, “Your Honor, is this boy alone
in feeling deprived and baffled? Is he an excep-
tion? Or are there others?” He answers himself:
“There are others, Your Honor, millions of oth-
ers, Negro and white, and that is what makes our
future seem a looming image of violence” (468–
469). Both Bigger’s race and his class matter in
the end.
True to strains of literary naturalism that dom-
inate Wright’s style in this novel, Bigger is trapped
and pessimistically determined by his heredity
and socioeconomic environment. In his introduc-
tion to the novel, Arnold Rampersad notes that
Wright “had been studying Bigger Thomases all
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 mental-
ity were historically in place in America, stocked
by the criminal racial situation that was America”
(xvii–xix). Wright himself wrote in “How ‘Bigger’
Was Born,” “there was not just one Bigger, but
many of them, more than I could count, and more
than you suspect” (506).Native Son 385