Native Son

Native Son

Adult fiction
"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 Biggers' mentality were historically in place in America,
stocked by the criminal racial system that was America..."
If you want to understand racial injustice in America, you need
to study history. Richard Wright's Native Son (set, by the way, in
Chicago, not a rural Southern backwater) gives a lot of insight into
racial relations in a time (the 1930s) when Jim Crow and Black Laws
were the law of the land and every space from neighborhoods to schools
and public accomodations was separate and very far from equal.
Bigger Thomas, Wright's protagonist, is to be his family's route
to avoid starvation. Taking a job driving for a wealthy family, the
Daltons, means that his mother, sister, and brother won't be taken off
relief and his siblings will be able to stay in school. His first
night he is told to drive the Dalton daughter, Mary, to a lecture at
the University. Mary, however, has another destination in mind.
After they pick up Mary's communist boyfriend, Jan, they go to a
restaurant.
At the restaurant Mary and Jan insist that Bigger do the
unthinkable--eat with them. Recall that even drinking from a "White"
water fountain could get a Black in big trouble. And relationships
between Black men and White women were strictly regulated. To keep
his job he has to obey Daltons which requires him to put himself in a
very dangerous position.
Throughout the evening Mary becomes very drunk. Back at her
home she is too intoxicated to climb the stairs to her room. Carrying
her there he is almost caught. When that danger is past he realizes
that he has accidentally suffocated her. A Black man killing a White
woman--if he's found guilty he'll pay the ultimate penalty.
On a personal note, I was disturbed by the similarities between the
time portrayed in the book and now. The most obvious is the fervor
with which the police officers tear the Black community apart in the
search for Mary's killer, disrupting the lives and livlihoods of many
innocent people. That's still going on. There was, for example, a
White guy who shot his pregnant wife and gave himself a superficial
wound, claiming a Black man had done the shooting. Black
neighborhoods in and around Boston were torn apart with many innocent
men taken down to the station. And how about all the White cops who
shoot unarmed Black people?
Another similarity is inequality in housing. In a very dramatic
beginning to the story Bigger fights a huge rat that has entered his
family's dilapidated one room apartment. The man who hires Bigger is
the slumlord to whom his family pays rent. The properties he rents to
Blacks are not only much worse, but more expensive than those he rents
to Whites. These days the blighted areas most impacted by
environmental pollutants (lead paint, toxin dumping) are inhabited by
blacks. And there's plenty more to get angry about.
A great big shout out goes out to the writers who expose the
systematic roots of racism and its evils.
jules hathaway





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