Reading Native Son in the 21st Century

The book highlights two great divides in American society.

First, the Black-White divide.  As a historical matter, Wright’s book is enormously influential in highlighting this divide. 

No doubt about it: in 1940, three quarters of a century after the Civil War, the divide between Blacks and Whites was large and in desperate need of being corrected.  Wright does a fantastic job illustrating the divide and the effects of the divide. 

On this level, Wright’s book is an amazing piece of American history.  But, on this level, it is comparable to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an enormously important and influential novel that is dated and not really all that engrossing.

The second divide, and it is well worth noting that it is not obvious whether the first or second divide is the more significant one in the novel, is the difference between the wealthy and the poor.  Communists loom large in this book. 

In other words, the explanation for the actions of Bigger are overdetermined—does he act the way he acts because he is black in a society which relegates blacks to being second-class citizens or because he is poor in a society which relegates the poor to being second class citizens?  Presumably, some teacher somewhere, desperate to find an essay topic in which students could analyze or review Native Son, has assigned that question.

But, and here is where the novel reaches Greatness, there is a third possibility. 

Imagine for a second that Bigger is a person.  Not a black person.  Not a poor person.  Just a person. 

Everyone around Bigger wants to label him.  They want to tell him he is black or poor.  (Just like everyone reading the novel wants to label him as black or poor.)    So, Bigger grows up learning to act like he is just a walking label. 

But, imagine the sudden realization that Bigger has sitting in his jail cell that he is not just a label.  He is a complete and full person.  Imagine the shock.  He has a hard time wrapping his mind around it all.  But, he begins to see the possibilities:

Another impulse rose in him, born of desperate need, and his mind clothed it in an image of a strong blinding sun sending hot rays down and he was standing in the midst of a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men, and the sun’s rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and good upward toward the sun…

I have this strange dream where one day people will read Native Son and notice that Bigger is not a poor, black man, but that he is a man and they will treat him like a man and ask him what he feels not as a part of a larger class, but what he feels himself. 

I have this strange dream that one day we will all talk to each other like that, that we will all treat each other like individuals unique and three-dimensional. 

I have this strange dream that one day the idea of assigning Richard Wright in an “African-American Literature” course will seem insulting and old-fashioned because Richard Wright is not an African-American author, but he is an author, a man who wrote a Great Book.

(The Library of America volume adds some really interesting details about the publication history of the book.  Indeed, this is the first time the book was published in its original form.  If you haven’t read it, and even if you have, get the LOA edition.)

In reflecting on his fear that the Communist party might condemn the book because of its “individualist and dangerous element,” Wright realizes, “I felt that a right more immediately deeper than that of politics or race was at stake; that is, a human right, the right of a man to think and feel honestly.” 

This book is a beautiful testament to the problems inherent in thinking of people only as a member of a class of people. 

Bigger deserves more.  He deserves to be seen as an individual, not as a member of a class. 

It is a tragedy, a true tragedy, that three quarters of a century after Native Son, Bigger is still not accorded his full measure of humanity.