Richard Wright Archives - James E Hartley

Beyond Black and White

Richard Wright’s most recently published novel is a cause célèbre. The Man Who Lived Underground, originally written in 1941, was rejected by his publisher at the time. Excerpts were subsequently published in a few places, including the posthumously published short story collection Eight Men. Thanks to the Library of America, we now have the complete novel.

The story: Fred Daniels is a black servant picked up by the police as a suspect in a murder he did not commit. Brought to the police station, Daniels is brutally tortured in order to solicit a confession. He escapes from police custody and goes into the sewers, where he lurks for a few days, observing what is going on aboveground. He eventually returns to the surface where he is killed by the police.

That at least is the gist of the plot summary provided in most of the reviews of the novel. “Eighty Years Later, Richard Wright’s Lost Novel About Police Brutality Speaks Across Decades” (Esquire); “Richard Wright’s newly uncut novel offers a timely depiction of police brutality” (LA Times); “Richard Wright’s novel of police brutality: The most relevant book of 2021 was written 80 years ago” (Chicago Tribune): these are some of the headlines. Innumerable reviews noted that the publisher did not provide a reason for not publishing the book, but (wink, wink) it is obvious that a publisher in the 1940s could not handle a manuscript painting the police in an unflattering light.

That narrative is a bit odd, however…

Read the rest at University Bookman

Wright’s Unbearable Rage

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! That is truly one of the great rallying cries of all time.

(Trivia note: as you know, Patrick Henry is the source of that line. But, he probably cribbed it from Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy which has the lines: “It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”)

Richard Wright’s collection of short stories could well have been entitled with Patrick Henry’s immortal line. Instead, he called it Uncle Tom’s Children. Five stories (plus an autobiographical foreword), all of which are tales of a regular person driven to extraordinary acts of endurance in the face of implacable evil.

Wright is an amazing prose stylist, so these are incredibly well written stories. If you want a violent tale of good vs evil, reading any one of these stories would fit the bill. Perfect for a high school class that wants a model of an old fashioned morality tale.

Actually, the closet approximation to Wright’s stories are superhero comic books. That isn’t a joke. The villains in these stories are straight out of comic books—really evil people doing evil things for no reason other than the fact that they are evil people who like doing evil things. These villains are evil all the way down. If you are hoping that maybe the Evil Villain will show a shred of human decency, you are going to be bitterly disappointed.

The problem is recurring. You read the first story and evil triumphs. Evil triumphs again in the second story. And the third. And the fourth. Are you still hoping Good will triumph in the fifth story? Rather foolish of you. Evil always wins.

As odd as it sounds, there is more nuance in a Marvel comic book than there is in any of Wright’s tales. That is, after all, his goal. You can see the anger dripping off of ever page in these stories. There is no room for nuance here. Wright is waging a Race War, and he will not take prisoners.

In Wright’s war, the heroes are black. So are all the good, noble people. So are all the people who struggle to do the right thing. White characters come in only two varieties: extraordinary evil people and dreamy, hapless communists. The latter never actually do any good, but at least they aren’t just totally evil.

If you haven’t read the book, you might think this assessment is rather harsh. But, you don’t have to take my word for it. Richard Wright thought less well of this book than I do.

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom’s Children. When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.

Even bankers’ daughters! He is right. Wright wants to convey his anger and you the Reader are also inevitably angry at the evil people in this book. But Wright didn’t want to focus the anger on the cartoon villains. He wanted those banker’s daughters to feel complicit in the evil, not weep over it and feel good about themselves because they wept. But the stories don’t have enough depth or nuance to ever generate any other reaction than a feeling of moral virtue because you are not that evil.

The most amazing thing about Uncle Tom’s Children is that it was written right before Wright wrote his masterpiece Native Son. Reading these stories, you would never imagine that this author would be capable of turning his magnificent ability to write prose into a vehicle for a book with depth and nuance. Instead of one dimensional evil people, Native Son casts Society itself in the role of the villain. Native Son’s protagonist Bigger is doomed not because of some evil two-bit sheriff, but because the entire society leaves him no place to turn.

What then do we do with Uncle Tom’s Children? Is there anything to learn from a collection of comic book stories written by a master of prose? Yes, but it really isn’t the lesson Wright wants us to learn. In the face of formidable evil, how should we respond? Wright’s anger is one option. In the last story, “Bright and Morning Star,” Wright lays out the other option. At the outset of the story, the protagonist is humming the song from which the story title is taken. Wright rejects the answer of that song. Wright castigates that answer as the voice of the wrong side in the Race War. But, that other answer offers a promise of a reaction to evil that is something other than Wright’s Unbearable Rage.

I’ve found a friend in Jesus, He’s everything to me,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul;
The Lily of the Valley, in Him alone I see
All I need to cleanse and make me fully whole.
In sorrow He’s my comfort, in trouble He’s my stay;
He tells me every care on Him to roll.

Refrain:
He’s the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.

He all my grief has taken, and all my sorrows borne;
In temptation He’s my strong and mighty tow’r;
I’ve all for Him forsaken, and all my idols torn
From my heart and now He keeps me by His pow’r.
Though all the world forsake me, and Satan tempt me sore,
Through Jesus I shall safely reach the goal.

He’ll never, never leave me, nor yet forsake me here,
While I live by faith and do His blessed will;
A wall of fire about me, I’ve nothing now to fear,
From His manna He my hungry soul shall fill.
Then sweeping up to glory to see His blessed face,
Where rivers of delight shall ever roll.

Reading Native Son in the 21st Century

Some books get better with age. Native Son is a book like that.

The story, originally published in 1940: Bigger, a young black delinquent, gets a job as a chauffeur to wealthy white family, murders the daughter on his first night on the job, does a terrible job trying to cover up the crime, is discovered, flees, murders another girl, is caught, and is put on trial.

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.