Native Son - Richard Wright [0]
Richard Wright
With an Introduction by Arnold Rampersad
The Restored Text Established by the Library of America
TO
My Mother
who, when I was a child at her knee, taught me to revere
the fanciful and the imaginative
Even today is my complaint rebellious,
My stroke is heavier than my groaning.
—JOB
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
How “Bigger” Was Born
Note on the Text
About the Author
Other Books by Richard Wright
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The sound of the alarm that opens Native Son was Richard Wright’s urgent call in 1940 to America to awaken from its self-induced slumber about the reality of race relations in the nation. As proud, rich, and powerful as America was, Wright insisted, the nation was facing a grave danger, one that would ultimately destroy the United States if its dimensions and devious complexity were not recognized. Native Son was intended to be America’s guide in confronting this danger.
Wright believed that few Americans, black or white, were prepared to face squarely and honestly the most profound consequences of more than two centuries of the enslavement and segregation of blacks in North America. The dehumanization of African Americans during slavery had been followed in the long aftermath of the Civil War by their often brutal repression in the South and by conditions of life in many respects equally severe in the nominally integrated North. Nevertheless, Wright knew, blacks and whites alike continued to cling to a range of fantasies about the true nature of the relationship between the races even as the nation lurched inexorably toward a possible collapse over the fundamental question of justice for the despised African American minority.
Among blacks, the centuries of abuse and exploitation had created ways of life marked by patterns of duplicity, including self-deception, as well as something far more forbidding and lethal. Slavery and neo-slavery had led not simply to the development of a psychology of timidity, passivity, and even cowardice among the African American masses, Wright suggests in Native Son, but also to an ominous emerging element of which Bigger Thomas, the central character of the novel, is a reliable if particularly forbidding example. Although this new element was itself susceptible to fantasy and self-deception, what set its members apart from other blacks was the depth of their estrangement from both black and white culture, their hatred of both groups, and their sometimes unconscious but powerful identification of violence against other human beings as the most appropriate response to the disastrous conditions of their lives. Within the confines of the black world, this violence was easily directed at fellow blacks; but increasingly, Wright warned his readers, this violence would be aimed at whites.
Wright understood fully that this message was radical to the core, and that his novel Native Son was like no other book in the history of African American literature. In 1937, in his landmark essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” he had characterized African American literature to that time as fundamentally lacking in forthrightness and independence. “Generally speaking,” he had written reprovingly, “Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America…dressed in the knee-pants of servility…. For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks.” To some extent, Wright certainly had overstated the case for the inadequacy of past black writers. At least since the publication of David Walker’s vitriolic Appeal in 1829, some had vigorously protested against racism and warned white Americans about its dire consequences. Indeed, the inevitability of violence as a response to the African American condition had been the subject of literary works not only by blacks but also by whites, such as George Washington