Native Son - Richard Wright [3]
By the time Uncle Tom’s Children appeared in 1938, Wright was already questioning the authority of the Communist party where it mattered most to him, that is, where his autonomy as an artist was concerned. Clearly for him the revolutionary confidence of “Bright and Morning Star” and the prize-winning “Fire and Cloud,” which ends with blacks and whites marching together in the South, obscured the truth about the two major races in America. His non-Communist stories, too, with their country Southern settings and their emphasis on youth, womanhood, or a struggle with the elements, later seemed to Wright curiously curtailed expositions, indeed, almost local color. Most disturbing to Wright even as he enjoyed the accolades that came to him as a result of Uncle Tom’s Children was the quality of lyric idealism that suffused the entire collection and allowed the final effect of the book to be mainly, at least as Wright saw it in his uncompromising way, a good cry.
Wright understood that neither his employment of a radical socialist esthetic, which preferred simple stories of revolutionary activity, nor his more subjective attempts to depict and comment on race relations in the South, had succeeded in doing what he had established as the major goal of his writing—the exposure of the starkest realities of American life where race was concerned. Wright knew that much of that life was quite beyond hope, that racism and segregation were not forces to be eradicated easily by programs, much less by slogans, and that even the most graphic evocations of suffering would not be enough to move readers to see racism for what it was. As he himself put it, Wright discovered that in Uncle Tom’s Children he had written “a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and feel good about.” He then swore that the one that followed would be different. He would make sure that “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.”
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 Bigger’s mentality were historically in place in America, stocked by the criminal racial situation that was America. “I had spent years learning about Bigger, what had made him, what he meant; so, when the time came for writing, what had made him and what he meant constituted my plot.” Translating this idea into a narrative also came easily; the plot “fell out, so to speak.” In truth, Wright heavily revised the manuscript as he worked, and the dramatic opening scene, featuring Bigger and his rat, was a late addition; but almost everything else took shape swiftly in response to a mighty effort by Wright to complete his novel.
At the center of Native Son is Bigger’s consciousness. Where had Bigger come from? In his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” also published in 1940, Wright conceded that as with any sincere artist, his work of art had a life of its own: “There are meanings