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By Root 3610 0

in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper.” On the other hand, he was well aware from the start of the fundamental nature of his central character, who epitomized for Wright the most radical effect of racism on the black psyche. He recalled having met at least five specific Biggers in his youth. The first had been an ugly, brutish bully who, impervious to notions of justice or fair play, had intimidated and abused Wright and other black boys. The remaining prototypes of Bigger, however, distinguished themselves by the way in which their antisocial behavior was linked to their hatred of whites. That behavior moved on a spectrum from a devious opposition to white power to an open defiance of even its most intimidating shibboleths. Surviving miraculously in some cases, the most aggressive Biggers could not be cowed by threats of violence or by the law.

Bigger, however, was not an exclusively black phenomenon. Wright himself declared that the turning point for him in his understanding of social reality—“the pivot of my life”—was his discovery of the ubiquitousness of Bigger: “there were literally millions of him everywhere.” White Biggers abounded in response to the same fundamental environment that had helped sponsor, in situations that involved blacks, the secondary conditions that produced black Biggers. These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization—the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor. White Biggers, too, were as cut off from nurturing communal values and as emotionally ravaged by a gnawing sense of alienation as the black Biggers who had impressed themselves on Wright’s imagination. These men (Wright seems never to have conceived of Bigger in female terms) saw in a garish light the failure of their society, its cultural and political ideals and promises, and refused to accept the compromises that most individuals make for simple self-preservation.

The existence of Bigger across racial lines enabled Wright both to come to terms with the limitations of black American culture, of which he would write with almost abusive force in his autobiography Black Boy, and to set the problems facing blacks alongside those facing whites and thus allow a reciprocity of interest and influence that he had never guessed at in his youth. Nevertheless, the task of representing Bigger in fiction remained daunting. Unlike the dogmatic Communist ideology Wright was in the process of repudiating, the social and political criticism implicit in these marginal lives was by definition incoherent. “Their actions had simply made impressions upon my sensibilities as I lived from day to day,” Wright recalled, “impressions which crystallized and coagulated into clusters and configurations of memory, attitudes, moods, ideas. And these subjective states, in turn, were automatically stored away somewhere in me. I was not even aware of the process. But, excited over the book which I had set myself to write, under the stress of emotion, these things came surging up, tangled, fused, knotted, entertaining me by the sheer variety and potency of their meaning and suggestiveness.”

Around the centrality of Bigger, Wright set a cast of characters meant to stand for the principal players on the American stage where race is concerned. One group represented the black world—Bigger and Bigger’s family and friends, but also peripheral figures ready to support or betray him. Capitalism appears, in the person of Mr. Dalton; and capitalism’s fair handmaiden, liberalism, in the persons of the blind Mrs. Dalton and the warm but giddy figure of Mary; communism, cold and analytical but fallible in the person of Max, genial but susceptible in the figure of Jan Erlone, whose naiveté and paternalism help to precipitate the tragedy; religion, in the hapless, incompetent black preacher scorned by Bigger; and overt racism and reaction as represented