[In the following essay, Felgar comments on the animal imagery in Richard Wright's Native Son, finding that it symbolizes the white view of blacks in America.]

When Buckley, the State's Attorney in Native Son, sums up the prosecution's case, he says, “‘Man stepped forward from the kingdom of the beast the moment he felt that he could think and feel in security, knowing that sacred law had taken the place of his gun and knife.’”¹ In making the statement, Buckley unknowingly and ironically described from the white point of view the world of Bigger Thomas and of America, because Bigger is a beast among beasts, living in the wild forest. The discursive narrative line in the novel is developed, commented upon, and reinforced by Wright's use of images from man's primitive original state, which, as Wright shows, still obtains in the white man's view of the black man's world.

The pattern of beast imagery informs the violent opening scene in which Bigger and his family awake to the sound of “a light tapping in the thinly plastered walls of the room.” (8) A huge black rat finds itself trapped in the Thomas's one-room apartment: “The rat squeaked and turned and ran in a narrow circle, looking for a place to hide; it leaped again past Bigger. … The rat's belly pulsed with fear. Bigger advanced a step and the rat emitted a long thin song of defiance, it black beady eyes glittering, its tiny forefeet pawing the air restlessly.” (9-10) Bigger throws a skillet at the rat and then smashes its head with a shoe, which not only helps to establish the violent prospect of Native Son but also functions structurally in that the scene forestalls what Bigger will later do to Bessie and what will later happen to Bigger himself: he will be a black rat in the white man's world, running and looking desperately for a hole to crawl into. (233) The rat is also used expressionistically to objectify Bigger's own inner fear and fury at finding himself trapped in a white world with no escape.

As in the oppressor's stereotype, the Thomas family “‘lives like pigs.’” (15) Like a frightened animal, Bigger “lurked behind his curtain of indifference and looked at things, snapping and glaring at whatever had tried to make him come out into the open.” (31) The cinema reflects the same stereotypical image of the black man: Jack and Bigger decide to go to the Regal to see The Gay Woman and Trader Horn; the latter “was shown on the posters in terms of black men and black women dancing against a wild background of barbaric jungle.” (32) To Bigger's remark that he would like to go to the white nightclub in The Gay Woman, Jack replies, “‘Man, if them folks saw you they'd run. … They'd think a gorilla broke loose from the zoo and put on a tuxedo.’” (33) Buckley and the frenzied white mob refer to Bigger repeatedly as a “black ape.” Wright has given his white readers one of their own projections—the black man as a murderous, depraved beast; what most of the white characters in the book fail to realize, of course, is that they are more monstrous than Bigger because they share the ultimate responsibility for his being able to create and possess himself only through animal violence, only through cunning and fierceness.

The fearsome black rat in Bigger's own home finds its imagistic counterpart in the Dalton mansion in Kate, the ubiquitous white cat. When Mrs. Dalton walks down her hall-way after briefly meeting her new chauffeur, “a big white cat, pacing without sound” (49), follows her; it looks at Bigger “with large placid eyes.” (49) It is an intensified, animal image of the hostile white environment Bigger is in. Ironically, it is Mary, the liberal communist sympathizer and daughter to the Daltons, who picks up Kate and carries her out of the room in which Mr. Dalton is questioning Bigger. (54) The feline symbol of white guilt and hostility even watches Bigger while he tries to dispose of Mary's corpse:

A noise made him whirl; two green burning pools—pools of accusation and guilt—stared at him from a white blur that sat perched upon the edge of the trunk. His mouth opened in a silent scream and his body became hotly paralyzed. It was the white cat and its round green eyes gazed past him at the white face hanging limply from the fiery furnace door. God! He closed his mouth and swallowed. Should he catch the cat and kill it and put it in the furnace, too? He made a move. The cat stood up; its white fur bristled; its back arched. He tried to grab it and it bounded past him with a long wail of fear and scampered up the steps and through the door and out of sight. Oh! He had left the kitchen door open. That was it. He closed the door and stood again before the furnace, thinking, cats can't talk. … (90)

Bigger can never escape Kate and all she represents: hostility, exclusion, fear. Bigger is Kate's prey; she will never give up the chase. While the newspaper reporters question Mr. Dalton about his missing daughter, Kate “leaped with one movement upon Bigger's shoulder and sat perched there. … He tried to lift the cat down; but its claws clutched his coat.” (190) The white beast has caught Bigger and will devour him. Later, in Bigger's picture in the newspaper, Kate sits perched on his shoulder. (210)

The contours of the second book, “Flight,” are also largely determined by Wright's use of animal imagery. Widow Thomas remarks to her son, “‘You jumped like something bit you'” (96), when she sees him Sunday morning, after Mary has been smothered, decapitated, and placed in the Dalton's furnace, which is like a fire-breathing dragon whose horrible maw must be satisfied. (174) Vera, Bigger's sister, sobs that her older brother makes her feel like a dog (99), while Buddy is described as being “like a chubby puppy” (103), no match for the monsters of the encircling white world. Bigger characterizes Bessie, his girl, as a rabbit (137), always fearful and timid in face of the possible consequences of fighting back against the white oppressor.

The black ghetto is the kingdom of the beast Its streets are “long paths leading through a dense jungle, lit here and there with torches held high in invisible hands.” (141) Staying in the old abandoned houses while hiding from the beast will be like “‘hiding in a jungle’” (214), Bigger says. The old houses are rat-infested and dangerous. In the chase, Bigger corresponds to the fox or the hare, the members of the white police to hounds; there is never any doubt that, like the rat in the opening scene, the native son will be caught and killed, and Bigger knows it: “this whole vague white world … was more than a match for him … soon it would track him down and have it out with him.” (210) Finally about to be caught, Bigger hides from the beast on top of a water tank, but it uses a powerful jet of water to force him off: “The icy water clutched again at his body like a giant hand; the chill of it squeezed him like the circling coils of a monstrous boa constrictor.” (251) To literalize the metaphor, the prey is being suffocated in the jungle. Later, at the inquest, Bigger wishes he had cheated the beast out of “this hunt, this eager sport” (291) by letting it kill him.

In “Fate,” the third and last book of Native Son, Wright draws continually upon the source of his basic, informing metaphor, the kingdom of the beast. The eponymous hero begins to accept it himself: “Maybe they were right when they said that a black skin was bad, the covering of an apelike animal.” (256) The white newspapers exploit the metaphor relentlessly:

“‘He looks exactly like an ape!’ exclaimed a terrified young white girl. … His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast. … All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization. … He acted like an earlier missing link in the human species. He seemed out of place in a white man's civilization.” (260)

Max, Bigger's communist attorney, points out the metaphor to the jury, but they are blind, like everyone else in the novel: “It [the corpse of black people] has made itself a home in the wild forest of our great cities, amid the rank and choking vegetation of slums! … In order to live it has sharpened its claws! … By night it creeps from its lair and steals toward the settlements of civilization! And at the sight of a kind face it does not lie down upon its back and kick up its heels playfully to be tickled and stroked. No; it leaps to kill!” (362)

Buckley uses the same imagery in his summing up speech, only he does not realize or will not publically admit that men like him have made Bigger into a monster; he warns the court against other “‘half-human black ape[s]’” and refers to Bigger as “‘a bestial monstrosity,’” a “‘black lizard … scuttling on his belly … over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!’” (373) Later he calls him a “‘black mad dog,’” a “‘rapacious beast,’” a “‘black cur,’” a “‘maddened ape,’” an “‘infernal monster,’” a “‘treacherous beast,” a “‘coiled rattler,’” a “‘worthless ape,’” a “‘demented savage.’” (374, 376-78) It is of course the height of irony that Buckley should call Bigger names far more applicable to Buckley himself.

Pervasive throughout Native Son is imagery from the kingdom of the beast. Bigger is a “nigger,” a black ape, a tiger stalking its white prey, as the stereotypical white racist notion has it. But in the wild forest, no other way exists for him to find himself and give himself some status, but violence, the law of the jungle. To survive in such a world, one must be a cunning and fierce animal, for obeying the law will only exact one's humanity as the price for submission. To be free, one must, like a beast in the jungle, kill before one is killed. In the kingdom of the beast the only law is self-preservation. The kingdom of the beast revolves around violence and is Wright's objective correlative for, his objectification of, whites' inner stereotypical vision of the black world. The prospect of Native Son is a wild forest in which beast preys upon beast.

Note

1. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, 1966, rpt. of 1940 ed.), p. 373. Subsequent citations are from this edition and are incorporated into the text.