SOURCE: "The City and Richard Wright's Quest for Freedom," in The City in African-American Literature, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, pp. 50-63.

[In the following essay, Hakutani explores the urban settings of Richard Wright's fiction.]

One of the central themes in nineteenth-century American fiction was for a white man to leave his community in quest of pastoral peace of mind. Not only was he able to live in harmony with nature, but he would find a bosom friend in the stranger, a dark-skinned man from whom he learned the values of life he had never known. Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking novels makes such friendship with Chingachgook and Hard-Heart, noble savages of the American wilderness. Ishmael in Moby-Dick is ritualistically wedded to Queequeg, a pagan from the South Seas. Huck Finn discovers a father figure in Jim, a runaway slave. In modern African-American fiction, on the contrary, a black man is deeply suspicious of the pastoral scene. He finds the rural South a living hell and dreams of the northern city as deliverance from racial prejudice and exclusion. Richard Wright, while being careful not to romanticize American urban life, shows that a black man who finds the city a better place to live in than the rural community which has defined his past can succeed in creating the self in the city.

Wright's desire to create the self in his own life is well documented in his autobiography Black Boy. His success in fictionalizing such an impulse is also evident in his other work, particularly Native Son and The Outsider. "Reduced to its simplest and most general terms," he asserts in "Blueprint for Negro Writing," "themes for Negro writers will rise from understanding the meaning of their being transplanted from a 'savage' to a 'civilized' culture in all of its social, political, economic, and emotional implications."¹ By what Wright calls the savage culture, he means the origin of black people in Africa as well as the history of slavery in the South. By the civilized culture, he implies the promised land of the American city in the North after the slaves' emancipation.

Although the motive for a white man's quest for the pastoral idylls has little to do with race, his urgent need, nonetheless, is to escape from some sort of social and emotional tension he suffers in living with other individuals. In Moby-Dick Ishmael confesses his motive for becoming a whale hunter: "especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."² The root of Ishmael's anxiety is the crush of individuals that occurs in a crowded community; Ishmael's action betrays the basic elements of national character—individualism and freedom.

If a white man wanted to exercise the rights of liberty and individuality, it would be nothing unusual in modern America that a black man also would desire to acquire such privileges. One of the causes for black men in Wright's work to move from a rural to an urban environment is precisely the absence of individuality and independence within the black community in the South. More than any other book, Black Boy is a criticism of the black community, where people are united by race and religion but they are not encouraged to generate the spirit of individualism. Clearly the young Wright rebelled against such tradition. For those who did not seek independence and freedom, such a community would be a haven. Ralph Ellison has observed:

In some communities every one is "related" regardless of blood-ties. The regard shown by the group for its members, its general communal character and its cohesion are often mentioned. For by comparison with the cold impersonal relationships of the urban industrial community, its relationships are personal and warm.³

To Wright, however, such an environment in the South does not produce meaningful relationships among people and it is even detrimental to the creation of manhood.

The lack of individuality among black people in the South has taken a heavy toll on black character. The oppressive system, Wright observes in 12 Million Black Voices, "created new types of behavior and new patterns of psychological reaction, welding us together into a separate unity with common characteristics of our own."⁴ He provides an illustration of this behavior so familiar to plantation owners:

If a white man stopped a black on a southern road and asked: "Say, there, boy! It's one o'clock, isn't it?" the black man would answer: "Yessuh."

If the white man asked: "Say, it's not one o'clock, is it, boy?" the black man would answer: "Nawsuh."

And if the white man asked: "It's ten miles to Memphis, isn't it, boy?" the black man would answer: "Yessuh."

And if the white man asked: "It isn't ten miles to Memphis, is it, boy?" the black man would answer: "Nawsuh."

Always we said what we thought the whites wanted us to say. (Black Voices 41)

What Wright calls "the steady impact of the plantation system" also was on the education of black children. In many southern states the white authorities edited the textbooks which black children were allowed to use. These textbooks automatically deleted any references to government, constitution, voting, citizenship, and civil rights. The school authorities uniformly stated that such foreign languages as French, Spanish, and Latin were not suitable for black children to learn. This provincial policy is reminiscent of the famous scene in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Jim cannot understand why a Frenchman cannot speak English.⁵ Failing to convince Jim that there are languages other than English and cultures other than English and American, Huck utters in frustration with a sense of irony: "I see it warn't no use wasting words—you can't learn a nigger to argue" (79). In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright reports that white men "become angry when they think that we desire to learn more than they want us to" (64).

To Wright, the effect of white subjugation in the South was most visible in the black communities of the Mississippi delta. By the time he became fourteen he was able to read and write well enough to obtain a job, in which he assisted an illiterate black insurance salesman. On his daily rounds to the shacks and plantations in the area, he was appalled by the pervasiveness of segregated life: "I saw a bare, bleak pool of black life and I hated it; the people were alike, their homes were alike, and their farms were alike."⁶ Such observations later infuriated not only white segregationists, but many black citizens who wrote letters to the FBI and denounced Black Boy. Some letters called him "a black Nazi" and "one of the biggest spreaders of race hatred." Another black protester complained: "I am an American Negro and proud of it because we colored people in America have come a long way in the last seventy years. . . . We colored people don[']t mind the truth but we do hate lies or anything that disturb[s] our peace of mind."⁷

This absence of individuality and self-awareness among black people in the South often leads to the compromise of their character. Individually, Fishbelly and his father in The Long Dream are powerless in asserting themselves. Although they are not forced to cooperate with the white police, greed often sacrifices their moral integrity. They are fully aware that their illicit political connections will make them as wealthy as the whites. What is worse, not only politics but sex is dealt with in its sordid context: the hero's ritual of initiation into manhood is performed in a house of prostitution.⁸

Even though some black men are able to escape the southern environment and move to the industrial city in the North, they find it difficult to rid themselves of the corrupting system they have learned in the South. Jake Jackson of Lawd Today, one of the most despicable black characters Wright ever created, is tempted to do anything if he can make money. Although he is not capable of reasoning or independent observation, he is capable of deceiving others. He approves of graft as a way of life in the city for anyone to get ahead; he admires people who can profit by accepting bribes. He even envies gangsters who can wield their power to intimidate the strong and the weak alike. "I always said," Jake boasts, "that we colored folks ought to stick with the rich white folks."⁹ What unites people like Fishbelly Tucker and Jake Jackson is the fact that though they can escape and, like the protagonist of Black Boy and Big Boy in "Big Boy Leaves Home," can become considerably free from the racial strictures in their lives, they ultimately fail to find themselves. Even though they are physically free of the subjugating system, mentally they have failed to become individuals with autonomy and integrity.

Wright told Irving Howe that "only through struggle could men with black skins, and for that matter, all the oppressed of the world, achieve their humanity."¹⁰ To Wright, freedom for black people can become a reality only when all black people acquire independent visions as outsiders. No matter how courageous Silas, a black farmer in "Long Black Song," may appear, his fight against the oppressors makes little impact on the black liberation as a whole because his rebellion is motivated by a private matter.¹¹ The black emancipation from the rural South, Wright warns, must be accompanied by the vision of the outsider. Ely Houston, New York district attorney, in The Outsider speaks as Wright's mouthpiece:

Negroes, as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders, and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time.¹²

Houston's admonition can be easily heeded by a black intellectual like Cross Damon, but to most of Wright's uneducated black men the fear of persecution is what threatens their freedom and existence. In Black Boy Wright is continually at pains to show that white people had a preconceived notion of a black man's place in the South: the black man serves white people, he is likely to steal, and he cannot read or write. A black man was not likely to be executed for petty theft; there were relatively few restrictions on the subjects he was allowed to discuss with white men. Even sex and religion were the most accepted subjects of conversation, for they were the topics that did not require positive knowledge or selfassertion on the part of the black man. Interracial sex, however, was taboo, and black men risked their lives if they were caught in the act. "So volatile and tense," Wright says in "How 'Bigger' Was Born," "are these relations that if a Negro rebels against rule and taboo, he is lynched and the reason for the lynching is usually called 'rape,' that catchword which has garnered such vile connotations that it can raise a mob anywhere in the South pretty quickly, even today."¹³

This fear of persecution is most poignantly expressed in Lawd Today: a group of southern-born black men gaze lasciviously at the carelessly exposed thighs of a white woman sitting obliquely across the aisle on a train. The taboo of interracial sex is defined in a quatrain improvised alternately by Jake and his three companions:

Finally, Jake rolled his eyes heavenward and sang in an undertone: "Oh, Lawd, can I ever, can I ever? . . ."

Bob screwed up his eyes, shook his head, and answered ruefully: "Naw, nigger, you can never, you can never. . . . "

Slim sat bolt upright, smiled, and countered hopefully: "But wherever there's life there's hope. .. . "

Al dropped his head, frowned, and finished mournfully: "And wherever there's trees there's roper (96-97)

Although this scene is portrayed with humor, it represents the deepest fear any black man can have.¹⁴

It is well documented that the principal motive behind black people's exodus from the rural South to the industrial North is their quest for freedom and equality. Wright himself, a victim of racial prejudice and hatred in the South, fled to Chicago in search of the kind of freedom he had never experienced in the feudal South. "For the first time in our lives," he writes in 12 Million Black Voices, "we feel human bodies, strangers whose lives and thoughts are unknown to us, pressing always close about us" (100). In stark contrast to the situation in the South where black people were not allowed to communicate freely with white citizens, the crowded and noisy apartments in the northern cities have become hubs of interracial mingling and communication, the place where the migrant black people come in close contact with "the brisk, clipped men of the North, the Bosses of Buildings." Unlike the southern landlords, the city businessmen, Wright discovered, are not "at all indifferent. They are deeply concerned about us, but in a new way" (100).

In the industrial city a black man functions as part of a "machine." Unlike his life in the rural South, which depends upon "the soil, the sun, the rain, or the wind," his life is controlled by what Wright calls "the grace of jobs and the brutal logic of jobs" (Black Voices 100). By living and working ever so closely with the white bourgeoisie, the minority workers in the city strive to learn the techniques of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, Wright notes, black workers "display a greater freedom and initiative in pushing their claims upon civilization than even do the petty bourgeoisie" ("Blueprint" 54). The harsh conditions under which black workers must produce and compete with white workers became an incentive to achieve a higher social and economic status. In short, the black man of the industrial North is given a chance to shape his own life. Economically man is a machine and his production is measured not by his race, but by his merit.

Clearly, the businessmen of the city are not concerned about the welfare of the black workers recently fled from the rural South. Like the self-proclaimed philanthropist Dalton in Native Son, they take an interest in the black people because their business would prosper if the black men's economic status improves. Focusing on such economic facts in the city. Wright carefully creates a character like Dalton, a symbol for the ambivalent and contradictory ways of the city. Mr. Dalton thus has given millions for social welfare, especially for the NAACP, and ostensibly donated money to buy ping-pong tables for black children. Bigger Thomas does not know this, nor is he aware that Mr. Dalton's contribution comes from the exorbitant rents charged to the black tenants living in his overcrowded and rat-infested apartments. However ironic this may be, the fact remains that Bigger feels grateful for getting a job and that, for him at least, his employer does not appear a racist. Despite the severe living conditions in which black people are placed, the fierce competitions they face,¹⁵ and the traumas they suffer, the city nevertheless provides them with possibilities of freedom and equality.

What impressed Wright when he arrived in Chicago from the deep South was the relative absence of discrimination. "It was strange," he writes in American Hunger, "to pause before a crowded newsstand and buy a newspaper without having to wait until a white man was served."¹⁶ Although he was allowed to sit beside white men and women on a streetcar as are Jake Jackson and his black companions in Lawd Today, he began to feel "a different sort of tension than I had known before. I knew that this machine-city was governed by strange laws" (2). American Hunger also intimates an episode which suggests that some white citizens were not as much obsessed with the problems of race as southerners, and that a black man is often treated by the white citizens as an equal.¹⁷ One time, Wright obtained employment as a porter in a Jewish delicatessen and felt he had to lie about his absence from that job to take his civil service examination for a better paying job in the post office. But it turned out that his employer would have gladly consented for him to take the examination and that he would not have had to lie about something so important and beneficial to the employee. In The Outsider the realistic details woven in the life of a postal worker, Cross Damon, are those of the problems caused by living in the city. Cross is not in any way handicapped in his life or work because he is a black man. He is physically and mentally a tired man; he is bored with routine work just as are his fellow workers, black or white. Because of an early and unfortunate marriage, he has to support a wife he does not love, and their children; he also has a pregnant mistress who is trying to force him to marry her. To forget his miseries he takes to drinking. But such problems have little to do with Cross's being a black man.

Earning a livelihood in industrialized society as does Cross Damon, however, takes a heavy toll of his life. Like Sartre's Mathieu, Cross finds himself in a state of incomprehensible disorder and meaninglessness. To black men such as Cross Damon and Fred Daniels of "The Man Who Lived Underground," the city takes the appearance of a labyrinthine metropolis, where the pervading mood is aimlessness, loneliness, and lack of communication. If man is treated as a machine, he is not expected to communicate or intermingle with his fellow human beings. The controlling image of Wright's city is that of a crowded place inhabited by the people, black and white, who are alienated by displacement and industrialization.

The dehumanizing influences of urban life upon nonintellectuals like Bigger Thomas make their personality warp and harden. In the heart of Chicago, Wright witnessed numerous examples of the Bigger Thomas type—nervous, fearful, frustrated. "The urban environment of Chicago," Wright recalls, "affording a more stimulating life, made the Negro Bigger Thomases react more violently than even in the South. More than ever I began to see and understand the environmental factors which made for this extreme conduct" ("How 'Bigger' Was Born" xv). These black youths, moreover, are alienated not only from the white civilization, but from their own race. Based on this reality, Bigger is depicted as "resentful toward whites, sullen, angry, ignorant, emotionally unstable, depressed and unaccountably elated at times, and unable even, because of his own lack of inner organization which American oppression has fostered in him, to unite with the members of his own race" ("How 'Bigger' Was Born" xxi).

While Bigger Thomas of Native Son, buttressed by Wright's own experience in Chicago, is depicted as a hero able to transcend these obstacles of city life and gain self-confidence, another black man, Jake Jackson of Lawd Today, is presented as a degenerate character largely unaware that industrialization and capitalism have hopelessly corrupted his soul. Wright makes it clear that while Jake is not legally a criminal as is Bigger, Jake is a latter-day slave. If Jake is a victim of the economic system, he is also a worshiper of the shoddy values of the system that exploits him. Jake and Bigger are both the products of the same civilization, but Jake, unlike Bigger, is incapable of transcending the dreadful effects of the environment.¹⁸

Even though the dominant influences of the urban environment on the black men lead to dehumanization and isolation, the same environment can provide them with avenues for transcendence. In fact, Chicago, New York, and later Paris, unlike the southern cities, offered Wright education, free access to libraries, political affiliation, and introduction to realist writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos, and French existentialist novelists such as Sartre and Camus. It is a well-known fact that Wright learned how to write fiction by associating with the John Reed Club of Chicago, a leftist writers' organization. Not only did he find intellectual stimulation in Communist philosophy, but also, as Blyden Jackson points out, he found among the members of the Communist party the warm and sustained relationships, the lack of which was the cause of his loneliness in the South.¹⁹

On the one hand, Wright's ideological fascination with communism is overtly expressed in such early short stories as "Fire and Cloud" and "Bright and Morning Star," which take place in the southern environment. The chief reason Wright joined the Communist party was not his belief in the economics of communism, nor his attraction to trade unionism, nor his curiosity about its underground politics. His vision was the possibility of uniting the isolated and oppressed people allover the world. His own experience in the cities had convinced him that industrialization and commercialization lead people to isolation and loneliness. On the other hand, his personal attraction to communism is alluded to in The Outsider. After accidentally gaining a new identity, Cross Damon leaves Chicago for New York, a cosmopolitan city, where he befriends a Communist couple, the Blounts, not because of sympathy for their ideology, but simply because he finds in them urbanity, liberalism, and lack of racial bigotry, the qualities he had not earlier found in white people. To a total stranger in a huge metropolis, the sudden appearance of the Blounts, who offer him food, shelter, and companionship, is indeed an oasis.

As an artist, however, Wright in his own life became disillusioned with the Communist party. To his dismay he learned that the Party insisted on discipline over truth, and that factionalism within the Party pre-empted dialogue and criticism. The Party was primarily interested in a fledgling writer as long as his imaginative ability would result in the writing of pamphlets acceptable to the Party principles. "It was inconceivable to me," he wrote, "though bred in the lap of southern hate, that a man could not have his say. I had spent a third of my life travelling from the place of my birth to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear" (American Hunger 92). Not only did he find the Party practice repressive, but he realized that blind adherence to Communist ideology would leave the artist little room for concentration and reflection. "The conditions under which I had to work," Wright felt, "were what baffled them. Writing had to be done in loneliness and Communism had declared war upon human loneliness" (123).

In The Outsider Cross Damon murders not only the Fascist landlord, but also the Communist associate, a symbolic act of terror in asserting himself. If his New York landlord is a painful reminder of the Ku Klux Klansmen of the South, his Communist companion equally stands in the way on the road to his freedom and independence. Now with Eva, the wife of the murdered Communist, in his arms, Cross reflects on this climactic action:

They'll think I did it because of Eva! No; Communists were not unintelligent; they could not seriously think that. There was one thing of which he was certain: they would never credit him with as much freedom to act as they had. A certain psychological blindness seemed to be the hallmark of all men who had to own worlds. .. . All other men were mere material for them; they could admit no rivals, no equals, other men were either above them or below them. (369)

Unlike Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser's An American Tragedy, a victim of the materialistic civilization, Cross Damon has learned through his murders how to exercise his will. And before death he is finally able to declare his independence.

Similarly, the last word in Native Son is not expressed by the white authorities who hold Bigger in jail, nor the white liberals who are sympathetic to black people. The final statement is given not by the Communist lawyer Max, but by Bigger, a black man who has at last achieved his goal in life:

"What I killed for must've been good!" Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. "It must have been good! When a man kills, it's for something. .. . I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em. .. . It's the truth, Mr. Max. I can say it now, 'cause I'm going to die." (392)

Bigger's dismissal of the Reverend Hammond's attempt to console the accused before the trial is also a symbolic act, which suggests the black man's rejection of religion. In the same way, Cross rejects his mother, the product of southern Negro piety.²⁰ Cross, like Bigger, rejects the traditional Christianity in the South, for it taught black children subservient ethics. It is only natural that Cross should rebel against such a mother, who moans, "To think I named you Cross after the Cross of Jesus" (Outsider 23). Both men reject religion because in a complex modern society it functions only as a ritual; it offers only irrational escape, blind flight from reality. Both men, having conquered the forces of the urban environment, have now severed themselves from the last remnants of the religious and political influences upon them as well. They both have become rugged individualists, the willed creators of their past, present, and future in a chaotic and hostile world.²¹

But Cross's search for meaning in his life is a departure from Bigger's achievement of manhood. In Chicago, the problem of race, the avowed conflict between black and white people, becomes the catalyst for Bigger's manhood. In New York, the issue which torments Cross is not the conflict of race; the larger issue he faces is man's existence or annihilation. In creating Cross, Wright departed from the social issues confronting a black man and asked the universal question of what man is. In terms of plot, the accidental killing of a white woman in Native Son whets Bigger's creative impulses. To Cross, on the other hand, Eva, only incidentally a white woman, becomes an essence he tries to find in the meaningless existence. Cross has fallen in love with Eva because they both suffer from the same wound; she was forced to marry a man she did not love just as Cross was once married to a woman he did not love. For Cross the consummation of his love for Eva means the ultimate purpose of his new life. It is understandable that when that goal appears within reach and yet is taken away from him, he finds only "the horror" that he had dreaded all his life (Outsider 440).

Although both men seek freedom and independence in their lives, what they find at the end of their lives, the visions which they gain before death, are poles apart. Bigger's last words, "I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em" (Native Son 392), signal the affirmation of life. Cross, tasting his agonizing defeat and dying, utters:

"I wish I had some way to give the meaning of my life to others. .. . To make a bridge from man to man . . . Starting from scratch every time is .. . is no good. Tell them not to come down this road. . . . Men hate themselves and it makes them hate others. . . . We must find some way of being good to ourselves. . . . Man is all we've got. . . . But certainly different . . . We're strangers to ourselves." (Outsider 439)

Whereas Bigger's vision is full of joy and hope, Cross's is tinged with sadness and estrangement.

In general, critics have regarded Wright's philosophy in The Outsider as existential. Noting Cross's action to kill without passion and his indifference to the emotions of others, they have called the philosophy of this metaphysical rebel most consistently nihilistic.²² To some readers, moreover, Cross represents "the moral and emotional failure of the age."²³ The reason for calling Cross nihilistic lies in his uncharacteristic remark in the novel: "Maybe man is nothing in particular" (Outsider 135). Cross's statement, however, seems to be based upon Wright's world view, the philosophy of the absurd, which was in vogue after World War II. Existentialists, and nihilists in particular, are convinced of the essential absurdity of human existence, but Cross is not. If one judges life as inherently meaningful as Cross does, then it follows that his action to seek love, friendship, and freedom on earth also is meaningful. Cross is passionately in search of order, eternity, and meaning. In the light of his actions in the novel, not in view of Wright's occasional philosophy, Cross ends his life as a failed humanist rather than a nihilist.

As Wright endowed Bigger Thomas with the capacity to assert his freedom and independence, Wright also endowed Cross Damon with the power to create an essence. On the one hand, Bigger, despite his lack of education, has challenged and transcended the unjust forces of the urban environment. On the other, placed under the cosmopolitan climate where he is able to shed the last vestiges of the obsolete Christian ethics as well as the stifling Marxist ideology, Cross stumbles onto the philosophy of existentialism. Rejecting such a philosophy, however, he has instead defined his own way of life. His revolt is not so much against the nothingness and meaninglessness of existence as it is against the inability of man's attempt to make illogical phenomena logical. Despite his own failure, the revelation he gains at the end of his life suggests the possibilities of harmony and love among all men. Bigger and Cross have walked different avenues in the city, but in the end they have both been able to "uphold the concept of what it means to be human" in America.²⁴

¹ Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," New Challenge 2 (Fall 1937): 62-63.

² Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Fiedelson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 23.

³ Ralph Ellison, "Richard Wright's Blues," Antioch Review 5 (June 1945): 208.

⁴ Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Viking, 1941), 41. Subsequent references to this book are given in parentheses.

⁵ In an attempt to teach Jim that English is not the only language spoken on earth, Huck says:

"S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy—what would you think?"

"I wouldn't think nuffin' I'd take en bust him over de head—dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

See Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 79.

⁶ Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 151. Subsequent references to this book are given in parentheses.

⁷ Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980), 173-74. According to Gayle, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi condemned Black Boy on the floor of the U.S. Senate on 7 June 1954: it is "the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing that I have ever seen in print . . . it is so filthy and dirty .. . it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any better from a person of his type" (173).

⁸ "Fire and Cloud," Wright's earlier short story, also deals with the corruption of the black leadership in southern cities.

⁹ Richard Wright, Lawd Today (New York: Walker, 1963), 160. Later references to this novel are given in parentheses.

¹⁰ Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons," A World More Attractive (New York: Horizon, 1963), 109.

¹¹ I agree with Edward Margolies, who says: "Yet Silas's redemption is at best a private affair—and the Negro's plight is no better as a result of his own determination to fight his oppressors with their own weapons. He is hopelessly outnumbered." See Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 67.

¹² Richard Wright, The Outsider (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 129. Subsequent references to this novel are given in parentheses.

¹³ Richard Wright, "How 'Bigger' Was Born," in Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1940), xii.

¹⁴ Horace Cayton, a sociologist and Wright's close friend and associate, observes that for a black man "punishment in the actual environment is ever present; violent, psychological and physical, leaps out at him from every side." See Horace Cayton, "Discrimination—America: Frightened Children of Frightened Parents," Twice-a-Year 12-13 (Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter 1945): 264.

¹⁵ The competition the black man faces in the city creates a tension quite different in nature from the tension in the segregated South. One of Jake's friends in Lawd Today says: "The only difference between the North and the South is, them guys down there'll kill you, and those up here'll let you starve to death" (156).

¹⁶ Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 1-2. Subsequent references to this book are given in parentheses.

¹⁷ Besides liberals such as the Hoffmans, the Jewish delicatessen owner, undergound gangsters also treated black people with equality and compassion, as Wright notes in 12 Million Black Voices: "through the years our loyalty to these gangster-politicians remains staunch because they are almost the only ones who hold out their hand to help us, whatever their motives. . . . The most paradoxical gift ever tendered to us black folk in the city is aid from the underworld, from the gangster, from the political thief (121-22).

¹⁸ Jake Jackson among Wright's characters is often the object of disparaging remarks by critics, but there are some notable exceptions. Granville Hicks affectionately defended Lawd Today, calling it less powerful than Native Son and Black Boy, but uniquely interesting. What interested Hicks is that although Wright was an avowed Communist at the time he wrote the novel, he did not make a Communist out of Jake Jackson, Jake even despised communism, Hicks points out, and refused to become a victim of the capitalist system, either. Jake was delineated as uneducated, frustrated, and "erring but alive" (37-38). Lewis Leary, regarding Jake as a caricature of the white world, calls him "incongruously, enduringly alive." See Lewis Leary, "Lawd Today: Notes on Richard Wright's First/Last Novel," CLA Journal 15 (June 1972): 420.

¹⁹ Blyden Jackson, "Richard Wright: Black Boy from America's Black Belt and Urban Ghettos," CLA Journal 12 (June 1969): 301.

²⁰ While Wright dismisses Christianity as useless for black people's freedom and independence, he values the black church in the city because it enhances their community life. In 72 Million Black Voices, he observes: "Despite our new worldliness, despite our rhythms, our colorful speech, and our songs, we keep our churches alive. . . . Our churches are centers of social and community life, for we have virtually no other mode of communion and we are usually forbidden to worship God in the temples of the Bosses of the Buildings. The church is the door through which we first walked into Western civilization" (130-31).

²¹ Margaret Walker, a fellow black novelist who knew Wright well, writes: "Wright's philosophy was that fundamentally all men are potentially evil.. . . Human nature and human society are determinants and, being what he is, man is merely a pawn caught between the worlds of necessity and freedom. . . . All that he has to use in his defense and direction of his existence are (1) his reason and (2) his will." See Margaret Walker, "Richard Wright," New Letters 38 (Winter 1971): 198-99.

²² Charles I. Glicksberg, in "Existentialism in The Outsider," Four Quarters 7 (January 1958): 17-26, and in "The God of Fiction," Colorado Quarterly 7 (Autumn 1956): 207-20, saw parallels between Wright and Camus in the treatment of their existential heroes. Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer, specifically indicates that Wright's composition of The Outsider "was influenced in subtle ways by his reading of The Stranger in August 1947. He read the book in the American edition at a very slow pace, 'Weighing each sentence,' admiring its damn good narrative prose,' and remarked:

It is a neat job but devoid of passion. He makes his point with dispatch and his prose is solid and good. In America a book like this would not attract much attention for it would be said that he lacks feeling. He does however draw his character very well. What is of course really interesting in this book is the use of fiction to express a philosophical point of view. That he does with ease. I now want to read his other stuff."

See Michel Fabre, "Richard Wright, French Existentialism, and The Outsider," in Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 191.

²³ Edward Margolies in his comparison of Damon and Meursault, the hero of The Stranger, points out the similarities between the two characters. See Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright, 135.

²⁴ Quoted from Wright's unpublished journal, 7 September 1947, in which he wrote: "Sartre is quite of my opinion regarding the possibility of human action today, that it is up to the individual to do what he can to uphold the concept of what it means to be human" (Fabre 186).