SOURCE: Bryant, Jerry H. “Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas: Grace in Damnation.” In Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel, pp. 197-210. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Bryant discusses violence and racism in Richard Wright's Native Son, noting that the novel's protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is the first Black character in American literature to substitute his own value system for one given him by white society.]

Of all the African American novelists who have explored the issues raised by violence, Richard Wright is the most probing. It is therefore fitting that he comes to us in medias res. In the person of Bigger Thomas, and in the features of his own personality which he puts into Bigger, Wright projects the most fundamental of the ambiguities residing in violence, and in the figures of the victim and the hero, and therefore provides the pivot in the history of the African American novel of violence. The story has become part of American lore. Bigger Thomas, hired as chauffeur by rich Chicagoan Henry Dalton, finds himself cornered in the bedroom of his employer's daughter, Mary. He has assisted the girl to her room after chauffeuring her and her boyfriend around town while they get drunk and try to make friends with him. When Mary's blind mother enters the room, Bigger smothers the girl to keep her from giving him away. Later he kills his black girlfriend Bessie Mears, figuring he cannot take her with him in his planned escape and cannot leave her behind to expose him. He tries to flee, is captured by the police, convicted of murder, and on the last page of the novel sits in his jail cell awaiting his execution. These two murders are the pivotal acts of violence in the African American novel, and Wright's meditation on their effect upon Bigger is the subtlest comment on violence to be made by a black novelist up to 1940.

Before Native Son, the typical pattern of events in African American novels dealing with violence started with whites. A group of southerners would rape a black woman, lynch a black man or woman, or riot against vulnerable black citizens. The novelists would expose the injustice and dastardliness of the violence and then consider whether the victimized blacks were morally justified in using counterviolence in retaliation or self-defense. Usually they decided not. Their characters were too morally upright to descend to such savagery and would opt instead for forgiveness and nonviolent activism to counter white brutality. Wright reworks the pattern profoundly. When Bigger kills he is not reacting to any specific act of white violence. No rapes or southern-style lynchings occur in Native Son. It is Bigger's black violence that we are concerned with, an extreme act of self-defense, embodying the contradictory, even self-canceling, elements of the victim, the hero, and the pariah. Bigger is Wright's statement about the impossible double bind in which the black man finds himself in “the presence of the white man”¹ and the narrow options left him for heroic action and a sense of dignity.²

If we look at the novel as social protest, Bigger's extreme reaction might be mitigated by the truly threatening situation he finds himself in. His sense of personal vulnerability in Mary's room when her blind mother gropes her way in grows out of his conditioning by the racist environment in which he has been raised. The white culture of Chicago may not be as overtly violent as that of the South, but it still makes perfectly clear the danger any black runs when he or she oversteps the racial limits. Thus an argument could have been made by any social liberal at the time that, while Bigger's deed was bad and he should not have done it, it was a racist, class-driven society that made him do it. And indeed Wright does suggest that society bears a portion of the blame. The white racism that closes off to Bigger avenues of achievement and growth that are taken for granted by whites creates an atmosphere in which it will be only a matter of time before a young hothead like him will do just what he did. Even before the murders, he feels “like something awful is going to happen to me.” And after them he says that he had really killed before.³

But Wright introduces into his narrative a number of elements that make it difficult to see the novel simply in terms of social protest. The murder of Bessie, for one thing, shatters any justification for absolving Bigger of guilt because he is a victim of racism. Killing white Mary Dalton, however awful, is understandable. She is a symbol of everything that has kept Bigger back. Killing a black woman and feeling good about it complicate the issue beyond simple protest against white bigotry. Then there is the difficulty with Bigger himself. Although we may mitigate Bigger's actions because he has been shaped by a narrow and stultifying social system, he brings few endearing qualities with him. Not only does he frighten his own family and friends, the murders he commits are impossible to justify by most readers' moral standard. We cannot say that he is defending the lives of his family or his honor as a man, or that he is justly retaliating against a particular white outrage upon a black victim. He is hot-tempered and brutal. He is a petty thief with only enough courage to rob other Negroes. He cruelly teases his sister, bullies his own friends, and resents the helping hand extended by a benevolent, though hypocritical, white man. Even his own mother says he will come to no good. Mary Dalton tries, however clumsily, to befriend him; Bessie Mears trusts him. He murders them both for their trouble. We cannot warm to Bigger and cannot condone his violence, in which there is nothing we could call admirably manly. In this respect, Wright achieved his stated resolve to avoid the pathos of the stories in Uncle Tom's Children (1938, 1940) and write a book that “would be so hard and deep that [the reader] would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (xxvi). By making him murder Bessie as well as Mary, by making the murders the seedbed out of which Bigger's sense of esteem and identity grows, by making Bigger less than attractive, Wright undercuts the view of Native Son as social protest. He obviates much of the sympathy we might have for Bigger as a social victim and thumbs his nose at the traditional black middle-class insistence upon morally unblemished protagonists. He produces instead a totally problematical hero who not only takes full responsibility for the two heinous crimes but experiences total exhilaration for having committed them. Bigger's quiet certainty in the rightness of his violence at the end of the novel strikes horror into the heart of Mr. Max, because Bigger has created for himself a morality in which murder is a good.

It is this moral paradox and Wright's disappointing all expectations of what convention requires in a black character that make Native Son so different from any earlier African American novel. Moral paradox, indeed, characterizes the violence of the novel, both Bigger's murders and his own pending execution. More specifically, it characterizes the two moral systems that seek to control our attitudes toward that violence—Bigger's system and the one represented by the Daltons and State Attorney Buckley. The two systems, in polar opposition, nevertheless mirror one another. Violence is at their center, along with the question of whose violence is the legitimate one, which system controls violence and maintains the power to define it as virtuous or criminal. The tacit assumption here is that violent acts are morally neutral. They take on a moral charge with the attitudes we have toward them. Wright deals with these issues not as a polemicist, moralist, or philosopher, by formulating a discursive argument with a reductive conclusion, but as an artist. Through the design of his action and imagery, he dramatizes the inherent ambiguity of any morality that seeks to legitimize violence. Like any good novel that takes on such a basic, explosive topic, Native Son is made up of a conflict that is inherently inconclusive at the same time that, as a novel, it is morally revealing and aesthetically satisfying.⁴

The conflict originates in Bigger's attitude toward the murders themselves, through which Bigger acquires his unprecedented sense of self. After he kills Mary, he feels reborn; after Bessie, he feels whole and empowered (101, 226). Bigger also comes to believe that through his acts he redeems his family and friends.⁵ Throughout the novel, he sees them as victims, not of any literal physical violence from the white world surrounding the South Side Chicago ghetto where they live but of their own timidity. They have sold out to the racist social and moral system which demands not only that they should be what the system says they are but that they affirm that identity as natural and right. They have accepted the racial limits imposed upon them and agreed to be satisfied with the seedy “corner” of the city to which they have been assigned. They thus pay “mute tribute” to the tremendous and intimidating “force” of the white world (109). As he contemplates his family the morning after he murders Mary, Bigger feels in them “a force, inarticulate and unconscious, making for living without thinking, making for peace and habit, making for a hope that blinded” (102). They acquiesce in the mental and moral darkness in which whites force them to live. The entire black community cowers, muffling its pusillanimity through drink, as Bigger's girlfriend Bessie does, or rationalizing it through religion, as his mother does (226). The black church music he hears when he is a fugitive hiding in the empty tenements of the South Side whispers to him “of another way of life and death, coaxing him to lie down and sleep and let them come and get him, urging him to believe that all life was a sorrow that had to be accepted” (237). This “was his mother's world, humble, contrite, believing,” requiring that he lay “his head upon a pillow of humility and [give] up his hope of living in the world. And he would never do that” (238). The murders he commits turn out to be a way of executing his determination to “never do that,” of finding and then asserting an autonomous consciousness that can work in the favor of other blacks. In the end, as his family, his friends, and a black minister all crowd into his jail cell, feeling sorry for him because he is “guilty,” Bigger suddenly sees that he has saved them from the shame of their victimization:

They ought to be glad! It was a strange but strong feeling, springing from the very depths of his life. Had he not taken fully upon himself the crime of being black? Had he not done the thing which they dreaded above all others? Then they ought not stand here and pity him, cry over him; but look at him and go home contented feeling that their shame was washed away.

(275)

But the moral system reflected in this attitude is no less flawed than the system that Bigger fights. The white racist morality is tyrannical, oppressive, and unfair. Bigger's requires victims, too—Mary and Bessie. Yet Mr. Max can, with accuracy, call Bigger's murders an “act of creation.” The two murders do indeed open Bigger up to consciousness, meaning, knowledge. His fear and shame had heretofore kept him from using processes which these acts of violence now put into motion. As he seeks to hide his crimes, he calls into service senses and intelligence his environment had previously blocked. His feeling of being present in life is heightened to incandescence. He becomes more finely aware of his every move, brings every muscle and nerve into play.⁶ His body trembles with a mix of frenzy and clarity. He is a new man, and the world he returns to is new. After he murders Bessie, he sums up the meaning of his acts: “In all his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind eyes” (391-92, 224). Bigger now has a sense of being that living in the kitchenette with his family or planning robberies with his friends had never given him. And by the end of the novel, as Bigger waits in his cell to go to his death in the electric chair, he interprets his violence by the revolutionary moral system Mr. Max refers to and which Bigger slowly develops in the course of the novel:

“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. I know what I'm saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I'm all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way.”

(392)

When Bigger attacks Gus in the pool hall before they are going to rob Blum's delicatessen, his violence is simply that of a bully brought to the boiling point by frustration and fear. It is not an act that engages the larger world or makes him more than he is. When he murders Mary Dalton, however, Bigger takes on more powerful forces. He approaches the forbidden, at first with dread and then, when the barrier has been scaled, with exaltation. The one absolute good that Bigger senses at the moment he commits the first murder is his own existence. Only later, after reflecting upon his deeds, can he explain what the killing was “all about”: that if his existence is good, what supports it has to be good (392). This does not mean that either we or Wright must endorse Bigger's point of view. In fact, we must not. On the other hand, we must not assume that we have reached the final answer by being brought to see the flaws in the larger white system that made inevitable this “new form of life” (361).

Instead, we must submit to Wright's art, which foregrounds the conflict between the two systems, not the resolution of the conflict; emphasizes the paradox rather than a solution. Wright does not ask us to approve or disapprove of Bigger's violence but to feel the quandary in the situation: two opposing systems each containing goods embedded in bads. Bigger's independence and self-esteem, which we presumably value, grow in a character we do not especially like through acts we cannot condone. The racist white moral system victimizes blacks, it is true, yet it embodies a high good in its theoretical prohibition against murder. Simultaneously, it seems to exploit this high good as a way of curbing Bigger's self-creating revolt. Both systems contradictorily assign both high and low value to human life. They base their assignment of value on an unstated selection criterion that gives some humans higher value than others. This criterion justifies violent acts toward one group, which are considered criminal when committed upon another. Both systems abuse human life to achieve their ends of celebrating and protecting human life. Thus Wright troubles us with a moral dilemma in which tacitly accepted goods (the cultivation of personal identity and the protection of the sanctity of individual life) are entailed in systems containing tacitly accepted bads (the suppression of personal identity and a disregard of human life). Each system claims violence as the means for protecting the higher good as its supporters define it.

The impact of the novel, of course, is not in the abstract explanation but in the concrete drama, and in that drama Bigger has a unique role. At one level he has the effect on us of the outlaw-hero. He breaks laws we know are right, but we are drawn to him for doing it. We agree that he has to be punished but regret it. Houston A. Baker, Jr., puts a slightly different spin on this view. Bigger, he says, is the black culture hero—the courageous slave who revolts against his bondage; Nat Turner, who leads a rebellion; the folk hero Stackolee, ambivalently admired among blacks for his fearless meanness. Baker reads Bigger from a virtually untrammeled racial point of view. Bigger destroys the symbol of white purity and superiority in Mary Dalton, says Baker, and becomes “a strong, Satanic figure determined, at whatever cost, to have his freedom.”⁷ The Satan identification strikes me as exact. It defines in a single image the clash between the two moral systems that I have noted. White authority reserves violence for its own exclusive use and stigmatizes any unapproved use of it. The murders Bigger commits, therefore, are not simply acts that gain him freedom. They are in themselves free acts. They are Bigger's refusal to submit to a system that demonizes the only means it has left him to achieve his definition. That those acts are in themselves morally indefensible makes the paradox all the tighter and the reader's perplexity all the more intense.

The paradox also heightens the drama. Bigger steals the gods' fire, so to speak, and this starts up the implacable mechanism of authority's self-defense and punishment of disobedience. His liberation entails his annihilation, for authority cannot tolerate his autonomy and remain authority. Bigger is a doomed rebel who, even while he revolts, acknowledges the validity of the punishment he must receive for trying to find himself. Wright does not have him insist that the moral system that makes murder for him an “act of creation” should supersede the moral system that says those two murders are crimes. Instead, he speculates about giving it a parallel validity and then bringing it into collision with the majority system. For it all to work, Wright must be able to induce in the reader at least an understanding of the logic of Bigger's moral system, though not acceptance of it. So he confronts the reader with a hero who is willing to take on the white world and undergo destruction to achieve self-discovery.

The genesis of this hero in Wright's mind is indirectly described in his autobiography, Black Boy (1945). Here, Wright explains that violence was ubiquitous in the South of his youth. It was used to thwart his attempts to grow out of the limits set for him by his world. Even though he himself experiences only minor instances of white violence, he sees the evidence of its terror all around him and knows men whom whites kill.⁸ It has a powerful inhibiting effect on him: “My sustained expectation of violence had exhausted me. My preoccupation with curbing my impulses, my speech, my movements, my manner, my expression had increased my anxiety. I became forgetful, concentrating too much upon trivial tasks” (171).⁹ In the concluding pages of Black Boy, he reflects that “as I had lived in the South I had not had the chance to learn who I was. The pressure of southern living kept me from being the kind of person that I might have been” (227). Violence is the pervasive impediment to the achievement of a spontaneous autonomous self-identity.

This impediment was not limited to whites. The pattern of violence in the larger white world is repeated in the black world of his family, his school, and his neighborhood. In his telling, his family, like Bigger's, conforms “to the dictates of the whites above them.” The slappings, the spankings, the beatings his older relatives administer are an extension of white discipline intended to force him to be “what the whites said I must be,” a compliant nullity (227). Wright's description of two famous beatings his mother gives him as a child makes the link explicit. Each causes a fever during which, in his delirium, he sees “monstrous white faces suspended from the ceiling, leering at me,” and, much more symbolically, those often-cited “huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me.”¹⁰ The family violence is mixed in his fevered unconscious with the all-pervasive white danger. The black as well as the white seek to stifle the growth of Wright's youthful personality. He is constantly in conflict with some institutionalized “naked will to power” that seeks to force him into submission (119).

In his neighborhood and at school, though, he meets violence under different conditions. Bullies and gangs try to intimidate him and subject him to their command. They threaten him, steal his money, take his lunch, try to bend him to their will. Whenever he changes schools or moves to a new neighborhood, he has to prove himself by fighting or be forever relegated to anxiety and limited freedom of movement. But this conflict has a much different effect upon Wright than that between himself and his family and white people. These fights become a way of defining himself, of establishing who he is and achieving the admiration of his schoolmates. Once he has proven himself in a fight, the other schoolchildren accord him the kind of individual respect that he needs to be whole. He feels a mild contempt for the “docile” students in the Seventh Day Adventist school he attends who have had all the spunk taken out of them in their submission to the religious strictures of their families and churches. They lacked “that keen sense of rivalry which made the boys and girls who went to public school a crowd in which a boy was tested and weighed, in which he caught a glimpse of what the world was” (90). This is the only violence for which Wright expresses a positive feeling. It is clear why that is so. Both the contestants and their audience understand what is expected of each. The best man wins in this healthy competition. Unlike the other violent structures to which Wright is subjected, that of the neighborhood and schoolyard provides a satisfactory outlet for his sense of his own importance. It embodies a mutual respect and a basis for self-respect that the other structures withhold. Most important, the violence of the neighborhood and schoolyard is not clothed in the hypocritical moralizing of self-serving piety or backed by social or familial institutions. The power struggles are naked and straightforward. There is only one moral system, and its rules are transparent, universally observed, and equally applicable to all.

Not so the moral system of his grandmother's household and the white world it mirrors. There the moral rules are unequally applied. It is God's will that all members of the family have a sacred right to punish the young Richard when he seeks to go his own way, or that whites are morally authorized to kill blacks when blacks seek to claim equal rights. This system does not authorize either young Richard or blacks in general to fight back. When Richard does fight back, he does what Bigger does. He asserts a moral system of his own. Wright fights back against the corporal punishment of his family with the same physical vehemence with which he fights to protect his autonomy in the schoolyard and neighborhood. When he gets old enough and big enough, he returns violence for violence or threatens to defend himself with violence if attacked, sometimes grasping a knife and holding off an aunt or an uncle with grim recklessness. But there is no pleasure in these encounters, or sense of achievement, or even ground for self-esteem. Every fight results in intensified bad feelings, resentment, anger, and increased alienation, rather than a heightened sense of autonomy or regard for a former competitor.

The story Wright tells in Black Boy is essentially one of his struggle against a violent, suppressive environment to become the person he can spontaneously be. The first episode, about four-year-old Richard setting fire to the curtains of the family cabin and the punishment that follows, epitomizes the rest of the narrative, as well as many of Wright's fictional narratives. The passage contains a group of images that cluster around the core of much of Wright's writing: fire; the rebel; the conventional and timid observer of the rules (Wright's little brother says, “Don't do that,” when Richard first sets the broom straw afire [4]); the rebellious crime (setting the curtains afire); the flight of the criminal (Richard hides under the house); the pursuit by authority (his parents go looking for him); punishment; and his reflection upon the “meaning” of the episode.

The act springs out of the conditions that Wright always hated, constraints against his free search for light, knowledge, and experience. He is feeling restless under the orders of his mother to remain quiet and avoid disturbing Granny Wilson, lying ill under a doctor's care in the next room. He looks for something to do. He is resentful of the limits forced upon him, of being expected to suppress his natural animation, of the fear he is made to feel about defying his mother's authority or disturbing the fierce matriarch, his grandmother. Light and fire attract him—knowledge and power. The “glowing coals” in the fireplace fascinate him. He lights a few straws from the broom he finds. But unsatisfied, he moves his eyes to the curtains. They are “long,” “fluffy,” and “white,” a description he mentions twice. They are expressly and specifically “forbidden,” outside the approved set of playthings that his brother dutifully confines himself to, and mark the boundary of his containment. Beyond that fluffy white purity is the street, in which he dreams of “running and playing and shouting.”¹¹ Instead, he is cooped up in a cheerless room. He touches the burning broom straw to the curtains, they flare up, the house catches fire, and Richard tries to escape by hiding under the house. Bedlam breaks out, screams, frantic movement, then fire wagons. He is terrified. His father, finding him curled up next to the chimney, drags him out by the legs, and his mother beats him.

But it was all “an accident,” says Wright. He had only wanted knowledge. “I had just wanted to see how the curtains would look when they burned” (4). That is, in the midst of limiting conditions, Richard was curious about what lay beyond. He looked for “illumination,” needing to find the meaning the curtains conceal. Even threats from authority could not dampen that need. Wright's little brother, out of fear, cooperated with that authority, obediently rejecting whatever knowledge it is that the adults forbid. As for Richard, he seized the only experience authority has left him. From the viewpoint of that authority, he looks like a disobedient brat. For a personality that needs liberty to live, he does what he has to within the conditions imposed upon him. The fire was an “accident” he had not intended. This is the same way that Bigger speaks of his crime. “I really never wanted to hurt nobody,” he tells Mr. Max. “I didn't mean to do what I did. I was trying to do something else” (388). But for better or worse, both Richard and Bigger, all by themselves, transformed the world that had controlled them. Had authority allowed them some other avenue of self-expression and exploration, both Wright in Black Boy and Bigger in Native Son might have taken it without violence. But it is the nature of the kind of authority that Wright sees ruling the world to prohibit self-knowledge as a threat to its power and to punish those who violate the prohibition. The words Wright uses to describe the beating he receives from his mother imply that prohibition. The whipping causes him to lose “consciousness,” he says. “I was beaten out of my senses.” (6) This is not surprising since consciousness and sense—how the curtains would look—were the states of awareness that Richard lit the fire to attain. His mother, in this case Authority Enraged, beats him to put out the light he tries to ignite with the flame. His punishment is the violent obliteration of the consciousness he had sought. I do not mean that Wright the four-year-old consciously and intentionally set out to acquire “knowledge,” only that Wright looking back imbues this episode with a kind of mythic order that is a prototype of many of his other narratives.¹²

Wright comments on the discovery his experience brings to him: “Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings” (7). Richard is driven to seek the coded meanings uttered by the cryptic tongue of the curtains. It is naughty mischief, but Wright is a naughty and mischievous child, who should be punished. At the same time, we admire his exasperating insistence upon his own will. It is the same ambivalence we feel toward Bigger Thomas's punishment.

Not all the knowledge Wright attains in Black Boy is dangerous or calls him to the attention of the “gods.” But when he does encroach upon the gods' ground, when, say, fire itself is an issue, they use no restraint in going after the challenger. This is primordial myth and religion, a stage on which is acted out the ambivalence of the human being toward consciousness, its attractiveness but its dangerousness as a form of revolt. Consciousness, understanding, knowledge, awareness are precisely what the jealous gods of so many myths do not want the upstart humans to acquire. When it comes to fire and consciousness, it is too tempting to resist invoking Prometheus,¹³ whose story suggests many elements in the typical Wright narrative: the argument among the gods (authority) over the amount of knowledge humans (blacks) should be allowed (consider the discussion Mr. and Mrs. Dalton have over Bigger's “education”); Prometheus the rebel bringing humans the fire of technology and understanding; the punishment of both Prometheus and humans by the jealous gods; the simultaneous destructiveness and creativity of fire.¹⁴ When translated into English, the language that Aeschylus puts into the mouth of Prometheus suggests Wright's language, To the Chorus, Prometheus says,

          Before I gave them sense and understanding,
Men were like babies, like figures in a dream;
Eyes they had, but didn't notice things;
          Ears they had, but couldn't distinguish sounds.(15)

The fire that Prometheus steals from the other gods and presents to humans is the light of understanding and knowledge that Bigger seeks through the murder of Mary and Bessie, and that young Richard ignites the curtains to acquire. “I opened [humans'] eyes to the stars,” boasts Prometheus, “And what they signify” (line 462). To steal the gods' fire is to claim a right to awareness, and that is an autonomy the gods cannot tolerate. For such a theft, the Prometheus figure must be punished. He must be taught “not to rebel against Zeus” (line 10). Adam receives punishment for the same offense, acquiring forbidden knowledge. There is a certain rightness in those punishments. As Milton puts it, “Die [man] or Justice must” (Paradise Lost, 3.210). Social harmony still depends in large part upon the observation of “degree, priority, and place” (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.86). At the same time, it is in the nature of the seeking self to see authority as tyrannical, and revolt as the only way available to preserve full existence. And often, even objective onlookers bring only an ambivalent respect for authority and applaud the rebel for doing what they themselves would not.

The Richard Wright who sets the curtains afire to see how they would “look” is a kind of Promethean rebel, an Adamic seeker after knowledge, impatient with his own ignorance. From his viewpoint, the “system” (his mother, acting in behalf of Granny Wilson and the rest of the family) overreacts with punishment out of proportion to the alleged crime. Michel Fabre speculates that much of Wright's adult anger stemmed not from his racial problems but from the beating he received from his mother. It was an “incomprehensible punishment for a transgression he did not accept as such, an experience which long predated his first encounter with racism.”¹⁶ Fabre speculates that this might have been the original betrayal. We have also seen how Wright connected this beating with the kind of violence he faces in the white world. What we might call his self-pity becomes a sense of grievance against an unjust world that Wright carries with him to his grave, aggravated in his last years into a paranoiac conviction that the Central Intelligence Agency was pursuing him and planned his death.¹⁷ All of his main characters are “innocent,” even though they might have performed acts defined as crimes within the values of constraining authority. In his dying words, Cross Damon, after killing no fewer than four men in The Outsider (1953), says that “in my heart … I'm innocent. … That's what made the horror.”¹⁸ We get the same feeling about Bigger Thomas, and it lends legitimacy to the rebel's individual moral system.

For Wright the raison d'être of the narrative is in the drama of the rebel challenging the tremendous power that will inevitably crush him. When he steals the gods' fire, the rebel sets himself ablaze and draws the attention of the universe to himself. He puts himself into the cosmic spotlight. An easy target, now, for the pursuing furies of authority, he becomes an object of awe and terror to the timid who fear to strike the spark. One of the more revealing images in Black Boy embodies the nature of the drama for Wright. It appears in another typical story of revolt, in which Wright recounts how, when he publishes his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre,” in the local newspaper, his family and schoolmates are baffled and uncomfortable. The “dream” that story represents was something “the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle” (148). In Wright's mind, his family, friends, and acquaintances, like Bigger's, collaborated in their own oppression, refusing to contemplate any act or thought outside approved bounds. When they discover that Wright has struck through those bounds to unapproved consciousness, they warn him that he is going past the limits set for him by the racial culture, just as his little brother had warned him about the fire and the curtains. The metaphor contains all the elements of the hero's struggle against darkness and oppression, together with the grandeur of a defeat that is also a victory.

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air. (148)¹⁹

It is this sensational readiness to risk the wrath of the powers that be for higher consciousness that rules Wright's narrative and dramatic interests. His heroes, including himself in Black Boy, stride across a vast stage, the center of attention, the object of all apprehensive eyes. They ride the wild locomotive, hurtling through space on a disastrous but resplendent course. All existence condenses itself in their act. They are Prometheus, Satan, Ahab, the Byronic hero—America's romantic individualist defiantly taking on the forces of oppression and death, striking through the pasteboard masks to forbidden awareness and knowledge, saying “No!” in thunder. Alone, they blast through the night, doomed, but ready for their fate, for in their damnation lies redemption, in failure, glory. Their crime is a thrust for freedom. Wright seeks for them not authority's grace or society's approval but tragedy, heroism, fame; he craves attention and admiration; he wants them to flame out in an unprecedented gesture of defiance that stimulates the world to awe. With their destruction they willingly pay for the priceless prize of illumination, consciousness, and autonomy. Like Hemingway, Wright sees the world rigged against the individual. But unlike Hemingway, he makes no separate peace. Wright's prototypical story—his autobiographical writings and much of his major fiction—is an account of the way he and his protagonists refuse to submit to these forces: “Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong?” he asks in Black Boy. “If the answer was yes, then I knew I would always be wrong, because I could never do it” (144). For him, the fight is everything. It is the vehicle of the consciousness and autonomy he must seek for fulfillment.

Bigger Thomas and Richard Wright revolt as black men against a white world. But they are more than a black folk hero or an instrument of social protest. Neither is a “victim,” surely, like a slave who is whipped, an accused black man who is lynched, or an urban citizen run to ground by a mob. Nor is either a “hero” in the sense that they mobilize a following to try to make a difference in the world they live in. What makes them unique in the history of the African American novel of violence is that they are the first black figures to take on the authentic features of the traditional American romantic individualist.²⁰ At the same time, like the rebel Albert Camus imagines over a decade later, Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas find the meaning of their life in revolt against dehumanizing limits and show how the African American can be seen as a metaphor of modern existential man.²¹ Bigger is the first black character to reject all aspects of the white moral system and to substitute his own. Unlike such notable nineteenth-century rebels as William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Bibb, who carefully stayed within the limits of Victorian sexual morality and attitudes toward thievery and violence, Wright has Bigger insist that his own value justifies actions that whites call crimes. He declares black independence in a way no black protagonist had since Martin Delany's Henry Blake. He sums up half a century of black novel writing about racial violence and lays the foundation for the half century to come.

Notes

1. Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 286.

2. In From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), John W. Roberts uses the “double bind” idea to describe the dilemma of the folk badman-hero, who in seeking to preserve “the harmony and integrity of black communal life” employs methods judged moral by his own “philoi” but immoral by the white society against which he struggles. The folk badman, says Roberts, is “an individual who, in breaking the law, ultimately paid for the heroic moment” (214). Roberts's discussion throws much light on the character of Bigger Thomas, and though my own reading of Bigger somewhat resembles Roberts's reading of the badman-hero, I do not see Bigger as a Stackolee, Dupree, or Billy Martin. Nor do I fully concur with Roberts that these black badmen commit their violence “to protect the values of the black community” (214).

3. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 23, 225. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are indicated in parentheses in the text.

4. Edward Margolies points out that “the full freedom of [Wright's] central characters depends not only on the transgression of society's laws but often on the suppression of other members of society.” About these oppositions, says Margolies, Wright is “ambivalent to the end.” See “Richard Wright's Opposing Freedoms,” Mississippi Quarterly, 42, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 413, 414.

5. In The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 137, Keneth Kinnamon speaks of Bigger as a “suffering Christ” whose sacrifice has “redemptive power.” It seems to me, though, that Bigger is nearer Satan, whose moral system subverts rather than reinforces the tradition that Christian imagery upholds. It is ironic, not holy, that Bigger redeems. See the rest of my discussion and the following note.

6. Compare Christopher Lasch's definition of “the republican tradition” of America as including “the fullest use of one's powers,” in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 155.

7. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Introduction, Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Native Son” (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 11. There is also James Baldwin's reference in his essay “Many Thousands Gone,” which says quite a different thing. Bigger, says Baldwin, scorns all appeals to his humanity in the end of the novel, actually wanting to die “because he glories in his hatred and prefers, like Lucifer, rather to rule in hell than serve in heaven” (in Notes of A Native Son [1955; rpt. Boston: Bantam Books, 1964], pp. 34-35. This seems to me quite wrongheaded, serving Baldwin's total attack on the novel rather than a judicious reading.

8. Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), p. 65. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are indicated in parentheses in the text.

9. I should point out that little seems to have changed since Wright wrote these words in 1945. Gayle Pemberton writes in her 1992 book The Hottest Water in Chicago (Boston: Faber and Faber) that in the United States the “necessity of concentrating on surviving in black skins saps the energies; not only does it keep real political and social power in the hands of whites, but it makes the self no more than a sociological fact, dancing, marionette-style, to a degrading tune.” Quoted by Nancy Mairs in her review of the book, “‘Minority’ Is for Statisticians,’” New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1992, p. 17.

10. Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” in Uncle Tom's Children (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 5; and Black Boy, p. 6.

11. Among many other critics, Russell Carl Brignano cites this same passage and says of it, “This restlessness of youth is emphasized throughout the work. The street operates as a symbolic barrier dividing different worlds. It additionally functions as a symbolic path of flight. … As the youthful Wright continually tries to push aside the alluring white curtains, a lesson is eventually gained: the Southern whites have established severe penalties for a black man's venturing beyond the curtains” (Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Work [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970], p. 8). Brignano makes no allusion to the fact that the oppressor here is the rigidly Seventh Day Adventist black household.

12. See also Albert Stone's interesting discussion of this first episode, in which he concludes that “fire is the comprehensive metaphor of self which unites and explains Wright's identity” (Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982], p. 129).

13. Others have also failed to resist the compulsion. Cf. Katherine Fishburn, Richard Wright's Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977), p. 87: Bigger Thomas, she says, has “a dual heritage, exhibiting traits of both the eternal rebel, Prometheus, and the eternal victim, Sisyphus.” Eugene E. Miller, in Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), pp. 122-23, points out that Wright mentions “the motif of Prometheus” in an unpublished manuscript entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” and “seems to connect [it] with a theme of revolt.” Miller suggests that Fred Daniels in “The Man Who Lived Underground” carries the Promethean fire but fails. Keneth Kinnamon declares that Wright sees Bigger as “a revolutionary potentiality” (Emergence of Richard Wright, pp. 125-26).

14. Among others, Keneth Kinnamon has noted Wright's repeated use of fire as metaphor and image. He cites Henry F. Winslow in his review of The Long Dream, “Nightmare Experiences,” The Crisis, February 1959, as the first critic to observe this pattern. Cf. Kinnamon's Introduction to his New Essays on “Native Son” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 10.

15. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. Michael Townsend (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1966), lines 409-412.

16. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 10.

17. Addison Gayle, Jr., in Richard Wright: The Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980): “The temptations to draw conclusions in line with those who believe that the FBI and the CIA were directly involved in Wright's sudden death are great. To do so, however, based upon the facts of the documents, would be wrong. … What I found was a pattern of harassment by agencies of the United States Government, resembling at times a personal vendetta more so than an intelligence-gathering investigation” (xv).

18. Richard Wright, The Outsider (1953; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 440.

19. If, as Robert Hemenway says, “the train motif is well known” in African American folk and literary tradition, Wright's locomotive image is certainly not that of the spiritual “Get on Board, Little Children” but rather of the “damnation train” that John Pearson, of Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), employs in his last powerful sermon. Hemenway quotes Pearson's “vision” of the train in its entirety and points out that Hurston had copied it verbatim during her trips to the South to collect folklore:

    I heard de whistle of de damnation train
    Dat pulled out from Garden of Eden loaded wid cargo goin' to hell
    Ran at break-neck speed all de way thru de law
    All de way thru de prophetic age
    All de way thru de reign of kings and judges—
    Plowed her way thru de Jurdan
    And on her way to Calvary, when she blew for de switch
    Jesus stood out on her track like a rough-backed mountain
    And she threw her cow-catcher in His side and His blood ditched de train
    He died for our sins.
    Wounded in the house of His friends.

    If Wright knew either the conventional imagery or the Hurston passage in particular—and it is impossible to tell if either is the case—he certainly adapted it to his own use. I have never been convinced Wright felt much folk tradition in his own bones, and though there is an uncanny closeness of meaning between his and the sermon's imagery, his wording comes nearer to modern existential myth (see Friedrich Durrenmatt's short story “The Tunnel,” for example) than to an appropriation of folklore such as Hurston makes in Jonah's Gourd Vine—this in spite of his comment in “Blueprint for Negro Literature” that “Negro folklore remains the Negro writer's most powerful weapon.” Hemenway also says something more interesting regarding black folklore relevant to Richard Wright: “In the notes to Mules and Men,” he writes, “Zora observed that the devil in black folklore is not the terror he is in European folklore. Rather, he is a powerful trickster who often competes successfully with God.” The idea is that blacks tend to side with the enemy of whites and to call into doubt the purported goodness of a white God who endorses oppression and slavery. Sonia Sanchez's We a BaddDDD People demonstrates how they can reverse the moral vocabulary in an act of celebration and defiance. See Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 197, 223-24. I personally see none of the trickster or the ironic signifying that characterizes so much of the folk tradition in Wright's passage. He is grim and self-celebrating here rather than ironic.

20. In his 1849 review, “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves,” Ephraim Peabody links the slave narratives with epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey and the stories of romance popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. See The Slave's Narratives, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 230-31: Andrews claims that references to Frederick Douglass as “devil” in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) make him a kind of Prometheus, a “serpent who tempted [his fellow slaves] to rebel,” who both attracts and repels whites. This, says Andrews, connects him with the English poets of the romantic movement, Shelley and Byron.

21. Albert Camus's The Rebel was published in French in 1951, as L'homme révolté (Librairie Gallimard), the English translation in 1956 (Alfred A. Knopf). See also my article “The Violence of Native Son,” Southern Review, 17, no. 2 (April 1981): 303-20; reprinted in Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arnold Rampersad, New Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1994), pp. 12-25.