SOURCE: Caron, Timothy P. “‘The Reds Are in the Bible Room’: The Bible and Political Activism in Richard Wight's Uncle Tom's Children.” In Struggles over the Word: Race and Religion in O'Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright, pp. 112-40. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000.

When Israel was in Egyptland,
Let my people go,
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
Go down, Moses …
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.

The genius of these preachers lay in their ability to adapt what they had learned to the existing needs and circumstances of their people and to transpose the white man's message of subservient obedience into a confident awareness that things were not as they should be, or as they would be.

—C. Eric Lincoln

Like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright recognized that African-American religiosity provided psychic health for blacks by assuring them that they would not always be oppressed in the “Egyptland” of the Jim Crow South. He also recognized the black church's radical potential and its ability to equip Southern blacks with an indigenous belief system for hastening and contributing to their own liberation.¹ Realizing the degree to which Wright viewed black folk culture, particularly the black church, as a source of cultural strength helps to facilitate the kind of reconciliation between Hurston and Wright advocated by June Jordan. She argues that “the functions of protest and affirmation are not, ultimately, distinct: … affirmation of Black values and lifestyles within the American context is, indeed, an act of protest. Therefore, Hurston's affirmative work is profoundly defiant, just as Wright's protest unmistakably asserts our need for an alternative, benign environment.”² Both artists viewed African-American religiosity as a source of black vitality and as an integral component of their art, Hurston to promote racial solidarity and Wright to help to stir Uncle Tom's Children to action.

Despite Ralph Ellison's proclamation that Wright “found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity,”³ Richard Wright could not help but “discover” the forms of his African-American heritage. Ellison's pronouncement regarding Wright's involvement with American Communism overlooks his own role within the CPUSA and its allied fronts during the 1930s. This comment probably has as much to do with disagreements between the two authors as with the prevalent anti-Communist attitude of the nation during the Cold War, the period during which this essay was first published. Reviewers and critics have been suspicious of Wright's communist affinities throughout his career, however. Upon the publication of Uncle Tom's Children, Zora Neale Hurston wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature that Wright's work presented “the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late. … Mr. Wright's author's solution, is the solution of the PARTY—state responsibility for everything and individual responsibility for nothing.”⁴ As Ellison has also said, quoting Heraclitus, “geography is fate.”⁵ While the first volume of Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, does claim “the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes” and the “cultural barrenness of black life,”⁶ it also catalogues many of the joys and strengths of that same black life: the Thomas Wolfe-like lists of beautiful sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of Southern black rural life; the lyrical catalogues of black folk beliefs that he recognized as vital to African-American survival in the South; the indomitable will that Wright inherited from his mother; and, perhaps most importantly for Wright as an artist, his imaginative quest through language for insight into his own lived experience.⁷ It is important to remember that Wright's “geographic destiny” also included a thorough indoctrination into the black South's religiosity, a fact also documented in Black Boy but often overlooked. His initiation into the symbolism of stories and the power of verbally constructed images as taught to him in the black church formed a vital part of his literary apprenticeship.

If Zora Neale Hurston was born with “God in the house” and quickly “tumbled” right into the Missionary Baptist church, Wright proved not to be such a willing participant in Southern black religion. Some of the earliest and most intense exposure he had with the black church came in his childhood when his mother's poor health (brought on by a stroke) forced him to live with his maternal grandmother, Margaret Wilson. Grandmother Wilson was a staunch Seventh Day Adventist, and as a member of her household, Wright was forced to attend services with his grandmother and perform daily pieties such as reciting Bible verses before every meal, much as William Faulkner was made to do at his grandfather's breakfast table. During his childhood, Wright grumbled about the numerous church services he was forced to attend with his mother and grandmother, resented the required family prayers and Bible readings, and resisted every attempt made to save his soul.

In Black Boy, Wright recalls the sermons he heard in his grandmother's church, a conversion centered gospel

clogged with images of vast lakes of eternal fire, of seas vanishing, of valleys of dry bones, of the sun burning to ashes, of the moon turning to blood, of stars falling to the earth, of a wooden staff being transformed into a serpent, of voices speaking out of clouds, of men walking upon water, of God riding whirlwinds, of water changing into wine, of the dead rising and living, of the blind seeing, of the lame walking; … a cosmic tale that began before time and ended with the clouds of the sky rolling away at the Second Coming of Christ. …⁸

Wright claims in Black Boy to have “remained basically unaffected”⁹ by the emotional appeals to save his soul made during these colorful sermons of his early childhood, perhaps because he did not want to compromise his narrative persona's carefully cultivated sense of uncompromising independence. The Wright of Black Boy is virtually self-created. But, as Michel Fabre notes, Wright was tremendously influenced by these sermons' vivid images and stories,¹⁰ learning early lessons in story-telling and narrative technique and later harkening back to them as he intertextually invokes them in his mature fiction. However, while making this observation, Fabre mentions only “Big Boy Leaves Home” as a noteworthy example of a work from Uncle Tom's Children that draws upon Wright's early biblical and religious training at the hands of his Grandmother Wilson.

Wright most clearly and extensively explains his ideas about the radical nature he perceived within the black church in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” an essay originally published in The New Challenge in 1937. Written while composing Uncle Tom's Children and during the early stages of his relationship with communism, Wright is filled with the ardor of the newly converted in this essay. He shows how his Marxist faith informs his view of the black church's role in the upcoming inevitable revolution. The black communist artist will be in the vanguard of this struggle as if to receive the baton passed on from the black church: “With the gradual decline of the moral authority of the Negro church, and with the increasing irresolution which is paralyzing Negro middle-class leadership, a new role is devolving upon the Negro writer. He is being called upon to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live, and die.”¹¹ Despite his criticism of the black church, Wright does not dismiss it as having no value in the revolutionary struggle for full participation in American democracy. Elsewhere in this essay, Wright asserts that “there is … a culture of the Negro which is his and has been addressed to him; a culture which has … helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action. This culture has stemmed from two sources: 1) the Negro church; 2) and the folklore of the Negro people”¹² (emphasis added).

In Wright's vocabulary, action almost always means collective, political action as in Uncle Tom's Children, particularly, “Fire and Cloud.” The Reverend Dan Taylor struggles over whether or not he should help the local communist organizers stage a demonstration to petition the city's power brokers for help in feeding the town's poor, both black and white. In this gesture of racial unity, Wright's invocation of the South's response to the Bible sets his intertextual practice apart from Faulkner, Hurston, and O'Connor's. There are no examples of biracial congregations in Light in August, Moses, Man of the Mountain, or Wise Blood. In Light in August, the white character Doc Hines enters into black churches, but he goes only to preach sermons of white superiority; in Moses, Moses and the liberated Southern blacks keep to themselves to insure that they will not become victimized again by the Jim Crow South; and in Wise Blood, the novel's single black character, a Pullman porter, delivers the worldly-wise message to Hazel that Jesus is long dead. But, when Taylor is finally galvanized into action, he feels a part of a “many-limbed, many-legged, many-handed” and multi-colored organism as he participates in the march. Taylor has discovered a new and deeper relationship with his community and with God through his commitment to social justice. And Wright advocates much the same in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” Folklore and the church have been the African-American's medium for expressing what Wright labeled African-American “racial wisdom” (although “cultural wisdom” might be a more accurate phrase). In turn, this wisdom has given meaning to American blacks' experiences and suffering. In Wright's opinion, the black church has done much to crystallize and shape the collective “meaning” of the African-American experience because black religiosity has long served as an “antidote for suffering and denial.”¹³ The “meaning [of] their suffering” is crucial for producing activism in African-Americans because “at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.”¹⁴ To continue Wright's metaphor, if the black church had traditionally functioned as an “antidote” for racial oppression, he believed it was time for it to become politically active in the fight against Jim Crow and to act as a “prevention” against further racial injustices.

James H. Cone has described the black church's theology as a type of “liberation theology.”¹⁵ After all, the black church has been about liberation since its earliest beginnings: in its adopting the pregeneric myth of Moses delivering God's children from bondage; in its embracing a biblical hermeneutic grounded in the here and now; in its serving as one of the earliest outlets for black creativity and community advancement, African-American religiosity has served “roles of both protest and relief.”¹⁶ Wright's contribution to the cultural conversation on the Bible in the South is outlined in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and even more forcefully in the stories of Uncle Tom's Children. He insists that the black church must become even more political and must fully actualize its revolutionary potential to evolve into an even greater agent for dramatic action in righting the social wrongs committed against African-Americans.

Crucial to Wright's involvement with the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) was the party's endorsement of full civil and equal rights for African-Americans. Yet, Wright detected a flaw in the party's strategy for winning the support of large numbers of African-Americans. For Wright, the CPUSA's emphasis upon enlisting the masses made them too inflexible in meeting the particular demands of the specific people they sought to help. In American Hunger, he writes, “The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead. In their efforts to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner.” In Wright's opinion, American communism was not responsive enough to black culture, and he saw himself as a mediator between the new dispensation of communism and the vitality and specific needs of African-Americans. Elsewhere in American Hunger, Wright expresses the depth of the communist convictions he held during the writing of Uncle Tom's Children when he says that “with the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist party.”¹⁷ Of his mediating role, Wright goes on to say, “I would make voyages, discoveries, explorations with words and try to put some of that meaning back. I would address my words to two groups: I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them.”¹⁸ Essential to communicating the feelings and hopes of the Southern blacks he knew first-hand and interviewed while writing Uncle Tom's Children was Wright's demonstration of the church's principal role in the community—its Bible, its strong, determined congregations, and its devotion to civil equality.

The CPUSA helped Wright insist upon political activism from the black church. In many ways, communism was Wright's church. While he later withdrew from the party and became increasingly outspoken in his opposition to international communism,¹⁹ Wright was a committed member of the party when he wrote Uncle Tom's Children. What Wright initially found so appealing about communism was the highly spiritual sense of community it inspired in him. “[M]y attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred people into a whole. … Out of the [communist] magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there was none of the lame lisping of the missionary in it.”²⁰ He went so far as to use Protestantism's discourse to underscore his youthful commitment to the CPUSA by describing his joining as a “total commitment of faith.”²¹

As Cornel West reminds us, “the classical Marxist critique of religion is not an a priori philosophical rejection of religion; rather, it is a social analysis of, and historical judgment upon, religious practices.”²² Much the same could be said of Wright's investigation of the black church in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” as he never faults the church as an institution, but exhorts it toward greater political participation. In “On the History of Early Christianity,” Frederick Engels writes: “The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights. … Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery. …”²³ In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Wright credits the black church with being informed by a quest for freedom.²⁴ Wright explored these similarities and possibilities for tactical alliances between Marxism and Christianity in “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star,” the last two stories from Uncle Tom's Children. These alliances were not explicitly explored by black theologians and historians until the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Wright celebrates the real-life Moses figures of African-American history—Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth—by creating the Moses-like freedom fighters of “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star.”

As Abdul JanMohamed has noted, the cohesion of Uncle Tom's Children derives from its incremental repetition of themes,²⁵ with Wright's concerns progressing outward from individual survival toward community solidarity and eventual political activism. Wright even revised the collection for its subsequent 1940 publication by adding an introductory essay, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” and a fifth and concluding story, “Bright and Morning Star,” to make this expansion more explicit. Wright explained his revision in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” the introduction to Native Son. He says, “I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom's Children [in 1938]. When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.”²⁶ Wright wanted to deprive his readers of the consolation of tears and challenge them with an unmistakably political work in the revised book. Whites were stripped of their stereotypical views of blacks as contented workers and were faced with the unsettling specter of increased CPUSA activity in their region. Blacks were faced with a radical challenge that called upon its strongest cultural institution—the church—to increase its political activities. Wright maintained that “Big Boy Leaves Home” and all of the stories of Uncle Tom's Children posed one central question: “What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?”²⁷ By the collection's (revised) conclusion, there is no mistaking Wright's answer to this question—African-Americans must use the legacy of the black church, which has always maintained the worth and dignity of its members, but they must employ that spiritual legacy within the collectivization of Marxist politics to press toward the goal of civil equality.

Wright's 1940 version of Uncle Tom's Children included the autobiographical introduction, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” The essay's focus upon Wright's search for employment in an economic system controlled by whites reinforces the entire collection's demand for a revolutionary opposition to Southern Jim Crowism. As autobiography, the essay establishes the book as a physical object outside of the narrative world and evokes a historical context—Wright's own life as it was lived in the Jim Crow environment of the racist South.²⁸ Wright's documentation of the violence and day-to-day humiliations of living Jim Crow exposes the falsity of popular conceptions of Southern tranquility, the propaganda behind songs like the one which serves as the book's epigraph:

Is it true what they say about Dixie?
Does the sun really shine all the time?
Do sweet magnolias blossom at everybody's door,
Do folks keep eating ’possum, till they can't eat no more?
Do they laugh, do they love, like they say in ev'ry song? …
If it's true that's where I belong.

Wright makes it clear that he never knew this Edenic South, that land flowing with milk and honey so reminiscent of Hurston's Eatonville, Florida. Instead, he was confronted with the same racial violence experienced by his literary characters. Unlike most of the characters from Uncle Tom's Children, however, Wright would never surrender himself to the black church, despite the powerful pull of its symbols and its “dramatic vision of life.”²⁹

In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the collection's first story, biblical intertextuality evokes the hopes and dreams of a life lived free from the horrors of Jim Crow. The Bible was revoiced in the black church's spirituals and social structure, sustained the African-American community, and offered shelter from the white South's racist fury, but its use in this story offers no means of successfully overcoming that racism. For instance, as Big Boy and his friends make their way to the fateful water hole on old man Harvey's property, they sing the spiritual “This Train Bound for Glory” about the “freedom train” that they hope will one day deliver them to the Promised Land. Spirituals have always spoken with a double voice, promising heavenly rewards for faithful service to God and deliverance here in this life. The boys sing of these promises when they hear an actual train heading North toward greater freedom than they know in the Jim Crow South. The dual nature of the spirituals is even clearer when the boys hear another north-bound train whistle after they reach the swimming hole. Their speech reinforces the association of the “freedom train” with spiritual and social liberty outside of the South:

Far away a train whistled.
“There goes number seven!”
“Headin fer up Noth!” …
“Lawd, Ahm goin Noth some day.”
“Me too, man.”
“They say colored folks up Noth is got ekual rights.”(30)

Their song and speech are vaguely prophetic because the social network of the black church engineers Big Boy's escape after he shoots the white soldier in self defense. Everything about this escape evokes the Underground Railroad which delivered escaped slaves to the North: Big Boy hides in a kiln in the side of the hill where the boys used to play as if they were train conductors, and he escapes in the pre-dawn darkness. A church elder's son is a truck-driver who makes regular deliveries to the North, and Big Boy will hide until morning and catch a ride to Chicago.

In later stories, the church becomes an organ of political action that advances against the South's Jim Crow laws, but it is powerless to stop Bobo's lynching in this story and can only provide Big Boy's escape. After the murders of Lester and Buck, Big Boy manages to flee to his house where his parents assemble the church elders to plot his escape; however, this same congregation seems powerless to stop the white mob from burning down Big Boy's parents' house in retribution. Just like when Big Boy squeezes Bobo's neck so that Lester and Buck will abandon their friendly wrestling match, the white South realized that in the absence of a politically unified and active black church “a little heat,”³¹ as in a well-timed cabin burning or lynching, will often dissuade others from opposing Jim Crow.

Biblical intertextuality provides ironic commentary in “Down By the Riverside” by contrasting the church's otherworldly promises with the horrors of political disfranchisement and second class citizenship. As neighbors and fellow church-members gather in his house during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to pray for his wife, who is in the throes of child labor, Mann considers the problem of transporting his wife to the hospital in a stolen rowboat. As he sets off rowing against the current of the flooded river and the tide of Southern white racism, the story accelerates with a nightmarish speed. Mann kills the boat's original owner in self defense and delivers his wife to the Red Cross only to find that she died in childbirth. He then confronts the family of the man he killed when he helps to evacuate stranded families in town, and he finally forces the armed soldiers to shoot him when they discover that he killed a white man. Mann stakes everything on his faith in a supernatural deliverance, yet the soldiers and their guns prove to be powerful reminders of the necessity for political action. The refrain of the spiritual sung at Mann's house, “Ah ain gonna study war no mo,” is the story's strongest ironic indictment of the militarily enforced Jim Crow system that eventually costs Mann his life. What endows him with the superhuman strength he displays is his faith in God. As he says in one of his interior monologues, “Nobody but God could see him through this. … He would have to trust God and keep on and go through with it, that was all.”³² Mann's prayers for deliverance, however, are answered only with his death. As Abdul JanMohamed argues, death becomes Mann's “only viable, but highly paradoxical, route of escape from [the] radical liminality” of a Jim Crow existence because African-American religiosity offers little hope (in this story, at least) of providing a weapon for fighting against the “social death” of Southern racial oppression.³³

“Long Black Song,” the middle story of Uncle Tom's Children, is the fulcrum upon which the collection pivots. Here Wright addresses more explicitly his larger, societal concerns. The New Testament Silas renounces worldly gain to proclaim the early church's gospel with the apostle Paul, but Wright's pursues money and property to the exclusion of everything else. So strong is his commitment to material gain that Silas often neglects Sarah, his wife, and their child. While listening to a spiritual on a gramophone, Sarah succumbs to the advances of the white college-boy salesman who tries to interest her in buying the fancy combination clock and record-player.³⁴ Silas refuses to accept what he sees as a betrayal with the easy tolerance demanded by the Jim Crow South. As John Lowe notes, “Like his biblical counterpart, Silas refuses flight, and elects to stay where he is, letting the enemy come to him.”³⁵ In his violent and inarticulate struggle against white racism, Silas bears a strong resemblance to another of Wright's literary characters, Native Son's Bigger Thomas. Both characters are filled with a similar murderous rage and refuse to abide by the pervasive racist mores of their environments. Both grapple with a language inadequate to express their anger and to achieve their greatest eloquence in their violent refusal to tolerate America's color prejudices.

Wright's commentary upon the forces that could produce a Bigger Thomas ring equally true of Silas: the creation of such an individual is, in Wright's opinion, largely attributable to a person's becoming “estranged from the religion and folk culture of his race.”³⁶ Bigger estranges himself from his culture when his desire to be like the glamorous, flickering shadows of the movie screens and his immersion in petty thievery and anger and indignation of ghetto-life. Silas, on the other hand, estranges himself by pursuing material gain in the same ruthless manner as the white landowners. Silas is isolated even in death, unlike the other characters of Uncle Tom's Children who force confrontations with the Jim Crow society such as Dan Taylor from “Fire and Cloud” and Aunt Sue from “Bright and Morning Star.” While the Jim Crow system deprived him of his wife and child, Silas temporarily masters oppressive whites with their own weapons, the material emblems of the white South's Jim Crow ideology, i.e., a gun and a whip. Unfortunately, his lynching effects no appreciable change in the political realities of the Jim Crow South. Like Joe Christmas' actions before his death in Light in August, the white South has no glimpse into Silas' decision to become a “hard” man and resist the social system that has taken everything for which he has worked so hard. Also like Christmas, his lynching serves as another buttress and sanction for the white South's racist ideology.

Uncle Tom's Children moves through the stages of African-American responses to the oppressive white South. “Fire and Cloud” is the collection's first story to fully marshal the black church's latent political energy within its religious discourse. The collection explores the elements within African-American religiosity that deflect concerns for social justice and emphasize survival by means of escape (“Big Boy Leaves Home”). Then it moves to those components of the black church that stress heavenly rewards for enduring seemingly inescapable racial tribulations here on earth (“Down By the Riverside”). Next it depicts the ineffectual anger of a man cut off from the social network of the black church by the white South's racist economic and social system (“Long Black Song”). But Dan Taylor is the first character in Uncle Tom's Children to reconcile the aims of communism and the black church.

Wright would go on to have his well-documented break with the CPUSA, but his commitment to communism was at its height in the 1930s, the period in which he drafted the stories of Uncle Tom's Children, and it was also a period which held great promise for combining the efforts and energies of the black church with the CPUSA, which reached the zenith of its influence in this era. In 1931, the CPUSA provided legal counsel for the defendants in the Scottsboro case, and their advocacy of these young men proved to be a major factor in gaining a sympathetic audience among Southern blacks. As a result of their efforts, the communists succeeded in making the case an international cause celebre and gained invitations to speak in many black pulpits.³⁷ A year after the Scottsboro case the in-roads of the CPUSA (which were extremely hard won considering the rabid anticommunist sentiment of the white South) were reflected in the opinions expressed by participants in a symposium of leading black newspaper editors printed in The Crisis. While Roscoe Dunjee expressed skepticism toward but a willingness to listen to radical whites with apparent “love in [their] heart[s]” for Southern blacks, Carl Murphy said that “the Communists appear to be the only party going our way. They are as radical as the NAACP were 20 years ago.”³⁸

“Fire and Cloud” opens with Reverend Dan Taylor debating what role he should take in resolving a tense stalemate over food distribution during the Depression. Whereas Hurston's intertextual figuration of Moses relies only upon a distinctive African-American religiosity, Taylor struggles to decide if he will support the Party's agenda. Should he endorse the direct action and public demonstration advocated by local communist organizers, Hadley and Green, or should he instruct his congregation to maintain their faith in God's eventual deliverance and not participate in the planned communist march? On one hand, the direct confrontation advocated by Hadley and Green seems to offer hope through the strength possible in their numbers. He thinks that a large, organized assembly “could do something, awright! Mabbe ef fiv er six thousan of us marched downtown we could scare [the white city administration] inter doin something! Lawd, mabbe them Reds is right!”³⁹

On the other hand, Taylor still maintains a firm faith in God the Deliverer, the God who liberated His People from Egypt and destroyed Pharaoh for daring to contradict His will. He longs for divine retribution, “The good Lawds gonna clean up this ol worl some day! Hes gonna make a new Heaven n a new Earth! N Hes gonna do it in a eye-twinkle change; Hes gotta do it! Things cant go on like this ferever!”⁴⁰ Wright quickly reconciles these two courses of action when he likens Taylor to Moses. Before the Depression's economic hardships and a reduction in land available for black farmers, Taylor had been “like Moses leading his people out of the wilderness into the Promised Land.”⁴¹ Invoking Moses assures a hallowed sanctioning of his eventual alliance with Hadley and Green because, like his biblical predecessor, Taylor is working to liberate God's people. Using the figure of Moses suggests a reconciliation of the story's opening dichotomy: Moses is both man of God and man of action, serving Jehovah by liberating his chosen people.

But Moses is not the only biblical character intertextually evoked in this story; Deacon Smith plays both Judas and Satan to Taylor's Christ because, to fulfill a kind of typology within “Fire and Cloud,” Taylor must be both Moses and Jesus. Like Christ, Taylor is presented with the temptation to abandon his mission—Jesus refuses the worldly temptations of Satan in the Wilderness, and Taylor politely deflects the mayor's bribe to “take care of him” if he “does the right thing.”⁴² Following Taylor's rejection of this offer, the mayor sounds suspiciously like Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair when he tells the reverend that compromise is no longer an option. Mayor Bolton says, “Ive done all I could, Dan. You wouldn't follow my advice, now the rest is up to Mister Lowe and Chief Bruden here.”⁴³ Like Christ who was persecuted and bore his tribulations “without a mumblin' word” but will, according to the spirituals, implement God's plan of divine justice, the reverend is beginning to realize the necessity of undertaking his own liberating mission. These New Testament evocations suggest parallels between Taylor and the Gospel accounts of Jesus. As James Cone reminds us, associating Christ with liberation is a cornerstone of what he calls “black theology” and is an association that can trace its roots back at least as far as Nat Turner who was inspired by Jesus to “the spirit of violent revolution against the strictures of slavery.”⁴⁴ Wright's characterization of Taylor fluctuates between these two affiliations, sometimes invoking Moses and sometimes Jesus, but always evoking their emancipating missions. Drawing upon the liberating legacy of these two biblical figures, Taylor adopts the communist's plan and leads the march, synthesizing black political power and the black church.

Taylor's faith in the righteousness of his mission shines through the prayer he offers to comfort some of his church members. Narrative tension is at its height as the preacher juggles the demands of everyone who has crowded into his house to meet with him. He must calm his flock's fears (stirred up by the “snake in the grass,” Deacon Smith), deliver a decision to the Party organizers, and pacify the white civic leaders who have come to demand that he not lead the march. Despite this chaos, Taylor takes time to edify the assembled believers and assure them that they play a key role in God's intricate plan. Throughout the call and response format of Taylor's prayer, he invokes numerous examples of God's benevolence, outlining the Bible's course of sacred history from Genesis to Revelation, particularly emphasizing the constancy and fidelity God shows toward His Chosen People. Beginning with the Creation, Taylor lists God's intercessions on behalf of His people—the Exodus out of Egypt, the deliverance of the Hebrews from the fiery furnace, the victory of the Israelites over their enemies at Jericho. He concludes the prayer with a specific request, asking for direction in guiding his flock: “Speak t our hearts n let us know what Yo will is! … Try us, Lawd, try us n watch us move t yo will!” Just like previous generations of faithful servants, Taylor and his church will comply with God's will once they discern what He would have them do. In contrast, the avaricious white landowners are depicted as violating God's divine plan. If the black church is seeking to serve God, the dominant white South is guilty of controverting God's wishes: “The white folks say we cant raise nothin on Yo earth! They done put the lans of the worl in their pockets! They done fenced em off n nailed em down! Theys a-tryin t take Yo place, Lord!”⁴⁵ Underscoring the common concerns of the CPUSA and the black church, Taylor's prayer is issued on behalf of the entire African-American community and indicts greedy whites for attempting to disrupt God's sacramental plan. In his prayer, the doctrines of both Christianity and Marxism assure that everyone should have equal rights. Taylor and, by extension, the black church have turned the tables on Southern whites who appeal to the Bible to characterize African-Americans as sub-human; in this cosmogony, these racist interpretive communities have clearly violated God's promises.

To inscribe Marxist doctrine within the black church and activate what he saw as the revolutionary potential within black religiosity, Wright insists upon a new dispensation. Whereas the white Southern church viewed Christ's sacrificial death as superseding the rituals of the Hebrew Law, the South's Jim Crow oppression of Southern blacks demands a new system of promises. In the Gospels, Jesus states that his intention is to realize the writings of the Hebrew Bible, not to destroy them in any way: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”⁴⁶ Jesus proclaims himself the fulfillment of the Law, its ultimate, truest expression. In a similar fashion, Wright's fiction maintains that the truest and most politically committed expression of the black church's love and concern for its members can be voiced with the aid of communist doctrine. Wright symbolizes this inscription of the CPUSA's goals into the black church by placing the communists Hadley and Green within the Bible Room. Their political agenda should suffuse the Scriptures. Even though Taylor initially distances himself from the organizers by referring to them as “them Reds,” which is the same pejorative label affixed by the white civic leaders, Taylor later calls the communist organizers “Brother Hadley” and “Brother Green.” Most notably, Taylor even extends this title of love and respect normally reserved for other Christians to Hadley, a man whose white skin would ordinarily make the reverend view him at least with suspicion, if not outright animosity.

As a result of his refusal to abandon the demonstration, Taylor is kidnapped and tortured by the city council's henchmen, and he undergoes a metaphorical “death and rebirth.”⁴⁷ As he makes his way home, he must cross through a white neighborhood, which, as Wright reminds us in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” was a particularly dangerous situation for a black man in the Jim Crow South.

Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.⁴⁸

Caught in this dangerous situation, Taylor views these white houses as emblems of the unjust system he has struggled against. The pain of his beating has transformed Taylor into a “pillar of fire.” God directed the Hebrews to follow a pillar of fire out of Egyptian bondage, and Taylor likewise longs to lead his people out of the bondage of the white South's racial injustices. Taylor looks at the white homes and thinks, “Some days theys gonna burn! Some days theys gonna burn in Gawd Awmightys fire!”⁴⁹ Filled with a fervent desire to fulfill this prophesy, to render some miraculous service to his people, Taylor pleads, “Gawd, ef yuh gimme the strength Ahll tear this ol buildin down! Tear it down, Lawd! Tear it down like ol Samson tore the temple down!”⁵⁰ Like an Old Testament deliverer, Taylor longs to be an instrument of God's divine will, but he desires to fulfill a New Testament-like apocalyptic vision where a new heaven and earth of economic and political equality replaces the reality of the Jim Crow South.⁵¹

Taylor succeeds in this role of deliverer and leads his people to the Promised Land of political participation. The crowd is conscious of parallels between their struggle for liberation and the struggle of their Old Testament predecessors, singing as they march:

So the sign of the fire by night
N the sign of the cloud by day
A-hoverin oer
Jus befo
As we journey on our way.(52)

Drawing strength from his gathered congregation, Taylor realizes the validity of the communist imperative of collective action. In fact, the reverend achieves his greatest sense of strength while in the midst of the protesters: “Taylor looked ahead and wondered what was about to happen; he wondered without fear; as though whatever would or could happen could not hurt this many-limbed, many-legged, many-handed crowd that was he.”⁵³ Singing God's promise in the spiritual while massed together for collective political action, Taylor senses their unified strength. As the white civic leaders acquiesce and agree to give the demonstrators food, Taylor is filled with a religious ecstasy. “A baptism of clean joy”⁵⁴ sweeps over him and his faith in God the Deliverer is affirmed, for Taylor's God is one who shows His strength in the arms and legs of His active children and who delivers upon His promises of liberation. “Fire and Cloud” ends on this hopeful note of baptizing “clean joy” as all the institutions of Jim Crow oppression seem to topple in Taylor's tear-filled eyes. This new heaven and earth can be accomplished when the black church at large learns the same lesson that Taylor has learned via Lenin, “Freedom [economically, politically, and spiritually] belongs t the strong!”⁵⁵

Uncle Tom's Children originally concluded with this Marxist benediction, but Wright amended the collection to emphasize the black church and the CPUSA's common goals of liberation by concluding with “Bright and Morning Star.” Aunt Sue's heroic sacrifice at the story's conclusion is made possible only by the new dispensation of communism, which converts her Christian endurance into a political commitment to overturning Jim Crow. Aunt Sue grew up in the bosom of the black church, “feeling buoyed with a faith beyond this world,” and she had viewed “the cold white mountain” of Southern racial oppression as “a part of the world God had made in order that she might endure it and come through all the stronger.”⁵⁶ It was in this spirit of perseverance—akin to the stamina O'Connor felt was necessary after a redemptive encounter with Christ to endure the trials and tribulations of this life—that Sue formerly sang the spirituals, particularly “The Lily of the Valley.”

Before her conversion to the CPUSA, Sue often sang in moments of depression or during hard labor.

Hes the Lily of the Valley, the Bright n Mawnin Star
Hes the Fairest of Ten Thousan t ma soul …
He walks wid me, He talks wid me
He tells me Ahm His own …(57)

She was convinced of God's love and her own self-worth. These assurances provided her with the strength to endure the injustices of the Jim Crow South because her tribulations would be forgotten after her heavenly union with Christ. But Aunt Sue's convictions change, and her faith dramatically alters as she accepts her sons' “new and terrible vision,”⁵⁸ which results from their communist commitment. Wright underscores the religious intensity of Sue's new faith by describing it in the Christian rhetoric of the black church.

[D]ay by day her sons had ripped from her startled eyes her old vision, and image by image had given her a new one, different, but great and strong enough to fling her into the light of another grace. The wrongs and sufferings of black men had taken the place of Him nailed to the Cross; the meager beginnings of the party had become another Resurrection; and the hate of those who would destroy her new faith had quickened in her a hunger to feel how deeply her new strength went.⁵⁹

(emphasis added)

In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes is O'Connor's invocation of the New Testament's Saul/Paul who responds to his conversion with a furious introspection, subjecting himself to scourges of the flesh to atone for his spiritual unworthiness. Hazel's faith turns his vision violently inward, and he studies his soul and to make the refinements necessary for salvation. On the contrary, Sue learns, like Dan Taylor, that God can be found in politicized groups of people. Her faith demands that she focus upon her fellow sufferers in an unjust economic/social system and forsake her previous other-worldly musings to devote her full strength to the CPUSA's this-worldly objectives. In Sue's new belief system, Jesus' assurance in Revelation 22:16 that He is “the root and the off-spring of David, and the bright and morning star” is subsumed within her certainty that the CPUSA will instigate a political revolution that will fulfill Revelation's apocalyptic vision.

The courage and conviction inspired in her by this “new and terrible vision” allow Sue to confront white oppression, even in her own kitchen. When the white sheriff and his deputies barge into her house looking for her son, Johnny-boy, they find no obsequious old black nanny but a proud woman willing to make any sacrifice for her new faith. As she tells the sheriff, “White man, don yuh Anty me!”⁶⁰ For her resistance, Sue is beaten unconscious. What sustains Sue during her first confrontation with white vigilantes is the “grace” bestowed upon her by her new “faith.”⁶¹ The depth of her new faith is demonstrated even more fully when she out-races Booker, the white traitor of the communist cause, to the clearing where Johnny-boy is being tortured. She must get there first to ensure that Booker does not reveal the party membership to the sheriff, and once she gets to the clearing, Sue acts with the resolve of a determined martyr.

Sue does not pursue vengeance for her beating or even for her son's life. In her mind, Johnny-boy has already been sacrificed for the greater good of the party; likewise, she will sacrifice herself for a new heaven on earth—the racial and social equality promised by the CPUSA. Sue arrives at her fatal confrontation with a shotgun wrapped in a sheet, telling the white vigilantes it is a shroud for her son.⁶² After she kills Booker and is shot herself, Sue feels her life slowly ebbing away, and Wright again closes with a Marxist benediction. Through her sacrificial death, Sue is “focused and pointed …, buried in the depths of her star, swallowed in its peace and strength.”⁶³ Sue's conversion is complete as the former devout believer and churchgoer, now communist activist, no longer identifies the “Bright and Morning Star” with the Christ of Revelation but with the red star of communism.

While the 1938 version of Uncle Tom's Children garnered Wright a large national audience and a lucrative publishing contract, that incarnation of the collection left him unsatisfied, feeling as if he let his white readers escape through the emotional loophole of pity.⁶⁴ Wright felt that characters such as Big Boy, Mann, and Silas could easily elicit a condescending charity from white readers. Even Reverend Taylor might be misread by a white audience as a heroic example of a Southern black who endured. Instead of functioning as the hallmark of a newly politicized black church's struggles for economic and social equality, Taylor possibly might be made to reinforce stereotypical (and wishful) depictions of extraordinarily patient Southern blacks who wear down kind-hearted but tradition-bound Southern whites. However, there is no mistaking the call to action of “Bright and Morning Star.”

The revised Uncle Tom's Children assured Wright that the white South would have to confront his work without pity. Yet even without the escape of sympathy, few critics have followed his apocalyptic vision of a politically committed black church toward “the place where the different paths of [African-American society's] religious-centered culture … and its need for a working-class political vision can meet.”⁶⁵ While Wright explored the violence resulting from African-American resistance, the white South remained absorbed in its dominant religiosity: either demanding a violent submission to Christ's call to sinners, a submission documented in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, or to propagating its racist gospel, which is critiqued in Light in August.

Notes

1. Several critics have touched upon Wright's relationship with and influence from the black church, most often when discussing Black Boy. Michel Fabre's biography, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, does an outstanding job of detailing Wright's complex relationship with the black church. See also Robert L. Douglas's “Religious Orthodoxy and Skepticism in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son” and Thomas Larson's “A Political Vision of Afro-American Culture: Richard Wright's ‘Bright and Morning Star,’” both included in C. James Trotman's Richard Wright: Myths and Realities, for two insightful discussions of Wright's indebtedness to African-American religiosity in the creation of his early fiction.

2. June Jordan, “Notes Toward a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred,” 87.

3. Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” 120.

4. Zora Neale Hurston, “Stories of Conflict,” 10.

5. Ralph Ellison, “Remembering Richard Wright,” 198.

6. Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, 45.

7. See Robert Stepto's From Behind the Veil on the importance of the pursuit of literacy upon Wright's career as detailed in Black Boy and in African-American literary history in general.

8. Wright, Black Boy, 13.

9. Ibid, 124.

10. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 35.

11. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 398-99.

12. Ibid, 396.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid, 396-97.

15. James H. Cone, “Black Theology as Liberation Theology,” 178. The title of Cone's essay is a clear allusion to the work of Latin American theologians such as Gustavo Guttiérrez and other pioneers in the development of liberation theology.

16. Joseph R. Washington, Jr., “Folk Religion and Negro Congregations: The Fifth Religion,” 52.

17. Richard Wright, American Hunger, 122.

18. Ibid, 65-66.

19. See Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, 165-70, for a discussion of Wright's increasing disillusionment with communism, particularly after leaving the United States. See also Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism and its discussion of Wright's critique of Marxism (416-40), wherein Robinson quotes Wright as saying, “Marxist ideology … is but a transitory makeshift pending a more accurate diagnosis. … Communism may be but a painful compromise containing a definition of man by sheer default” (433).

20. Richard Wright, “I Tried To Be A Communist,” 118.

21. Wright, American Hunger, 133.

22. Cornel West, “Religion and the Left,” 199.

23. Frederick Engels, “On the History of Early Christianity,” 316.

24. Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 397.

25. Abdul JanMohamed, “Rehistoricizing Wright: The Psychopolitical Function of Death in Uncle Tom's Children,” 192.

26. Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (introduction to Native Son) 31.

27. Wright, American Hunger, 88-89.

28. See C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow for an account of how the white South gradually enacted Jim Crow legislation throughout the region.

29. Wright, Black Boy, 123.

30. Uncle Tom's Children, 27.

31. Ibid, 23.

32. Ibid, 71.

33. JanMohamed, “Rehistoricizing Wright,” 192.

34. Some critics maintain that Sarah was raped by the white salesman. See, for example, C. James Trotman's introduction to Richard Wright: Myths and Realities, entitled, “Our Myths and Wright's Realities” (xii). Sarah initially resists the young man's advances, but her longing for her first lover, Tom, and the memory of the spiritual played on the gramophone combine to produce a sexual ecstasy in her that Wright describes in rapturous tones. See Myles Raymond Hurd's “Between Blackness and Bitonality: Wright's ‘Long Black Song’” for a thorough examination of the sexual politics between Sarah and the white salesman. Hurd sees parallels between their encounter at the well and the New Testament story, recounted in John 4:5-19, of Jesus and a Samaritan woman who discuss her infidelity at a well.

35. John Lowe, “Wright Writing Reading: Narrative Strategies in Uncle Tom's Children,” 62.

36. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 15.

37. Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, 335-36.

38. Roscoe Dunjee and Carl Murphy, “Negro Editors on Communism: A Symposium of the American Negro Press,” 154, 147.

39. Uncle Tom's Children, 130.

40. Ibid, 131.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid, 151.

43. Ibid, 152.

44. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 114.

45. Uncle Tom's Children, 138.

46. Matthew 5:17-18.

47. JanMohamed, “Rehistoricizing Wright,” 221.

48. Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” 10.

49. Uncle Tom's Children, 167.

50. Ibid.

51. For a different reading of “Bright and Morning Star,” see JanMohamed's “Rehistoricizing Wright: The Psychopolitical Function of Death in Uncle Tom's Children,” perhaps the most thorough, sophisticated, and engaging treatment of this collection as a whole. In his essay, JanMohamed argues that “religion becomes the potential source of rebellion, but the final transformation of Taylor does not occur until that source of power is ridiculed and seems to have failed.” He goes on to argue that Taylor's prayer during his lynching falls upon deaf ears because of the “void left by God's absence” (222, 223).

52. Uncle Tom's Children, 178.

53. Ibid, 179.

54. Ibid

55. Ibid, 180.

56. Ibid, 184.

57. Ibid, 181-82.

58. Ibid, 184.

59. Ibid, 185.

60. Ibid, 194.

61. Ibid, 206.

62. In Black Boy, Wright recounts a similar story he heard in his childhood “of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob. It was claimed that the woman vowed she would avenge her husband's death and she took a shotgun, wrapped it in a sheet, and went humbly to the whites, pleading that she be allowed to take her husband's body for burial. It seemed that she was granted permission to come to the side of her dead husband while the whites, silent and armed, looked on. The woman … knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the sheet; and, before the white men realized what was happening, she had taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shooting at them from her knees” (83).

63. Uncle Tom's Children, 215.

64. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 31.

65. Thomas Larson, “A Political Vision of Afro-American Culture: Richard Wright's ‘Bright and Morning Star,’” 158.