Native Son

"This is a very important novel when we’re thinking about the history of the United States, because it links the historical and racial perspective. Native Son is informed by the realities of segregation, Jim Crow, the national dialogue around white supremacism, and modes of thinking and seeing race which were really unexamined in the United States at the time. 1940 is very early for such an acute and honest portrayal of race relations in the United States. This really was very new and quite shocking in the way Wright does it, because he doesn’t pull any punches. He shows a fully actualized African American person written from the perspective of himself, an African American person. It’s a controversial novel, because Bigger Thomas, who is the protagonist, is a multiple murderer. He kills two people. You fall into a trap if you strictly read Native Son like a moral parable because there’s nothing moral about Bigger Thomas. The first one, Mary Dalton, the daughter of his boss, he kills by mistake. He’s in her room and if he were found in her room as a black man, in 1940, he would be lynched. So he holds her mouth shut so she doesn’t make any noise and she suffocates. He’s not in that situation of his own choice, so we could say he’s pushed into it by the social world in which he lives. Later on, there’s another character called Bessie Mears. She’s Bigger Thomas’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. At one point he lets slip to her that he’s done this atrocious thing, and that the person the law is hunting is him, and then they sleep together. He realizes that he can’t keep her alive to be a witness, so he kills her. So it’s the killing of Bessie in the novel where you go, ‘Whoa! That went too far. Now you are the antagonist of this novel, rather than the protagonist. You’ve crossed a moral line.’ What Wright is doing is humanizing Bigger Thomas. He’s not trying to lionize him or hold him up as a moral genius. He’s saying that this is what becomes of human beings when they are dehumanized, brutalized and pushed to the very ends of their abilities to cope in any legal or moral way. Wright paints a picture of a full and rounded human, which is very important in the novel, because this hadn’t been done. If you take someone like William Faulkner, when he wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1929 he wrote the character of Dilsey Gibson. She’s an African American woman who works for the Compsons in the novel. She’s a wonderful character but she’s a caricature. Faulkner was unable to show an African American person on the page who was also a fully realized human being. Later on, in 1932, Faulkner writes Light in August about the character Joe Christmas. He’s a lot more well realized, but the thing about Joe Christmas in Light in August is that he is racially ambiguous. In order to humanize Joe Christmas, Faulkner had to lighten his skin. He couldn’t think of any other way around this, whereas what Richard Wright does, only eight years later, is say, ‘I’m going to show you the African American experience, point blank as it is.’ Native Son is based on a real murder case. Richard Wright is not responding to history as a bystander. He reads about the case in the Chicago Tribune and thinks, ‘This is a story that really tells me something about the world I’m living in right now.’ He was coming to terms with these things in much the same way Bigger Thomas is. If we could ever think of a character as an avatar for an author, we can think of Bigger Thomas as an avatar for Richard Wright. Wright was an extremely political writer. He was involved in political agitation. If you read Frantz Fanon, one of the things he tells us is that if there is a prolonged period of injustice, the only response is violence. Richard Wright is for the political solution, up to and including protest, agitation and violence. Bigger is showing that psychological space taken to its absolute and tragic endpoint, in which the subjugated must engage in violence. That was key to Richard Wright’s thinking and he got into lots of debates on this. There were other African American writers at the time, like Zora Neale Hurston, who took a very different route. She took a humanist route: ‘I’m a human being in the world, and I don’t need to get involved in racial politics, merely because I happen to be black.’ To Richard Wright’s mind, that was an abandonment of the political expediency of the time and the things that African American writers should be doing—which is trying to shine a light on the social and political particularities and struggles of African American people. That’s what’s going on and Bigger Thomas is a dramatic representation of that."