Putting the black superman on trial. On Native Son by Richard Wright.
Rarely will a book hit you as hard as Richard Wright’s 1940 classic, Native Son, which caused a massive uproar at the time of publication. Never would you meet another creation as vile, as repulsive and as fascinating as Bigger Thomas. Make no joke, Native Son is a heavy hitter and it will hit you right where it hurts. Books like Native Son is the reason why I read and read voraciously: it makes you question your life, your upbringing and your established truths. It will shake you off your tree and believe me that that is a good thing.
It is also a divisive book, even within the black community. Another one of my favourite writers, James Baldwin titled an entire book of essays (Notes of a Native Son) based on his position on Wright’s work. But I think that requires much, much further reading from my end, and unfortunately at this stage in time, I can only review the book superficially; based on the words on the text itself, and my limited present knowledge and experiences with the otherisation of African Americans. The context will have to come later, because I think it merits its own study.
The adventures of Bigger Thomas comes to its inevitable end
In a claustrophobic apartment shared by a mother, two sons and a daughter, a giant rat wreaked havoc. Bigger, the eldest, managed to kill the rat, pick it up by the tail and wave it around his sister Vera’s face which causes her to pass out. In the background, his mother laments her fate on such a son. Waving a dead rat is the least of his crimes in front of his mother’s eyes. Bigger’s been known to hang around with not so great company. He’s dirtied his hand in crime before and thus he’s not unknown to the law.
But he has an opportunity to dig himself out of the hole, with a request from the white and wealthy Daltons, practically the landlord of his tiny flat, as they were looking for a new chaffeur. The Daltons are all about giving the black underprivileged a chance, raising them and educating them to take them out of poverty. But it’s a shame that the opportunity went to bigger, as he didn’t know he was sitting on a golden egg if he’s ever seen one.
The Daltons has a daughter, Mary, who’s a bit of a rebel and plagued by her own issues. Case in point, she’s a communist and is going out with one. Bigger’s first task was to drop Mary to study at college but she went to the Labour Office instead to pick up her boyfriend, Jan. Both were trying their best to be chummy with Bigger who found this chumminess repulsive. They made him take them to where he usually eats as they wanted to absorb themselves in African American life. An awkward scenario followed where two white people dined in a place frequented only by blacks, where Bigger knew some of the regulars there.
The three resorted to alcohol soon enough, getting absolutely plastered. Mary, in no condition to take herself upstairs, was carried up by Bigger to her bedroom where they got a bit too close. In a drunken moment, Mary attempted a kiss, Bigger got a hand on Mary’s boob and they ended up in bed. But this is where the blind Mrs Dalton came in to check on Mary. Bigger, trying to silent her, smothered her with a pillow and accidentally killed her. When Mrs Dalton leaves, he resolved to destroy Mary’s body in the furnace. Except it wasn’t as easy as it sounded; Bigger had to decapitate Mary’s head with a hatchet to fit her entire body in.
What follows is a series of cat and mouse between Bigger and the Daltons and anyone interested in the case of the missing girl. Bigger, convinced that he can pin the blame on Jan, stuck on, pretended dumbness (which wasn’t difficult to pull off). He had an idea to also extort the Daltons in the mean time, pretending that Mary was kidnapped and forcing his girl Bessy to be involved. But when the reporters come sniffing around, Bigger’s hours were numbered.
Wright’s polarising work still divides the line
In a decade or so, Native Son will be a century old. We’ll be hard pressed to find a book more divisive and more polarising in terms of race relations, especially the greater white population and the minority black population of the United States. This relationship had always been precarious, combative and on one side, oppressive.
In the afterword of the Vintage Classics edition, Gary Younge referred to recent events reflected the state of race relations in America: the white woman walking the dog unleashed in New York when a black man filmed her, when she got inexplicably angry and mustered up every fictional white privilege she could grab her feeble hands on; the other is the death of George Floyd, suffocated by the knee of a white police officer Derek Chauvin in broad daylight. Younge could refer to any incident of police brutality, blatant or passive racism in America and the results crystalises to the same conclusion: nothing much has changed.
In fact, some would argue that things are worse than ever. The racial divide is real, and exacerbated by the increasing police brutality. The move to defund the police resulted in more crime in major cities, only to increase resentment between classes and races, hatcheting the rift even deeper. So we must ask in that case: for what end does this book serve?
I have only finished reading Native Son a couple of days ago and what impact it has on me personally is still hard to say. However, Native Son, as we know is a polarising work, wrenched the friendship of the author and his friend and fellow author, James Baldwin. Wright’s portrayal of the black experience, according to Baldwin, is laden with the stereotypical image of the uneducated black man, that his resort to violence, is only the natural consequence of his nature.
Thus, Bigger Thomas has no agency for his actions as he is a mere result of the social oppression and prejudices innate in the systemic failure which divides the white and the black. There is no room for the character’s complexity, which might (just might) wrench himself out of his wallowing condition.
But this leads us to the central question of the novel, which critics and readers will debate to no end: How much is Bigger Thomas the representation of the black experience in America?
On one side of the argument, we can argue that Bigger Thomas is his own man. Yes, he is the result of the systemic failures setting him up to fail, but he in fact, does have agency. Bigger is more intelligent than most people credit him for, which was why he almost got away with a double murder. He relied on the aloofness of the white society who’d refuse to credit him with intelligence. He was smart enough to extort the Daltons to pay for the life of the daughter that had already died. In this regard, Bigger is unique, standing alone on his own.
At the same time, the book made such a lasting impact in black literature because many black readers identified with Bigger’s seething anger, his lack of satisfaction of his life, the dead ends where all avenues to escape from poverty or class stagnation have long been closed before they were born. Baldwin might not identify with Bigger Thomas, but there is no denying the connection that Bigger had made with black readers, and the influential he has on black authors, past and present. Some would argue that in some ways, Native Son had a lasting impact on James Baldwin’s work as well.
The convenient answer is that Bigger lies in between this representation on one side, and a unique creation that stands on his own on the other. There is no denying the cause and effect that systemic failures played in Bigger’s thoughts and actions, but Bigger is unique to me in the sense that he attempted to create his own reality. In some ways, Bigger was Nietzsche’s black superman.
The reality that doesn’t fit into Bigger’s mould
No book rings closer to Native Son as Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, where man, in defiance of the existing reality must create his own. In creating this new reality, this new superman must reject existing realities which manacles him from this ultimate freedom. Without actively knowing, Bigger had already started the killing of these conventions which did not suit his personal reality, long before he committed his first act of taking human life:
“He had killed within himself the preacher’s haunting picture of life even before he had killed Mary; that had been his first murder. And now the preacher made it walk before his eyes like a ghost in the night, creating within him a sense of exclusion that was as cold as a block of ice. Why should this thing rise now to plague him after he had pressed a pillow of fear and hate over its face to smother it to death? To those who wanted to kill him he was not human, not included in that picture of Creation; and that was why he had killed it. To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die.”
However, I’ve always thought about what really will happen if you try and make this reality irrespective of existing laws and conventions? I think that you’d hit a stumbling block which stops you dead on your track. In some ways, Native Son validates these thoughts. Bigger Thomas was unable to escape from the pressures of the reality. Consequently, Bigger has to die for this defiance that failing to tow in line, he must be smoothed out as he was an inconvenient wrinkle in the system.
But Bigger’s venture in this creation of reality is the ultimate exhilaration which for some moments gave him self-actualisation, that he had in fact, put himself in equal footing to his oppressors:
“The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score.”
For Bigger, this momentary freedom was the happy downhill walk of Sisyphus before he retrieves his insurmountable boulder.
Echoes of Zola’s humanism in Bigger Thomas
Bigger, as a man wronged by the system that had been failing his forefathers before him, carries with him this seed of vitriol. This inherent apprehension is more than just the product of what he had picked up in his life, but something passed on. In this way, Bigger Thomas is similar to Zola’s humanist creations, as he inherited a wrong that had not been resolved for generations, resulting in crime.
In La Bête Humaine, Lantier tried to hide his perversion to mutilate the living female body. This perverted desire can be attributed to a previous caveman ancestor, swarthed by a female companion who perhaps had taken away this rudimentary manhood, thus passing this hatred on to his offsprings until it is resolved in Lantier’s inclination to commit murder.
This argument is unconvincing, not backed by any empirical studies and relying solely on anecdotal theorems. But this is more convincing for Bigger Thomas’s side. This generational trauma is embodied in Bigger Thomas, who has no avenue to channel this inner agitation. He does not follow his mother’s religion, nor does he resort to alcoholism. Without an avenue, he resorts in bit violence:
“These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger — like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a faraway, invisible force. Being this way was a need of his as deep as eating.”
It is difficult to discern which areas of Bigger’s life was inherited and which were learned, it is the traditional chicken and the egg dilemma of nature versus nurture. But the result is still the same: it is a man unhappy in a world that he does not fit.
The greater tragedy of Bigger Thomas
The greater tragedy is that the world did reach out to Bigger, and in a world that failed him and for once wanted to lend a helping hand, that he’d reject it. Kindness is foreign to Bigger, even in the sincerity of the Daltons. We can argue that the Daltons themselves have blood on their hands, as Mr Dalton, being the principal shareholder of the company which houses Bigger’s family, imposes rents higher than areas in similar conditions for white residents.
The Daltons motivations and reaction to the death of Mary is not in the scope of this review but presents another angle of the disconnect between the blacks and whites. We must argue in Bigger’s case that it was only natural for him to react with distrust, as an abused dog finds shelter with new owners who only wanted to treat him kindly. Kindness was not something that Bigger was ever given, and thus it was not something that he is able to reciprocate.
When Jan, after a long introspection was able to forgive Bigger for Mary’s murder, Bigger’s reaction was of a new kind of confusion:
“Jan’s words were strange, he had never heard such talk before. The meaning of what Jan had said was so new that he could not react to it; he simply sat, staring, wondering, afraid even to look at Jan.”
And in effect, we get a glimpse of Bigger’s “humanity” in his newfound remorse:
“For the first time in his life a white man became a human being to him; and the reality of Jan’s humanity came in a stab of remorse: he had killed what this man loved and had hurt him.”
It was the type of kindness which Mary offered in the beginning, but one which failed to land. The friendship that Mary and Jan imposed on Bigger was something borne from stupidity as much as it was from sincerity. Without wanting to understand Bigger’s state of mind, they demanded that Bigger take them to dine someplace that he usually dines. They failed to recognise that their white faces will create a rift between Bigger and his community.
In this way, the kindness of Mary, Jan and the Dalton parents originated from a selfish and foolish source, perhaps as an apologetic retaliation to a crime that they are only too well aware of. But regardless of this, it fails to make the connection and only resulted in a further drifting apart. It is then, a message and forewarning, that in order to connect, we must understand the context and the state of mind of those we want to help, that in order to genuinely help, one needs to step in the other’s shoe.
Why you should read Native Son
Reading Native Son made me feel empty. Wright managed to create a nihilistic world where the systems that failed its victims will continue to fail its victims, and those who might be in the position to put the spanner into the gears of the system will only be plucked like Bigger. But we need to understand that though it was Bigger Thomas that was in the stands to be judged, it is also this systemic failure that the reader must judge.
In both cases, we know that both Bigger Thomas and the system that failed him (and other black Americans) are guilty. Native Son is a reminder for us, as a reader and jury, to examine the context surrounding these failures. Why and how did we get here in the first place? And perhaps, just perhaps, we might be able to tweak it here and there.
Wright wrote the book out of sheer necessity. The effect of the book on the reader is deliberate. He did not want to write another Uncle Tom’s Children which only bear false sympathy though it might make some white readers cry here and there. Native Son is much more brutal, much more grounded, and we can argue that this brutality is necessary. It is works like Native Son that reminds us that we are part of this system, and thus we are our own jury and perhaps executioner.
