Whose town did you leave,
O wild and droning spring rain,
And where do you go?
— RICHARD WRIGHT
Brooklyn is proud of Richard Wright, one of the best American writers ever. He lived with friends in this great borough, near Myrtle and Willoughby, in the late 30s. He spent his mornings writing the notes for what became Native Son in Fort Greene Park. Several of his haiku are displayed on the sides of buildings throughout town, and I often find myself walking past the lines above (Haiku 69) printed in silver lettering on a gray tower in Albee Square in downtown Brooklyn.
The greatness of naturalist protest novels
For a while I didn’t believe it was possible to feel ensnared by “plot” again until I read Native Son for the first time. I shredded the first half in one sitting. You dig through Wright’s fiction like you’re working for your daily bread. His prose effortlessly builds up this atmosphere of oppression and psychological pain, right from the opening clauses in the kitchenette, the brutally inadequate family housing for Black people in Chicago in the 30s (also described by Gwendolyn Brooks in her great book Maud Martha). Fear and insecurity punctuate every waking moment in this unrelentingly cruel and racist world. And fear is not a simple human feeling. It’s a force, and it’s out there in the squalid streets of Chicago. The following passage, opening book 2 of the novel, illustrates both the objectivism and the strange objectification of evil (as an imagined reflection of institutional evil) that characterizes the so-called naturalistic protest novel. Bigger Thomas wakes up the morning after a grisly crime, and the stillness of the kitchenette with his sleeping family is also the source of his dread:
It seemed to Bigger that no sooner had he closed his eyes than he was wide awake again, suddenly and violently, as though someone had grabbed his shoulders and had shaken him. He lay on his back, in bed, hearing and seeing nothing. Then, like an electric switch being clicked on, he was aware that the room was filled with pale daylight. Somewhere deep in him a thought formed: It’s morning. Sunday morning. He lifted himself on his elbows and cocked his head in an attitude of listening. He heard his mother and brother and sister breathing softly, in deep sleep. He saw the room and saw snow falling past the window; but his mind formed no image of any of these. They simply existed, unrelated to each other; the snow and the daylight and the soft sound of breathing cast a strange spell upon him, a spell that waited for the wand of fear to touch it and endow it with reality and meaning. He lay in bed, only a few seconds from deep sleep, caught in a deadlock of impulses, unable to rise to the land of the living.
The story of Native Son includes some young white members of the Communist Party USA as well as a Party-appointed lawyer for Bigger Thomas, leading to a riveting inquest scene. His massive speech for the trial in the climax of the book is a full and unapologetic breach of polemic into the content of the fiction, and yes, it is very boring, like John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, only on the side of progress.
Before he wrote his gritty urban masterpiece, Wright was a chronicler of the Jim Crow south. His first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, binds together five stories plus his autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” These pieces weave together an epic narrative made of disparate Black lives in the south, but also a step-by-step development of economic and political struggle. Each story is drenched in terror and the looming threat and final appearance of violence. The opening story includes a sequence in which a lynching is partially seen through the eyes of a Black boy. I read a lot of freaky horror fiction, but this is the only time a literary passage has given me nightmares.
With each story, we progress from brutal oppression to spontaneous resistance and martyrdom, till at last we see Black sharecroppers organizing with white Communists against starvation and racist terror. This especially comes to fruition in “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star.” “Fire and Cloud,” about a reverend whose hesitant but growing acceptance of Marxism creates a dilemma, won the O. Henry prize in 1938; and “Bright and Morning Star,” about a Black mother who has to take a decision after discovering an anti-Communist plot, was published in the May ‘38 issue of New Masses, the cultural organ of the CPUSA, and for whom Wright did editorial work.
The political charge of Uncle Tom’s Children
Wright was a member of the Party from 1934 to 1942, and while these years overlap with some miscalculations, such as the dissolution of independent worker organs for the Popular Front policy, they were also the period of the Party’s rapid growth to its peak of 80,000 members by WWII, as well as the period of militant proletarian struggle at a level this country that has not since witnessed—including a particular influence in the American south, prompted by the Comintern’s recognition of the existence and right to self-determination of the Black nation. So many elements in Uncle Tom’s Children point in the direction of a secure territory in the Black Belt without saying it: the striving of sharecroppers for advancement, fair treatment in natural disasters or famine, freedom from lynch mobs. At the beginning of “Fire and Cloud,” we follow Reverend Taylor walking down the road to his home, bearing bad news for his parishioners regarding the prospect of food aid, looking over the fields:
He lifted his head and saw the wide fields plunging before him, down the hillside. The grass was dark and green. All this! he thought. All this n folks hongry! Good Gawd, whuts wrong! He saw the road running before him, winding, vanishing, the soft yellow dust filled with the ruts of wagon wheels and tiny threads of auto tires.
Wright often rapidly expands the space of the fiction with strong verbs like the “plunging” fields and the “winding, vanishing” dirt road in Taylor’s view. In the first story, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the narrator delays the action in these tranquil, even pastoral moments in a natural setting shared by four Black boys (who initially emerge from the forest, in a portentously symbolic image).
In these phrases, sounds and smells flow from unknown sources, small moments are delicately noticed: “In the distance a train whistled mournfully,” “A Black winged butterfly hovered at the water’s edge. A bee droned. From somewhere came the sweet scent of honeysuckles. Dimly they could hear sparrows twittering in the woods,” “He heard number nine far away and mournful,” “Somewhere, he could not tell exactly where, a cricket took up a fitful song. The air was growing soft and heavy.”
The first critical moment of the book happens when Big Boy refuses to give up the gun he has taken from a white soldier:
“Give me that gun, boy!”
Big Boy leveled the rifle and backed away.
The white man advanced.
“Boy, I say give me that gun!”
In the next story, “Down By the Riverside,” Mann is trying to get his family, including a wife in labor, to safety in a flood, using a boat he knows has been stolen. He has a gun which he hides when the boat is inspected by the authorities. Then, after the soldiers hook up Mann’s boat to tow it to the hospital, Mann chooses to take up the gun again:
His fingers groped nervously in the bottom of the boat for the gun; he found it and slipped it into his pocket.
Mann meets a violent end, but not before he is commanded by multiple whites for various manual labor jobs.
Then in “Long Black Song,” Silas goes down defending his shed and land while taking out as many whites as he can, though we see this from within the long-suffering world of his wife Sarah, now on the run with a baby.
In “Fire and Cloud,” Reverend Taylor, after escaping from a kidnapping and torture in which the whites whip him, making him take the Lord’s name in vain, is almost won over to the Red side, and discourages his son Jimmy from committing an adventurist counter-attack on the whites by himself on that basis:
“Membah whut Ah tol yuh prayer wuz, son?”
There was silence, then Jimmy answered slowly:
“Yuh mean lettin Gawd be so real in yo life tha everything yuh do is cause of Im?”
“Yeah, but its different now, son. Its the people! Theys the ones whut mus be real t us!....”
The southern dialect is like a separate linguistic texture woven through the book, through quoted dialog and indirect speech alike. Another notable element is the liturgy—in particular the lynching song gleefully sung by the white mob as they go after Black children, to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the song that haunted my dreams. The titles for the final two, most politically charged stories, are taken from hymnal lyrics: “So the sign of fire by night / N the sign of fire by day,” “Hes the Lily of the Valley, the Bright n Mawnin Star.” “Fire and Cloud” ends with a lyric that acts as a political slogan: “Freedom belongs t the strong!”
There is no schematic or stereotyped writing on the class struggle here. These narratives explore the overlapping contradictions that will make up any serious attempt to represent social reality. In “Fire and Cloud,” Reverend Taylor carries on a surreptitious debate with Party cadres Hadley and Green, with cops and state agents in the other room. The Reds want Taylor to endorse the demonstration for food they’re organizing, but this is a bridge too far for Taylor when it comes to antagonizing the whites. The distinction between this question and his acts in the past has to do with how his struggle has touched the class question for the first time: “When Ah saved Scott from tha mob, Ah wuz goin ergin some of the white folks. But this thing is going ergin them all! This is too much like war!” To which Hadley replies that they’re going against the whites with money: “Over three thousand of the poor white folks will be with us…” The class line traverses the racial question—which is understood here in the orthodox Marxist sense as a certain reflection of the national question. “Bright and Morning Star” bends in the opposite direction. As a young Party worker, Johnny-Boy refuses to subordinate class to nation, though his mother is suspicious of collaborating with whites in any capacity. “Ma, Ah done tol yuh a hundred times,” Johnny-Boy says to her, “Ah cant see white n Ah cant see black. Ah sees rich men n Ah sees po men.” Except in this scenario, his mother Sue is correct.
Reconsidering this once-Red writer
Wright’s relationship with Communism was effectively over when his literary career had just gotten off the ground. He was disappointed by the Party’s lack of initiative when it came to anti-racist struggle within the armed forces during the war. And like many would-be Marxist intellectuals, he didn’t appreciate the Party’s control over the “sovereignty” of his own creative initiative. He participated in Cold War liberal propaganda projects along with other repentant ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler.
And yet, the FBI began spying on him in the early 1940s, and opened an investigation into whether his literary work left him open to sedition charges. In 1954, the FBI and State Department officials hassled him in Paris when he tried to renew his passport. Every few years he would be forced to disclose his past membership to the Party throughout the Red Scare. He was active in the anti-Communist left while based in France, but other Black expats regarded him as a possible infiltrator. Wright spent his final years in isolation and depression. He died in 1960, at only 52. Authors can have all sorts of political trajectories, crossing the aisle from either direction. Wright broke with Marxism over his refusal to break from cultural freedom as he understood it, but it seems he truly caught the worst of both worlds.
In my graduate studies, it seemed to be standard wisdom that Richard Wright is a “problematic” author. Influential people and writers most attuned to polite society don’t seem to praise him without some rigorous qualifications.
James Baldwin supposedly demolished not only Wright but the entire notion of injecting progressive politics into narrative fiction, in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which was assigned in my grad studies. Baldwin identifies a tradition from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Women to Native Son and the work of James M. Cain. The protest novel is a “mirror of our confusion” (19), serving not to resist oppression but to reinscribe it into the text (that old postmodern saw!) (22). Of course Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “a very bad novel,” with its“self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” and “ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion” (14). Protest novels are infused with wicked things like “Causes,” “truth,” “Science,” and “Responsibility” (15). The zeal of the protest novel is like that of white missionaries bringing Christ and enslavement to black Africans (20).
In the last instance, protest novels are just as complicit in systems of oppression by tying us to the rational “categories” that undergird a social reality. This “reality” is the overarching fiction that keeps us from confronting the actual reality that is…“the void” (20). What is the void? It is there so that society has something from which to protect us. The void is “ourselves.” It’s the source of our fears and our salvations.
Baldwin ignores the immense differences in social and class conditions between Stowe’s novel, when the chattel slavers in the planter class needed to be demolished for free labor to take over the south, when the US revolution needed to finally reach completion; and the novels of the mid-20th century, when the labor movement was fermenting, and there were living examples of modern social revolution. Yes, the romanticist novels of the older period are “sentimental,” same with Chernyshevsky’s contemporaneous novel What Is to Be Done?, animated by the utopian socialism of emancipated peasants—what of it? It may well be true that these texts ended up soothing guilty liberals, but this point of reader reception is only one aspect of the relationship of politics and ideology and art. These different historical moments at hand had different overriding political goals (abolition and democracy in one, socialism in the other), defined by competing class interests whose significance has been buried under hand-wringing over historical forms.
And it may be appropriate for “the void” to feel emptied of real content, but that doesn’t make it less unconvincing!
Richard Wright, on the other hand, thought of the relation between art and politics in a different way, in a passage from his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” that has resonated deeply since I first read it. I don’t exactly agree with his conceptualization of politics either. What stayed with me were his phrases of “filigreed webs of dreams and politics,” and coming ultimately to describe a process of “recasting” his impressions and feelings.
Another thought kept me from writing. What would my own white and black comrades in the Communist party say? This thought was the most bewildering of all. …How could I create such complex and wide schemes of associational thought and feeling, such filigreed webs of dreams and politics, without being mistaken for a “smuggler of reaction,” …Though my heart is with the collectivist and proletarian ideal, I solved this problem by assuring myself that honest politics and honest feeling in imaginative representation ought to be able to meet on common healthy ground without fear, suspicion, and quarreling. …[M]y task, as I felt it, was to free myself of this burden of impressions and feelings, recast them into the image of Bigger and make him true.
The notion of concentrating one’s personal material into a work seems quite right to me.
It is no aesthetic crime to engage with social reality in the way writers like Richard Wright, Claudia Jones, Langston Hughes, and Lloyd L. Brown did in their own ways. Especially if the resulting product includes books like Wright’s. These stories of his are hard-boiled narratives that make no slick effort to exclude the reader. They simply make you look.
Here is the great Paul Robeson singing Wright’s blues song “King Joe” with the Count Basie Orchestra.
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Native Son has been pulled from high school libraries in a school district in Florida, as part of the ongoing censorship drive. This is not the first time Wright’s work has been challenged (Black Boy faced restrictions in the late 90s). Hopefully this removal can be reversed somehow, but it’s another reminder of the increasingly restricted field of our capitalist democracy, as well as its persistent need to sanitize its history to feed the youth something more “patriotic.”
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This letter kicks off a low-key series of “Red writers.” Actually, they don’t have much in common other than being novelists who lived in major capitalist countries and at some point in their lives joined socialist or Communist movements. And that they were crowding my TBR pile.
Next week’s letter will be on a different topic in order to demonstrate the variety promised at Silent Friends (though I may group letters by theme later on).
Also: we intend to increase the output of letters soon!