Native Son is black American writer Richard Wright’s masterpiece novel, published in 1940. It was a sensation at the time, and remains powerful reading today. I read it last December and I was fascinated by the tale of Bigger Thomas, the frustrated young black ne’er-do-well who becomes a rebel against the white society that holds him down and oppresses him. From the first page, I was captivated by this anti-social misfit and the violent, primitive energy that he unleashes on his fellow blacks – his friends and family- but suppresses when he is face-to-face with his white ‘masters’. That is, until the crux of the plot – his accidental killing of the beautiful white daughter of his white employee, who happens to be a secret Communist with a boyfriend that is also in the party. The rest of the novel is a cliffhanging blockbuster of a story, as Bigger fights against the combined might of white society bearing down on him in an epic manhunt to detain and bring to justice this dangerous black fugitive and rapist.
Reading it, it dawned on me more than once that I was Bigger Thomas. At the very beginning of the novel he is depicted as being at odds with his religious mother, who clings, as most black Americans did then, to Christianity as a salve for the misery of being an oppressed black person in a society controlled by white elites. He is reluctant to get a job and give away his freedom to slave away for the white man, despite his mother’s pleas that he needs to find a way of helping to support the family. He and his friend Gus speak of their unrealisable dreams of becoming pilots and flying in the sky, and Bigger complains of how these ambitions are frustrated by the white man:
“They don’t let us do nothing.” “Who?” “The white folks.”
After falling out with his friendship group of petty urban criminals, Bigger decides, reluctantly, to take a job with a wealthy white family, the Daltons, as their chauffeur. It just so happens that Mr. Dalton, a liberal philanthropist and supporter of the New Deal, is also the Thomas family’s landlord. It just so happens that Bigger’s family live in a rat-infested hellhole whilst the hypocritical Mr. Dalton lives in a grand house with all the luxuries he can afford. He meets their beautiful daughter, Mary, who is a secret Communist and regularly slips out for liaisons with her boyfriend (who recruited her to the party), using the lie that she is on her way to her evening classes at a local university. Bigger is repulsed by Mary’s clumsy attempts to ingratiate herself with him, seeing her, a glamorous, wealthy white lady, as a threat to people like him. After all, all black men are portrayed as would-be rapists and violators of white women, and the last thing Bigger wants is to allow himself to get too close to her and tempt fate. Both Mary and her boyfriend try to persuade Bigger to become Communist, seeing in him, an oppressed black man, just the person the party needs to build its multiracial coalition of anti-communist fighters. Bigger has no interest, and is frightened by their obsessive attempts to co-opt him.
During one fateful evening, bringing Mary back home from a long night of drinking with her boyfriend in the family car, Bigger and Mary end up making out in her bedroom, only for Mary’s blind mother to turn up at the bedroom door to check up on her. In his fear and confusion, Bigger tries to smother Mary to stop her cries, which would give both of them away, and ends up suffocating her. He has just killed a white woman. Even though it was an accident, he knows that he is doomed if he is discovered. What follows is a grisly tale of trying to dispose of the evidence on the form of Mary’s corpse, the discovery of the corpse, his escape from the Daltons’ and his heroic fight to escape justice. Driven by terror, his dark side fully emerges. When he is finally caught and put on trial, his fate is preordained. A Communist lawyer, Max, steps forward to help defend him, and gives a very long speech indicting America for putting in place the social conditions that created someone like Bigger and drove him to murder. (Wright was still a member of the Communist Party at this stage, but there is evidence that he was already on his way out – he would leave in 1942.) Towards the very end, Bigger is assailed in his prison cell by his weeping mother and the family pastor, who try to bring him back to his faith at the last, but they fail. Max’s message of human brotherhood is attractive and Bigger considers it, but ultimately rejects Communism too, preferring to retain what Dostoevsky describes in The Brothers Karamazov as his ‘unavenged suffering’. Reading it, I was full of admiration for Bigger for having the strength to repudiate both Christianity and the alternative religion of Communist universalism. The novel ends with Max sadly walking away, his mission having failed.
The tragedy of Bigger Thomas appears to be that of a man so poisoned by racial hatred in a society that has taught him nothing but hatred that he cannot bring himself to acknowledge white people, even those that try to help him, as fully human. It is a deeply pessimistic novel, not the kind of message that Wright’s Communist handlers were happy with, and one that shocked people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. But that’s not all. At the very end of the novel, Wright has Bigger reveal to Max his reasons for the murder, which can be read as a criticism of Communist ideology from a writer who now doubted his Communist convictions. It suggests that Bigger’s crime cannot, in fact, be reduced to social conditions:
“I didn’t want to kill! . . . But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder. . . .”
Max lifted his hand to touch Bigger, but did not.
“No; no; no. . . . Bigger, not that. . . .” Max pleaded despairingly.
“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. . . .”
Max’s eyes were full of terror. Several times his body moved nervously, as though he were about to go to Bigger; but he stood still.
“I’m all right, Mr. Max. Just go and tell Ma I was all right and not to worry none, see? Tell her I was all right and wasn’t crying none. . . .”
Max’s eyes were wet. Slowly, he extended his hand. Bigger shook it.
“Good-bye, Bigger,” he said quietly.
“Good-bye, Mr. Max.”
As Louis Menand says in a 1992 article for The New Yorker:
For what Bigger says (and Max understands him perfectly well) has nothing to do with negritude. It is that he has discovered murder to be a form of self-realization—that it has been revealed to him that all the brave ideals of civilized life, including those of Communist ideology, are sentimental delusions, and the fundamental expression of the instinct of being is killing. Two years before Wright formally broke with the Communist Party, in other words, he had already turned in Marx for Nietzsche.
CLR James wrote a couple of excited reviews of Native Son, choosing to ignore the subtle criticism of Communist ideology in the book and focus on Bigger Thomas’ proto-revolutionary act of rebellion against white power. Unfortunately for him, more careful readers, like myself, have discerned an anti-communism inherent in Wright’s brilliant novel. The point of the novel is that none of the whites, even the Communist whites, see Bigger as fully human. He is either simply a brute, or a passive victim of a corrupt society. Only when he becomes a murderer and a rapist does he feel fully human. He has violated morality, he has exercised his will, and he relishes it for its own sake, not for any social reasons.
Wright is not justifying Bigger’s horrific actions. What he is doing is asserting the essential humanity of Bigger, who acted to justify himself not as a black man, but as a man. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, like Raskolnikov, Bigger acts so as to prove to himself what is capable of, and through this attains a sense of self-realisation. For the first half of the novel, he feels lost and confused, but by the end, he has gained a disturbing confidence in himself and his powers of destruction. He has banished guilt and remorse from his mind. The question of being black in America, for Wright, is not simply a social question. It is an existential question. The result is a book with a contradictory message. On the one hand, Wright had to appease his Communist Party handlers and present Bigger as a victim of capitalism. On the other hand, he was beginning to doubt Communism, and these doubts are reflected in Bigger’s rejection of Communist ideology and his justification of his actions not on the grounds of social grievances, but individualist and existentialist ones.
It occurs to me that when I was in the IMT, I felt like Bigger Thomas. I felt stifled and stymied in my desire for self-realisation. I felt an incredible amount of self-consciousness. I felt I always had to toe the party line and deny my real self, as Wright did when he was a Communist Party member. Once Bigger accidentally kills Mary Dalton, his guilt becomes pride as he realises that he is more than simply a passive victim of white racism, that he is capable of taking life and wreaking havoc on society. When I broke from the IMT and began the process of liberating myself from cultism, I also saw guilt give way to pride at my intact capacity for agency and self-assertion. I learned anew that life could not be reduced to class war and social conditions, but that the rebellion of the individual against his society was an existential phenomenon that would never disappear, and which Communism wanted to abolish in favour of an even greater uniformity and homogeneity of human existence than capitalist modernity has so far been capable of. I learned anew that I would always be a Nietzschean, and never a Marxist, and I thank Richard Wright for reminding me of that fact in his superb novel.