BLACK BOY NO MORE? VIOLENCE AND THE FLIGHT FROM BLACKNESS IN RICHARD WRIGHT'S NATIVE SON

Abstract

[...]to the extent that Wright's work equates blackness with limitation, terror, and submission, black subjectivity tends to become a contradiction in terms, particularly for his black male characters. [...]I claim that Wright's project is constructing not racialized subjects, but gendered ones. By the end of the novel, however, Bigger has become more like them insofar as he has moved from relying on his fists, knife, and gun to using words to assert his sense of self. [...]much like Buckley's insistence that Bigger is subhuman and must die, Bigger's words at the end-"What I killed for I am! . .

Richard Wright, Arnold Rampersad tells us, was "perhaps the most significant and influential" African American author of the twentieth century (11). The "perhaps" with which Rampersad quali- fies his claim is probably unnecessary, as even critics who doubt the artistry or literary merit of Wright's work do not deny that as the first African American novelist of international stature he opened doors previously closed to black writers. James Baldwin, Wright's most insistent contemporary critic, admits that he viewed Wright as his "spiritual father" and Wright's work as "a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself" ("Alas" 259, 256). To the extent that this latter requirement was true, in varying degrees, for a number of later twentieth-century black writers, Wright's status as preeminent black novelist is secure.

Nonetheless, I want to question the "blackness" of Wright's most famous novel, Native Son. Immediately, I should clarify that I am not questioning Wright's blackness or his commitment to the antiracist and anticolonial struggles of blacks and other peoples of color worldwide. My concern here is with Wright's fiction, which we read and teach in African American literature courses, presumably because Wright himself was black, as are most of his protagonists. Yet it seems to me that, beginning with Native Son, Wright's novels, unlike most other African American fiction, are unconcerned with the question of black subjectivity. Indeed, to the extent that Wright's work equates blackness with limitation, terror, and submission, black subjectivity tends to become a contradiction in terms, particularly for his black male characters. Thus I claim that Wright's project is constructing not racialized subjects, but gendered ones. That is, the question that animates Wright's texts is not how one becomes a black man, but how (or if) a Negro becomes a man.

Of course, even as the election of Barack Obama has led some Americans to anticipate (and even proclaim) the advent of a postracial society, many scholars continue to express deep suspicion at the idea that one could assume a gender identity that was not also always already raced. I share this suspicion; in so far as manhood in the United States has typically been defined by who does and does not have access to certain rights or privileges and possession or control of certain things (property, the ballot, one's own body, women's bodies and sexuality, and so on), "man" has typically been, if not synonymous with "white," then very closely aligned with it. Nevertheless, Wright seems to hold out some hope for a manhood unmarked by race. Na- tive Son's hero Bigger Thomas is one of millions "whose existence ignored racial and national lines" (Wright, "How Bigger" 446) but not gender ones. He attempts to determine "how much human life and suffering it [will] cost [him] to live as a man" (444).

Bigger Thomas's answer to the question of how a Negro becomes a man is violence. Bigger claims that murder is an act of self-creation. Here too Wright appears to innovate, though it is not the claim that violence is necessary for manhood that makes Bigger so new. This idea is deeply embedded in Western civilization, and we find it ex- pressed in one of the founding texts of African American literature. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick rises from brute to man at the moment that he fights off and bests the slave breaker Covey. Ten years later, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass makes even more explicit the moral and significance of this moment: "I was nothing before: I WAs A mAn noW . . . A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity" (246-47). It is not violence itself, then, or even the will- ingness to use violence that distinguishes Native Son's protagonist. Rather, it is the way in which Bigger deploys violence that sets him apart from previous representations of black anger and violence.1

In Conjugal Union: The Body, the House and the Black American, Robert Reid-Pharr argues that antebellum black literature was most concerned with turning the enslaved and/or mulatto body into an intelligible, stable black self. Such work was necessary both because slave law in classifying slaves as chattel denied that the slave pos- sessed any self, any subjectivity of his or her own, and because "The black of antebellum print culture was hardly a static phenomenon. It was male and female, coal black and perfectly white, bond and free, rich and poor. . . . As a function of both social necessity and philosophical clarity, the black body had to be normalized, turned black" (5). The household, Reid-Pharr contends, was the primary site of this transformation: "It is literally the case that individuals enter black households as white and leave as black. . . . [the household] marshals all manner of technologies: cleaning, violence, marriage, all to the project of producing black bodies" (6). Conjugal Union addresses the cultural productions of black writers and intellectuals before the Civil War, but I would argue, as Reid-Pharr briefly does in his epilogue, that much the same model is at work in postbellum African American literature. As slave codes gave way to Jim Crow and as blacks moving city-ward encountered new forms of racism, exploitation, and intra-racial difference, black writers continued to revisit and contest the meanings and limits of black identity. And in their works, we often see characters turning to the domestic space, to the household and its various technologies, in their efforts to con- struct a stable, identifiably black subject. Bigger is not, of course, the mulatto protagonist typical of earlier African American fiction, so Native Son does not need to work to establish Bigger's blackness. Rather, the problem Bigger encounters is escaping the "No Man's Land" that blackness represents ("How Bigger" 451). And in contrast to his literary predecessors, Bigger marshals only violence, repeat- edly rejecting both the black domestic space and black people in his project of self-creation.

"It Don Mean Nothin": Blackness as Negation

The majority of blacks lived in the South well into the twentieth century, despite the disfranchisement, peonage, and racial terror- ism of the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Richard Wright addresses these oppressive conditions and blacks' struggles against them in Uncle Tom's Children; in doing so, he follows the tradition of past black American writers when treating the topic of interracial (white-on-black) violence. Though it was inevitable that black authors would address such violence given its pervasiveness, how to address black response to these acts was much less certain. "In the most mor- ally simplified cases, white violence against blacks produces a victim, black violence against whites a hero. . . . The figure of the hero who kills whites in retaliation assumes the validity of his counter-violence" (Bryant 2-3). But of course, things are rarely so clear-cut, particu- larly in the case of the black hero who commits violence. First, black writers and their protagonists recognize the likelihood that retaliation will provoke reprisals and further oppression from whites. Second, the violent hero, insofar as his violence can be turned inward against his own group, also engenders suspicion, even fear, within the black community he is ostensibly defending (Bryant 3).

In those cases where the protagonist does retaliate violently, we are made to understand both that the original offense is too flagrant to be overlooked and that he is merely acting in accord with the ideals of the white world. He may die as a result, but he would not be a man if he were to let the violation of his home and family go unpunished. In such cases, the major concern is not simply the manhood of the hero (though this obviously is a concern), but also that the integrity of the black family and the black home be maintained. Indeed, the two are interconnected. In Wright's "Long Black Song," for example, Silas describes his efforts to secure his home and thereby his man- hood. He has "slave[d] lika dog t get [his] farm free" and to keep his wife Sarah out of the fields (Uncle Tom's Children 143), and has done well enough that he is considering buying more land (on credit) and hiring an employee. His aspirations to bourgeois manhood cannot be realized, however, if white men can come into his home and have sex with his wife at will. Thus his violence is intended to "keep them white trash bastards [and his assumed-to-be-unfaithful wife] out" (143). Silas dies in this attempt, but neither his body nor his home is further defiled by white men's abuse or intrusion. In fact, the two cease to exist at the same moment; silas chooses to die silently in his burning home rather than let white men drag him out to be turned into a spectacle-the mutilated and burned object of the lynching that marks the refusal of manhood to black males in the Jim Crow South.

It is tempting to read this stance in line with Jerry Bryant's analysis; Silas's "counter-violence" is heroic because he chooses the terms of his death and takes some white men with him. He makes, in Abdul JanMohamed's words, "an entirely negative assertion of his humanity" (263).2 We must also consider, however, that Silas does not want to die, and his statements suggest the ultimate meaningless- ness of his actions: "Ef Ah run erway, Ah ain got nothin. Ef Ah stay n fight, Ah ain got nothin. It don make no difference which way Ah go. . . . But, Lawd, Ah don wanna be this way! It don mean nothin! Yuh die ef yuh fight! Yuh die ef yuh don fight! Either way yuh die n it don mean nothin . . . " (152-53). Nothing. Lack. Negation. These words seem most accurately to reflect Wright's view of black life in the south. In Black Boy, Richard famously ponders "the essential bleakness . . . the cultural barrenness of black life": "I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair" (37). Again, the string of negatives suggests that black life is emptiness, void, not life at all. Certainly Wright makes clear in presenting Richard's behavior that this barrenness is a result of and response to the pervasive cruelty, terror, and dehumanization in Jim Crow society. And several critics have suggested that this aside (the entire two-paragraph statement is in parentheses at the beginning of chapter 2) be read as a sort of literary device, one that makes more powerful the story of Richard's ascent, rather than as an accurate statement of Wright's beliefs.

Still, the absoluteness of this view contrasts sharply with the more balanced view presented by other black authors. While not ignoring or glossing over the violence, exploitation, and stifling inhibi- tions of life in the South, they also invoke the South "as a place that housed the values and memories that sustained black people. The South emerges as the home of the ancestor, the place where commu- nity and history are valued" (Griffin 9). But Richard finds the various Mississippi and Tennessee communities he lives in neither nourish- ing nor sustaining, as indicated by Wright's original manuscript title, American Hunger. Physical, emotional, and intellectual deprivation define his nineteen years in the South, and he flees this world with- out regret at his first opportunity. Similarly, after famously deploring the sentimental reactions to Uncle Tom's Children, Wright, in Native Son, rejects the South and the communal, historically and culturally rooted model of black identity associated with it. It is not just that all of Wright's novels except the last feature male protagonists in the urban North, but also that characters like Bigger, who are Southern, reject the South, its folkways, and those identified with them.

In titling his first published novel Native Son, Wright made clear his belief that urban black men are, first and foremost, American. Despite his confinement to Chicago's Black Belt, Bigger has dreams and desires similar to those of any white youth: to fly a plane, to get a good job, and to have an attractive woman to call his own. Indeed, Bigger may want these things more precisely because of his confine- ment, and it is only through the denial of the opportunity to pursue these goals that he becomes fearful, alienated and, ultimately, violent. As his lawyer Boris Max reminds the court, "Your honor, remember that men can starve from a lack of self-realization . . . And they can murder for it, too! Did we not build a nation, did we not wage war and conquer in the name of a dream to realize our personalities and to make those realized personalities secure!" (399). What Bigger has done, Max claims, is "an act of creation" (400): his violence creates him as an American man just as revolution created the Founding Fathers. That is, at the moment they create themselves through violence, as men, Wright's heroes simultaneously reject blackness, as represented by the black family/community and black cultural practices, in favor of a presumably more encompassing identity: first, American and, ultimately, man.

Blotting Out Blackness: Bigger as Native Son

The opening scene of Native Son immediately impresses us with the cramped, improper domesticity of the Thomas family. Even were Bigger inclined to use this space as in antebellum literature, it is not one likely to be productive of any stable or complete identity. Mother, sons, and daughter all sleep, dress, cook, and eat in the same tiny room. The intrusion of the rat points to the apartment's disrepair, as well as its unsanitary, dangerous condition. The narrowness of the Thomases' room reflects the narrowness of their lives. Wright portrays the Thomas women as defeated, wanting nothing more from life than what whites are willing to offer. Mrs. Thomas, with her constant talk of death, seems old before her time. Her religion pacifies rather than inspires her; it teaches her to endure injustice rather than challenge it and to wait for a better world after death. Bigger perceives his sister, Vera, as a younger, less religious version of their mother, and whereas he has dreamed of flying planes, her highest ambition seems to be work as a seamstress. Even Buddy, who is feminized in relation to Bigger, strikes his older brother as "soft and vague . . . aimless, lost . . . like a chubby puppy" (108). The vagueness Bigger identifies in his family suggests their lack of will or purpose, of identity even. They are part of the nameless black masses whose inaction angers and shames Bigger.

It is not just the lack of space, privacy, and safety that makes the Thomases' domesticity improper. The relations between and among the family members are flawed as well. We clearly see Bigger's flaws in this regard. He resents his mother, bullies his sister, and considers murdering his brother. He wishes "to wave his hand and blot them out" (99). But if Bigger is a bad son and brother, Mrs. Thomas is equally problematic as a mother. Trudier Harris observes that on the one hand Mrs. Thomas is the stereotypical black matriarch, using her speech to denigrate and emasculate her sons (67); on the other, "she is more the child than the mother, more the helpless lover than the protecting parent" (69). Her weepy near-collapse when Bigger kills the rat seems out of character for a woman who berates her sons as fools and "no-countest" (9). While her desire that Bigger help sup- port the family is entirely reasonable, the blame that she heaps on him for the family's poverty is unfair and counterproductive. Readers cannot, of course, blame her for Bigger's failures, but we likely find her nagging and piety as exasperating as Bigger does.

It is no surprise then, that Bigger is "sick of his life at home" (12), and after spending a few hours in the Dalton home and, not coincidentally, killing Mary, returns to judge his home and the people in it harshly:

This was much different from Dalton's home. Here all slept in one room; there he would have a room for himself alone. He smelt food cooking and remembered that one could not smell food cooking in Dalton's home; pots could not be heard rattling all over the house. Each person lived in one room and had a little world of his own. He hated this room and all the people in it, including himself. (105)

As Bigger sees it, the jumble of things, smells, and people in his fam- ily's apartment prevents him from having "a little world of his own," from thinking about and becoming himself. His desire to blot out his family, both at this moment and later on in his jail cell, clearly signals his rejection of this stifling domesticity.

Immediately before this judgment, Bigger rejects the possibility of domesticity with Bessie as well. When Buddy tells him that Bessie has been by talking of marriage now that Bigger has a job, Bigger's verbal response is noncommittal, but he silently agrees with his brother's claim that he now "can get a better gal than Bessie" (104). Ironically, Bigger experiences his only moment of positive, affirming domesticity when he first visits Bessie after killing Mary. They have sex and Bigger feels himself "being willingly dragged into a warm night sea to rise renewed . . . clinging close to a fountain whose warm waters washed and cleaned his senses, cooled them, made them strong and keen again. . . . Some hand had reached inside of him and had laid a quiet finger of peace upon the restless tossing of his spirit and had made him feel that he did not need to long for a home now" (135). Presumably, he need not long for a home anymore because he has found one with Bessie. Unfortunately, Bigger values Bessie only as a body, not a person or personality. His feelings of peace and renewal are contingent on Bessie's silence and sexual acquiescence. When she questions his actions and motives, he wishes he could "swing his arm and blot out, kill, sweep away the Bessie on Bessie's face, and leave [her body] helpless and yielding before him" (140). In killing her, he fulfills his wish, taking her body against her protests and then bashing her head with a brick.

Bigger rationalizes this second murder as necessary: "It was his life against hers" (236), but as Robert James Butler points out, the murder actually slows him down and helps assure his capture. He could just as easily have retrieved the stolen money from Bes- sie and fled, without telling her the details of Mary's murder or his destination ("Function of Violence" 16). Thus it is not Bessie's knowledge that compels him to kill her. She becomes the victim of his murderous rage because Bigger recognizes the pathetic compass of her life, which entails "long hours, hot and hard hours" in "the kitchen of the white folks" (139) with brief respites of drunkenness and sex with Bigger. He cannot recognize Bessie's meager existence, however, without also recognizing that his own life is similarly nar- row and circumscribed. Such knowledge conflicts with his repeated claim that now he is free, now he is "living, truly and deeply" (239). Bigger has already rejected his family and the gang, so Bessie is his final connection to the blackness he despises as weak, shameful, and passive. In murdering her, he breaks this connection.3

According to James Baldwin, one of the primary shortcomings of Native Son is Wright's failure to depict "any sense of Negro life as a continuing and complex group reality" ("Many" 30). The elision of this "necessary dimension," Baldwin argues, produces the idea "that in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no pos- sibility of ritual or intercourse" to account for blacks' survival despite the very real costs of oppression (27). Baldwin's string of noes here recalls Wright's aside in Black Boy, a coincidence that would seem to validate Baldwin's judgment. We do, however, get glimpses, though admittedly very brief ones, of black folk practices. So it is not that Wright fails to depict them, but rather that his protagonist rejects them, just as he rejects his stifling home life and the possibility of a more fulfilling domesticity with Bessie.

Bigger's irritation with his mother singing spirituals provides an early instance of this attitude, but another moment portrays more clearly the extent of Bigger's alienation from black religious and spiri- tual traditions. When he is a fugitive, hiding in empty apartments, Bigger is awakened from an exhausted sleep by singing in a nearby church. "The singing filled his ears; it was complete, self-contained, and it mocked his fear and loneliness, his deep yearning for a sense of wholeness. Its fulness contrasted so sharply with his hunger, its richness with his emptiness, that he recoiled from it while answering it. Would it not have been better for him had he lived in that world the music sang of?" (254). The song initially calls to Bigger, as it seems to offer the promise of fulfillment, "a center, a core, an axis, a heart which he needed" (254), but Bigger ultimately misreads its message: "the music sang of surrender, resignation. Steal away, Steal away, Steal away to Jesus . . . " (253). The next line is "I ain't got long to stay here," and of course, this spiritual is one slaves used not only to voice their hopes for freedom in the afterlife, but also to signal their plans to seize freedom in the here and now. The song points, there- fore, to a tradition of defiance, resistance, and cooperation (intra- and interracial). Bigger is apparently unaware of this tradition, and so he hears only a call to "[lay] his head upon a pillow of humility and g[ive] up his hope of living in the world" (254). Bigger desires hap- piness and his fair chance "in this world, not out of it"; he therefore rejects going to church and being religious as poor consolations suit- able only "for whipped folks" (356). Bigger's description of religious folks as "whipped" evokes the shadow of slavery and the refusal of personhood, at least in theory, that characterized chattel slavery in the US. But the slavery Bigger imagines is not one in which blacks, "whipped" in a variety of ways, resisted attempts to dehumanize them when and however they could. As Bigger uses the term, "whipped" signals passivity, total defeat, and acceptance of one's loss. Thus he reads turning to religion not as fighting for one's manhood in another arena, but as ceding it altogether.

Finally, it is important to note that Bigger rejects not just black religious or spiritual practices, but in the person of Reverend Hammond, the South as well. During their halting conversation in Ernie's Chicken Shack, Bigger tells Jan and Mary that he grew up in the South and has only been in Chicago about five years (74). Yet only the Reverend's speech is rendered in the kind of broad dialect that clearly marks him as Southern: "Lawd Jesus, . . . Yuh said mercy wuz awways Yo's 'n' ef we ast fer it on bended knee Yuh'd po' it out inter our hearts 'n' make our cups run over!" (282-83). Reverend Hammond's words momentarily awaken a sense of hope and wonder within Bigger, and he wordlessly accepts the cross the Reverend fastens around his neck. But Bigger later feels "trapped" and "betrayed" (338) and comes to associate the Reverend's gift with white hatred when he sees a burning cross near the Dalton home. Back in his cell, Bigger tears the cross from his neck and violently rejects further counseling from the Reverend: "'I told you I don't want you! If you come in here, I'll kill you! Leave me alone!' . . . Bigger . . . caught the steel bars in his hands and swept the door forward, slamming it shut. It smashed the old black preacher squarely in the face, sending him reeling backwards upon the concrete" (339).4 This action is yet another manifestation of Bigger's desire to "wave his hand and blot out" those who, in his view, reflect the powerlessness, the nothingness of blackness. Stirring as the Reverend's words are, the Reverend himself cannot do anything to protect Bigger from the mob's hatred. Indeed, he advises Bigger to reject the Communists' offer of help and put everything in God's hands. Much as he judges the friendship of Jan and Max "puny . . . in the face of a million men like Buckley" (292), Bigger rejects the Reverend's religion and the Southern blackness the Reverend represents as ineffective.

Bigger's rejections of the cramped domesticity of his family's tenement apartment, the softness and passivity of his family and Bessie, and the uselessness of Reverend Hammond and his self- sacrificing religion do not, by themselves, mean that he has rejected blackness. We must also examine his relationships with Jack, Gus, and G. H., for through them he may be connected to the street cul- ture of urban black males (Griffin 125-26). But even here Bigger is alienated and separate. Farah Jasmine Griffin claims that "signifying and street culture provide a space where [Bigger] can claim verbal and physical authority denied him in the white world" (125). When Bigger and Gus "play white," they do indeed voice their desire for power and authority, yet as Griffin notes, "inherent in the game is a critique of white people" and white power (125). This is particularly the case when Bigger, playing the president, suggests that Gus, the secretary of state, should drop everything, even diplomacy with the Germans, because "niggers is raising sand all over the country" and something must be done (19). Their exchange expresses their sense that, for white Americans, keeping blacks subjugated is more important than any other concern, even world peace. Similarly, just before he encounters Gus, Bigger signifies on the campaign poster of State's Attorney Buckley, rereading the poster's slogan (YOU CAN'T WIN!) to comment on the inequities in the legal process and to sug- gest that Buckley is the real criminal: "He snuffed his cigarette and laughed silently. 'You crook,' he mumbled, shaking his head. 'You let whoever pays you off win!'" (13).

In addition to the critiques of white power being voiced at these moments, we should notice that they occur when Bigger is either alone or with one other person. When he is with the group, Bigger seems to lose the verbal dexterity and cleverness that, according to Houston Baker, distinguish black men and black culture and are the criteria for status among "street-corner males" (Long Black Song 112-15) like Bigger. When he is the target of wordplay or insult, rather than keeping his cool and responding in kind-as playing the dozens requires-Bigger tends to denigrate the talk itself ("You laugh like monkeys and you ain't got nerve enough to do nothing but talk" [24]), or more often, to lash out physically:

"But I'll be Goddamn if I'm taking orders from you , Bigger! You just a scared coward! You calling me scared so nobody'll see how scared you is!"

Bigger leaped at him, but Jack ran between them. . . .

Bigger's stomach burned and a hazy black cloud hovered a moment before his eyes, and left. Mixed images of violence ran like sand through his mind, dry and fast, vanishing. He could stab Gus with his knife; he could slap him; he could kick him; he could trip him up and send him sprawling on his face. (27)

Bigger is not the "man-of-words" that Baker hails (Long Black Song 112). Instead, he finds confidence in "action so violent that it would make him forget" his fear and humiliation (Native Son 28-29). As we see later, when Bigger does attack and humiliate Gus in order to sabotage the gang's planned robbery of a white grocer, Bigger's status in the gang rests on his capacity for violence, not his facility with language. Jack, Gus, and G. H. do not seem particularly to like or respect Bigger; rather, they fear and resent him, and he "[does] not think enough of them to feel . . . responsible to them" (42). After he kills Mary, this sense of distance becomes even more pronounced; he feels "cut off from them forever" (111).

Only in isolated, one-on-one conversation-for example, when he explains to Gus that the white folks live inside him-does Bigger experience camaraderie with another black man. This moment is not to be dismissed certainly, but its singularity points to Bigger's general inability to establish human connection through verbal com- munication. And while physical strength and fighting skill are valued qualities in urban black male culture, it is supposed to be the practice and appreciation of verbal dexterity in a group setting that sets this culture apart from other, more general cultures or codes of mascu- linity. Thus, Bigger's reliance on his fists and his knife, rather than on words, when among his peers suggests if not a rejection of black male culture, then certainly a distance from it, a sense that it is like the other forms of black culture he clearly does reject: it does not do anything noteworthy or worthwhile. And if Bigger feels this way about blackness and black culture, we must wonder how he can serve as a model for black manhood, let alone black revolution.

It seems clear that Wright did not intend Bigger to serve such a purpose. The novel's title suggests Bigger's representativeness; as Wright explains in "How 'Bigger' Was Born," he intended the char- acter to "loom as a symbolic figure of American life" (447). Yet that representativeness is meant as a warning of dire consequences to come should the Us continue to insist on the political, economic, and social marginalization and exclusion of black Americans: "I am not saying that I heard any talk of revolution in the South when I was a kid there. But I did hear the lispings, the whispers, the mutters which some day, under one stimulus or another, will surely grow into open revolt unless the conditions which produce Bigger Thomases are changed" (444). Such revolt began in earnest with the boycotts and sit-ins that launched the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s. It took, however, the emergence of more radical analyses of America's political, economic, and social structures and more militant calls to overturn these structures-calls emerging, not coincidentally, primarily in response to conditions in the urban North-before some scholars and activists began reading Bigger (or the novel itself) as model rather than harbinger.

"The Child ofViolence": Bigger as Proto-revolutionary

"How 'Bigger' Was Born" details Wright's gradual realization that Bigger was not an exclusively black American personality type but that he existed in white America, in Nazi Germany, and in Communist Russia as well. Just over twenty years later, other African American intellectuals would similarly internationalize their analyses, though they turned more toward the Third World for their inspiration and analytical frameworks. As blacks began identifying with decolonization movements in Africa and Asia, the conception of black Americans as a colonized group within the US reemerged. Harold Cruse used the phrase "domestic colonialism" to describe the American racial struc- ture as early as 1962 (Blauner 394), but the analogy seems not to have really caught on until the emergence of more militant activism several years later. "Black Power," according to Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, "means that black people see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world" (xi). The first chapter of Carmichael and Hamilton's Black Power traces the ways in which blacks in the US, like their counterparts in the Third World, have been subject to political, economic, and social colonialism (6).

The "Child of Violence" subtitle above is taken from Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonialism and the pro- cess of decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth. sartre, stressing the necessity of such a work, writes that the means of establishing subjectivity practiced by colonizers are unavailable to the colonized: "We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture and death. . . . The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself a man at ours: a different man; of higher quality" (24). The "native," Fanon argues, is a product of the colonial encounter, and he can only recreate himself as a man through decolonization, the putting into practice of the biblical prescription "But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first" (King James Version, Matt. 19.30). Such a radical reorganization of society, however, can occur only "after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists" (37). Fanon's analysis, translated into English in 1963, was a crucial text for American intellectuals and activists seeking new ways to interpret racism in the US. Fanon apparently viewed the US as a colonizing force, particularly in the Western hemisphere; in a footnote he remarks on "Yankee" efforts "to strangle the Cuban people mercilessly" following the Cuban Revolution (97). Yet Fanon does not regard blacks in the US as a colonized group. To be sure, American blacks were victims of white supremacy, but that blacks across the globe "were all defined in relation to the whites" did not mean that all blacks had been subjected to the specific forms of political and economic control that colonialism entails (216). Cruse, Carmichael, Hamilton, and others who employed the colonial analogy generally did concede this point-black Americans were not "pure" colonials. Still, Fanon's description of the Manichean, compartmentalized world of the colony so closely mirrored the American racial situation that it could not be disregarded. Moreover, Fanon was an enthusiastic reader of Wright, whose hero Bigger Thomas some of these same activists celebrated as "a prototype of the revolutionary black hero" (Butler, Native Son 16).

Eldridge Cleaver praises Bigger as "the black rebel of the ghetto and a man" (106). Cleaver does concede that Bigger's rebellion is "inept" (106), but apparently his ineptitude is less important than the fact of having acted violently and of being heterosexual. Houston Baker, surprisingly even more enthusiastic than Cleaver, claims that Bigger "repudiates white American culture, affirms the black survival values of timely trickery and militant resistance, and serves as a model hero" (Long Black Song 127). Neither Cleaver nor Baker has much to say about Bessie's rape and murder.5 Addison Gayle states unequivocally that "Bigger fails as both rebel and revolutionary" (171) but still posits Native Son as "the model for the novelist of the nineteen seventies" (173) and attempts to recuperate Bigger as a sort of proto-revolutionary. To get to the "real," revolutionary Big- ger, readers should, Gayle tells us, "Strip the nihilism and self-hate from his personality makeup" (179) and ignore the Bigger after the murder of Bessie as the perverted "brainchild of Communists and liberals" (171). We can, however, make a plausible case for Bigger as a proto-revolutionary without bowdlerizing the novel as Gayle sug - gests. Bigger experiences many of the same material conditions as Fanon's native and, as a result, at times he gives voice, twenty years before Fanon, to the consciousness that, according to Fanon, leads to revolution. Yet Bigger's statements ultimately lead only back to himself, to his own alienation and rage. He seems unable, until it is too late, to reach out to others in a way that could lead to collective, revolutionary action.

To return for a moment to the household, we find in the tiny one-room apartment Bigger shares with his mother, brother, and sister the "world without spaciousness" in which, according to Fanon, colonized people are compartmentalized (39). Even when he moves outside his family's tenement apartment, Bigger's world is severely circumscribed because, like the native restricted to the medina, he is generally confined to Chicago's Black Belt. As a result of this cramp- ing, claims Fanon, "the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression. . . . The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor" (52-53). Fittingly, Bigger, watching a pigeon fly away, sighs, "Now, if I could only do that" (21), and he and Gus "play 'white'" (17) moments after commenting on the "funny" (17) way whites treat them.

When he explains to a horrified Boris Max, "I hurt folks 'cause I felt I had to; that's all. They was crowding me too close; they wouldn't give me no room" (355), Bigger anticipates Fanon's native, who knows "from birth . . . that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence" (Fanon 37). Bigger experiences a similar sense of clairvoyance; he confesses to Gus that when he thinks of white people and the limitations of his life, he feels "like something awful's going to happen to me . . . Naw; it ain't like something going to happen to me. It's . . . It's like I was going to do something I can't help . . . " (22). Undoubtedly, Bigger is a "child of violence"; his father was killed in a riot before the family moved to Chicago, and the novel's opening scene, in which he crushes to death a rat very obviously meant to symbolize himself, reinforces the fact that the violence in Bigger is a product of the violence around him. Bigger "first manifest[s] this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people" (Fanon 52). Indeed, Bigger is much more willing to victimize his own people-Vera, Gus, the neighbors from whom he and his friends steal-than to rob the white storekeeper Mr. Blum and thereby "trespass into territory where the full wrath of an alien white world would be turned loose upon [him]" (Native Son 14). Whites, Bigger knows, are less concerned (if they are concerned at all) about crimes in which the victim is black, and so he recognizes the safety of staying "in his place."

The psychology that Fanon describes is not a simple matter of self-hatred, however. Bigger does not want to be white so much as he envies the power and privileges that come with whiteness and wants to escape "the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin" (Native Son 67). In fact, inseparable from his envy of what whiteness can do and be is an intense hatred of actual white people. Thus, Mary and Jan's naïve and clumsy attempts to treat him as an equal backfire, making Bigger even more uncomfortable and angry:

He was very conscious of his black skin and there was in him a prodding conviction that Jan and men like him had made it so that he would be conscious of that black skin . . . Maybe they did not despise him? But they made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him, one holding his hand and the other smiling . . . At that moment he felt toward Mary and Jan a dumb, cold, and inarticulate hate. (67)

Even as he watches Mary admiringly, Bigger cannot separate his en- vious "dreams of possession" (Fanon 39) from this hatred: "But she was beautiful, slender, with an air that made him feel that she did not hate him with the hate of other white people. But, for all of that, she was white and he hated her . . . And, too, in spite of his hate for her, he was excited . . . " (82). In killing, he acts out both of these impulses. He is on the point of raping the drunk and semi-conscious Mary when Mrs. Dalton enters, and the scene continues, describing his smothering of her with language equally suggestive of intercourse:

Mrs. Dalton was moving slowly toward him and he grew tight and full, as though about to explode. Mary's fingernails tore at his hands . . . Mary's body surged upward and he pushed downward . . . Again Mary's body heaved . . . For a long time he felt the sharp pain of her fingernails biting into his wrists . . . His muscles flexed taut as steel . . . Then suddenly her fingernails did not bite into his wrists. Mary's fingers loosened . . . He relaxed and sank to the floor, his breath going in a long gasp. He was weak and wet with sweat. (85-86)

Bigger has "surge[d] into the forbidden quarters" (Fanon 40), an act that "shakes the world in a very necessary manner" (45) and trans- forms "a black timid Negro boy" (Native Son 107). Wright's use of both "black" and "Negro" emphasizes Bigger's dark skin, which Bigger is exceedingly conscious of when in the presence of white people, but the phrase, running together the four words without a comma, also suggests the words are all of a piece. To be Negro is to be black (no matter the actual color of one's skin), is to be timid, to be a boy, not a man. After killing Mary and disposing of her body, Bigger loses his earlier timidity, gaining enough confidence to return to the Dalton household, face Detective Britten, frame Jan, and compose a ransom note that implicates the Communist Party in Mary's disappearance. But does he truly begin the process of decolonization, of breaking down the equivalence between black and boy?

Though Bigger willingly takes responsibility for the murders, refusing to call Mary's an accident, there is little sense that he has acted for anyone but himself or that he is leaving behind anyone to continue his fight. In fact, Bigger feels toward his family much as he does toward white people: "Goddamn! He wanted to wave his hand and blot them out. They were always too close to him, so close that he could never have any way of his own" (99). Bigger is completely isolated in his hatred and alienation, and though he later acknowl- edges that "His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit" (298), his recognition does not lessen the shame and hate his family and their blackness engender in him.

As Addison Gayle's suggestion that we ignore the Bigger who murders a black woman indicates, the biggest strike against Bigger as a revolutionary is his rape and murder of Bessie. Unlike the previous murder, which was an accident, Bigger consciously decides to take Bessie with him as he is fleeing and kill her later. Moreover, even as he is planning her death, he disregards her protests and her attempts to resist and rapes her. Bigger's thoughts after the rape make clear that he thinks of Bessie merely as a body, a thing to be disposed of: "Yes, that was what he could do with it, throw it out of the window, down the narrow air-shaft where nobody would find it until, perhaps, it had begun to smell" (235; emphasis added). If his killing Mary were a truly revolutionary act, then it would be a step backward for Bigger to continue taking out his aggressions on his own people. Big- ger, however, is only concerned about himself; Bessie, like his family, Mary, and the rest of the white world, is something hemming him in, an annoyance to be blotted out. Because other people exist for Bigger only as obstacles, he can describe rape as "not what one did to women" (227) but rather as the "hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day" (228). The individualism that should be the first of the colonizers' values to disappear in a revolutionary movement (Fanon 47) never leaves Bigger; "I" is the most prominent word in his final statements, and he will die alone, mourned only by his family, understood by no one. Bigger cannot be a revolutionary á la Fanon because there is no such thing as a revolution of one.

What He Killed for, He Can't Be: Bigger's (Social) Death

Bigger himself does not use the word "revolutionary" to describe his deeds, but he does recognize that in killing Mary Dalton, he has shattered society's expectations. "They might think he would steal a dime, rape a woman, get drunk, or cut somebody; but to kill a mil- lionaire's daughter and burn her body?" (113). This realization makes him feel free: "he felt a lessening of tension in his muscles; he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried" (114). The burden is Bigger's sense that black people live the way they do, are treated as they are because they have never "done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much" (105). By contrast, he has committed "a supreme and meaningful act" (116), and in doing so has "created a new world for himself" (241, 285), a world in which he can presumably achieve the manhood denied him in the white city of Chicago.

This, at least, is the story Bigger tells himself. His dilemma is that he can tell no one else. He several times expresses a desire to stand up and announce to white and black passersby what he has done but of course must forego this release. Denied the release of speech, he writes instead. As Barbara Johnson notes in "The Re(a) d and the Black," the ransom note Bigger composes and delivers to the Daltons bears the mark of black agency: "Do what this letter say" (Native Son 177). This Black English construction should give away the black person behind the text, but as Bigger has sensed from the beginning, the Daltons and other whites are blind to his pres- ence (Johnson 118-19). Indeed, even after he is revealed to be the murderer, his text is not read properly. Despite the evidence there in the note, the authorities are unable or unwilling to acknowledge Bigger's agency by crediting him, rather than the Communists, with the ransom plan.

Bigger initially assumes that this blindness will be to his ad- vantage. He will be able to do as he pleases, so long as he acts as others expect him to. It is Bessie who reminds him that his inability to have his story read or heard will have negative consequences:6

"Honey, don't you see?"

"What?"

"They'll say . . . "

Bessie cried again. He caught her face in his hands. He was concerned; he wanted to see this thing through her eyes at that moment.

"What?"

"They'll . . . . They'll say you raped her."

Bigger stared. (227)

This is exactly the story the newspapers and State's Attorney Buck- ley tell. Bigger as rapist, as sex fiend, fits neatly into their already constructed narratives, and so Bigger's story is pushed aside in favor of one about "a bestial monstrosity" (408), "this black lizard," "this black mad dog" (409), "this hardened black thing," "this rapacious beast" (410), "this ghoul," "this worthless ape," "a cunning beast" (413), "this demented savage" (414). I reproduce many, but not all, of Buckley's epithets for Bigger in order to illustrate the absolute in- sistence that Bigger is less than human. That Bigger himself comes to rely on the newspapers as he is fleeing and when he is jailed sug- gests the ease with which his own story is displaced by stories that deny his humanity.

Nor is it only pandering racists like Buckley who misread or refuse to recognize Bigger. Again, Barbara Johnson points out that there is something "about Bigger that cannot be re(a)d within the perspective of [Boris] Ma(r)x" (116). For all of his claims of color blindness, Bigger's lawyer apparently cannot help but other Bigger with language that echoes Buckley's. In his summation, Max evokes the bestial to describe Bigger and his circumstances: "It has made itself a home in the wild forest of our great cities, amid the rank and choking vegetation of slums! . . . By night it creeps from its lair and steals toward the settlements of civilization! And at the sight of a kind face . . . it leaps to kill" (392). His intention is to provide con- text, to prod the judge to acknowledge the reasons for Bigger's rage and violence, but these statements paint Bigger as a savage invader and reinforce, rather than challenge, the white public's perception of Bigger's (non) identity. Further, Max's communism leads him to deny the importance of race. All working men may be oppressed, as he claims, but it is Bigger's blackness, not his class status, that makes him panic when he thinks Mary will awaken and give away his pres- ence in her bedroom. His blackness allows Buckley and the press to paint him as a subhuman rapist, just as it produces the mob howling for lynch law outside the courthouse. Race is integral to how Bigger has arrived at his particular position, and if Max "look[s] at the world in a way that shows no whites and no blacks" (424), he necessarily cannot fully see Bigger.7

Indeed, looking in this way means that Max cannot see his own and other whites' racial identity and positioning, though whiteness plays an even more crucial role in understanding Bigger's circum- stances.8 In addressing the court, max appropriately points to the way that the violence of the American Revolution created (American) men; he neglects, however, to acknowledge its role in the simultane- ous process of creating (American) whiteness. The practice before, during, and after the Revolution of subjugating and/or eliminating nonwhite peoples who perhaps were also attempting "to realize their personalities" reveals whiteness as integral to the American manhood the Founding Fathers were imagining and creating. It is whiteness, not his profits as Max would have it, that Mr. Dalton imagines him- self to be protecting when he refuses to rent to blacks outside of the Black Belt, and whiteness is what is at stake in the courtroom. Bigger has fully confessed to his crimes, so much of Buckley's summation is legally unnecessary; everyone knows that Max's efforts will not save Bigger from death. Buckley speaks, then, not to ensure a death sentence, but rather to paint Bigger (and all black men, potentially) as blackness itself, that is, as the negation of all that whiteness is supposed to represent: truth, law and order, decency, humanity itself. And while homicide undoubtedly presents a threat, it can be accidental. So Buckley must insist that "the central crime here is [Mary's] rape" (413) because only that crime suggests deliberate and "repellent contagion" (409), the contamination of whiteness by blackness. In effect, Buckley argues a version of Bigger's idea that rape is "not what one d[oes] to women"; it is instead what blackness does to whiteness unless death (or its threat) deters it.

These courtroom speeches make clear a tragic irony. In at- tempting to escape the supposed No-Man's Land of blackness, Big- ger has seized on a version of manhood premised on whiteness and therefore on the very othering and rejection that have been practiced against him. Initially, Bigger's rejections have more obviously bloody consequences than do those of Mr. Dalton and Buckley-much like the earliest versions of American manhood depended on physical violence as much as rhetorical violence. By the end of the novel, however, Bigger has become more like them insofar as he has moved from relying on his fists, knife, and gun to using words to assert his sense of self. Moreover, much like Buckley's insistence that Bigger is subhuman and must die, Bigger's words at the end-"What I killed for I am! . . . What I killed for must've been good!" (429)-signal his continued refusal to recognize the humanity of Mary and Bessie. In this sense, Baldwin is on the right track when he claims, "Bigger's tragedy is . . . that he has accepted a theology that denies him life" ("Everybody's Protest" 18). But it is not just Bigger who is denied life. In proffering the notion that blackness is a No-Man's Land, the novel effectively forces Bigger to adopt a version of (white) manhood that defines itself in part by denying life, figuratively and literally, to those it deems other.

What further compounds this tragedy is the knowledge that had Bigger engaged in clearly revolutionary or even defensive violence (as, for example, Big Boy and Mann do in Uncle Tom's Children), he still would not have attained the recognition he seeks. Bigger's dilemma is that of the chattel slave; because "criminality is the only form of slave agency recognized by law . . . fashioning of the subject must necessarily take place in violation of the law, and consequently, will, criminality and punishment are inextricably linked" (Hartman 41). Bigger, of course, is not technically a slave, but the inability of others to see him-that is, to see beyond their racist and stereotyped views of blackness-suggests the extent to which he (and black people more generally) continues to occupy the space of social death.9 Big- ger attempts to create himself as a man through violence, but those around him will only read that violence by inserting it into the already existing narrative of the black rapist. Thus the violence that ostensibly creates Bigger as a man simultaneously ensures his destruction. His "faint, wry, bitter smile" (430) as Max hurries away suggests, among other things, that Bigger has finally recognized, though too late, the impossibility of his project. Bigger is indeed a native son, but as the closeness of his first name to the epithet "Nigger" implies, his black- ness renders the American manhood he has achieved unrecognizable precisely because it is a manhood that depends on the maintenance of racial difference.

Footnote

Notes

1. My focus on Bigger's violence and his use of violence to reject black- ness (at least so far as he understands it) sets my account apart from more recent readings of Native Son. For example, in Constructing the Black Masculine, maurice Wallace uses Native Son (along with the photographs of Albert Watson) to elaborate on his concept of "spectragraphia" and the ways in which black men have been framed, literally and figuratively, by the white gaze. While I find Wallace's reading quite useful and convincing, I do not think we can or should overlook Bigger's own gaze, which he turns against black women especially, and the violence he employs when he sees what he does not want or expect to see.

2. JanMohamed is actually commenting on Wright's meditation on his life in the South as he is on the train heading to Chicago in Black Boy. Nevertheless, what JanMohamed (and Wright) has to say at this moment is applicable as well to Silas, Mann, and other characters in Uncle Tom's Children: "the environment had allowed him to manifest his humanity only in a negative form. . . . It had given him only the choice of becoming either a slave or a rebel; he had chosen the lat- ter" (263).

3. Butler's account does not explicitly address race; he reads the mur- ders of Mary and Bessie as Bigger murdering his "romantic self" and his "naturalistic self," respectively (17). See 17-18. Griffin's account is more satisfying because she addresses the significance of Bigger deliberately murdering a black woman and provides readings of the two murder scenes that highlight important differences between them. See 128-129.

4. At this point it is worth noting that others' faces are the most frequent targets of Bigger's violence. Stephen George, reading Native Son through Levinas, notes "the perversion of the face-to-face relation- ship" (499) that characterizes most of Bigger's interactions with other people and makes it possible for him to smother Mary and bludgeon Bessie.

5. Cleaver's elision of Bessie is striking only because he earlier claims to have recanted his belief that rape was "an insurrectionary act" that he could and did practice "on black girls in the ghetto" (14). Later, when Baker does address Wright's depictions of black women, including Bessie, in Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices, he no longer reads Bigger as an African American culture hero. See "On Knowing Our Place."

6. Johnson also notes that Bessie is the only one to read Bigger and his note correctly. Not only does she deduce that he has in fact murdered Mary, but she also concludes that he will kill her too. See Johnson 120-21.

7. Fanon would have predicted Max's failure to understand since "the Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem" (40). That is, though Marxist analysis denies its relevance, "the fact of belonging to or not belong- ing to a given race" is "what parcels out" the colonial world.

8. Of course, as a Jew and a Communist, Max does not possess white- ness as Buckley and the Daltons do. Yet Buckley does identify Max as a white man, even as he castigates Max's supposed betrayal of this identity.

9. Sharon Patricia Holland argues that the institutional practices of slavery were "too entrenched" to cease simply because of legislative action. Therefore, in the national imaginary, blacks have yet to ac- complish the "imaginative shift from enslaved to freed subjectivity" (15); instead they continue to occupy the space of social death.

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