📘 Richard Wright, Native Son
Then their eyes were riveted; a slate-colored pigeon swooped down to the middle of the steel car tracks and began strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat neck bobbing with regal pride. A streetcar rumbled forward and the pigeon rose swiftly through the air on wings stretched so taut and sheer that Bigger could see the gold of the sun through their translucent tips. He tilted his head and watched the slate-colored bird flap and wheel out of sight over the edge of a high roof.
i was led to Native Son by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and it is the longest book i've read this year. When i was in school, a decade ago now, we read To Kill a Mockingbird, and i think we should have read this book instead. i take issue with Mockingbird in that it paints a very bland picture of Tom Robinson, and that the story is told from the perspective of a little white girl, a position that presumes naivete in the matter of racial discrimination, and implicates the reader into that naivete. This is not a criticism of Harper Lee, she wrote what she knew, and she wrote with as much sensitivity as she could muster, but the heroes and villians of her story are white, and Tom Robinson a rhetorical device to expound on the actions of white people. Black people remain entirely marginal in Mockingbird.
Bigger Thomas is a different kind of character altogether; he not only implicates the reader into his life of poverty, longing, and powerlessness, he implicates us in the two murders he commits. Bigger Thomas is not a nice young man at all, he is restless, he has neglected to think about the conditions of his existence, and in this, he is a product of the racist society he has grown up in. When he accidentally murders Mary Dalton, paralysed by fear, we are in on it, when he hatches an ill-conceived plan to collect ransom money on the disappeared Mary Dalton, we are in on it (i spent half this book cursing Bigger for his stupidity, a stupidity that was, by dint of the narrative, also mine), when he rapes and murders Bessie, we are in on it, and we're in on it when he forgets to retrieve the money out of her pocket.
And then Bigger is arrested and accused of the crimes he has, in fact, committed, and now, we as readers are implicated in the judicial system that seeks to persecute him, we are implicated in the racist society that created Bigger Thomas, a society that now seeks to destroy him. By embedding the reader in Bigger, and the society that wishes to erase him, Richard Wright demonstrates the cruel tangle of a society built on hierarchies of class and race, but Wright is not a pessimist, he introduces a third variable to the equation, communism, a concrete way forward.
i think, more than merely writing a riveting novel, Richard Wright may have been thinking, thinking about society by means of fiction, there are paragraphs that veer deep into philosophy, without the didactic thrust an academic work on philosophy might employ. i can see why Frantz Fanon was taken by this novel, it meditates on the question of the black man in much the same way he does, right down to the misogyny, though Richard Wright employs misogyny as a rhetorical device far more conciously and gracefully than Fanon — the fact that Bessie's body is wheeled in to the courthouse as evidence, to superimpose upon the body of a white woman violence she did not bear the brunt of, was an incredibly harsh indictment of judicial order in the United States, and frighteningly true, within the confines of the novel itself, and outside of it.