Native Son.
I first read Richard Wright’s Native Son in college, and its violence, its stakes, its consequences were so outside of the norm of my day-to-day that it totally woke me up. I didn’t know that Black people were allowed to be this angry, and Trump was running for President, and I was living in the heart of Texas—I went to a majority White Southern Baptist school and had just made it out of a very intense evangelical church that, if I’d stayed, would have changed my life’s trajectory in ways that still make me shudder to think about, and yet somehow, here I was, reading as Bigger accidentally smothers a White girl and then burns up her body to keep from getting caught.
I thought it was the most revolutionary book I’d ever read, the most radical. Richard Wright was my hero—never mind that Bigger also kills his Black girlfriend because she’s not playing accomplice well enough. Never mind that Bigger is only allowed to respond to his distress with violence, he too was my hero because if they are so afraid of us—if this is what they think we’re going to do—then how delicious to have a character lean into that, to, instead of trying to prove them wrong, become the nightmare they imagine.
The second time I read Native Son, I found it less badass and more sad. Here was Bigger, offered a way out just to be trapped inside of it. He did what he had to do, but this time it felt less noble to me. I felt the way I did when I watched Doughboy kill his brother’s killers in Boyz n the Hood, like yes, this makes sense—what else could you have done?—but also what kind of life can you have after this? I felt less impressed by the story, but still I loved it for how it gave us Bigger’s point-of-view. We were allowed to hear his thoughts, peek behind the curtain to understand that he was much more man than monster, that he was just trying to hurriedly make sense of his circumstances, and this was the best he could come up with. He—like all of us—was just improvising as he went along. I read Native Son the second time and thought it was frustrating that he was only given bad choices and then condemned for not being good. Now, the story felt more inevitable than revolutionary, but at least Bigger could speak for himself.
When I read Native Son the third time, it was recently, for grad school. This time, I read it after I read the spoof of it in Percival Everett’s Erasure—where he takes the plot and makes it more ridiculous, much less sympathetic. I read Wright’s novel after I read an essay by Ralph Ellison on how he is different than Richard Wright, on how not all Black writers want to be Richard Wright, and on how just because this one White journalist loves Richard Wright doesn’t mean all Black writers are trying to write their own Native Son. I also read it after I read some commentary on the novel by James Baldwin, and he said that Native Son is kind of fatalist (Afropessimist?), that it only sees one way for Black people—Black men especially—to live, and that way is dark, involves killing or being killed, maybe both. Baldwin’s notes seemed to suggest that it was not actually revolutionary to become what they want us to be. I reread Native Son, and this time, I found it less radical and less sad, thought it was playing into what White people want to hear, and maybe this wasn’t the best way forward, maybe it was better to work around their expectations—to not prove them right or prove them wrong but to stop thinking about what they think altogether. I found Native Son harder to read this time, and the last third of the novel, mostly a White lawyer speaking on Bigger’s behalf, made me consider how after all of the effort to decenter Whiteness, there it was, back in the middle of things.
I still appreciate Richard Wright for his audacity and for this early attempt to let Black people—even Black people who are seen as violent and heartless—speak for themselves, share their side of the story. His willingness to have a Black character who is not always on his p’s and q’s is important, but I do wonder why, as Black people, to be published, to be produced, we often have to think of ourselves in relation to Whiteness. We are constantly made to prove them right or wrong in our work, and I guess that gets a little tiring after a while, as a writer and as a reader. I, like many, am ready for more Black stories that are operating outside of the White imagination, stories that are not here to bear a lesson but are there for our own healing or even just for fun—a romp, a daze, a world both ours and not fully uncovered.
Image: Max
Note: Suzan-Lori Parks has a really interesting adaptation of Native Son where Bigger is a bit more of an individual. He still suffers a hard ending, but the ride there is artful.
