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Native Son

Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. Thomas accidentally kills a white woman at a time when racism is at its peak and he pays the price for it. [1]

For other uses, see Native Son (disambiguation).

Author

English

March 1, 1940

United States

Print (hardback & paperback)

813.52

While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic causation behind them. Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American, since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.


"No American Negro exists", James Baldwin once wrote, "who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull." Frantz Fanon discusses the feeling in his 1952 essay L'expérience vécue du noir (The Fact of Blackness). "In the end", writes Fanon, "Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation." The book was a successful and groundbreaking best seller. However, it was also criticized by Baldwin and others as ultimately advancing Bigger as a stereotype, and not a real character.

Plot summary[edit]

Book One: Fear[edit]

Twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas lives in one room with his brother Buddy, his sister Vera, and their mother. Suddenly, a rat appears. The room turns into a maelstrom, and after a violent chase, Bigger kills the animal with an iron skillet and terrorizes his sister Vera with the dead rat. She faints, and Mrs. Thomas scolds Bigger, who hates his family because they suffer and he cannot do anything about it.


That evening, Bigger has to see Mr. Dalton, a white man, for a new job. Bigger's family depends on him. He would like to leave his responsibilities forever, but when he thinks of what to do, he only sees a blank wall.


Bigger walks to a poolroom and meets his friend, Gus. Bigger tells him that every time he thinks about whites, he feels something terrible will happen to him. They meet other friends, G.H. and Jack, and plan a robbery. They are all afraid of attacking and stealing from a white man, but none of them wants to admit their concerns. Before the robbery, Bigger and Jack go to the movies. They are attracted to the world of wealthy whites in the newsreel and feel strangely moved by the tom-toms and the primitive black people in the film, yet also feel they are equal to those worlds. After the film, Bigger returns to the poolroom and attacks Gus violently, forcing him to lick his blade in a demeaning way to hide Bigger's own cowardice. The fight ends any chance of the robbery's occurring, and Bigger is vaguely conscious that he has done this intentionally.


When he finally gets the job, Bigger does not know how to behave in Dalton's large, luxurious house. Mr. Dalton and his blind wife use strange words. They try to be kind to Bigger, but actually make him uncomfortable; Bigger does not know what they expect of him.


Then their daughter, Mary, enters the room, asks Bigger why he does not belong to a union, and calls her father a "capitalist". Bigger does not know that word and is even more confused and afraid to lose the job. After the conversation, Peggy, an Irish cook, takes Bigger to his room and tells him the Daltons are a nice family, but he must avoid Mary's Communist friends. Bigger has never had a room of his own before.


That night, he drives Mary around and meets her Communist boyfriend Jan. Throughout the evening, Jan and Mary talk to Bigger, oblige him to take them to the diner where his friends are, invite him to sit at their table, and tell him to call them by their first names. Bigger does not know how to respond to their requests and becomes frustrated, as he is simply their chauffeur for the night. At the diner, they buy a bottle of rum. Bigger drives throughout Washington Park, and Jan and Mary drink the rum and make out in the back seat. Jan departs, but Mary is so drunk that Bigger has to carry her to her bedroom when they arrive home. He is terrified someone will see him with her in his arms; however, he cannot resist the temptation of the forbidden, and he kisses her.


Just then, the bedroom door opens, and Mrs. Dalton enters. Bigger knows she is blind but is terrified she will sense him there. Frightened of the consequences if he, a black man, were to be found in Mary's bedroom, he silences Mary by pressing a pillow into her face. Mary claws at Bigger's hands while Mrs. Dalton is in the room, trying to alert Bigger that she cannot breathe. Mrs. Dalton approaches the bed, smells alcohol in the air, scolds her daughter, and leaves. As Bigger removes the pillow, he realizes that Mary has suffocated to death. Bigger starts thinking frantically, and decides he will tell everyone that Jan, her Communist boyfriend, took Mary into the house that night. Thinking it will be better if Mary disappears as she was supposed to leave for Detroit in the morning, he decides in desperation to burn her body in the house's furnace. Her body initially will not fit through the furnace opening, but after decapitating it, Bigger finally manages to put the corpse inside. He adds extra coal to the furnace, leaves the corpse to burn, and goes home.

Book Two: Flight[edit]

Bigger's current girlfriend Bessie Mears suspects him of having done something to Mary. Bigger goes back to work.


Mr. Dalton has hired a private detective, Mr. Britten, who interrogates Bigger accusingly, but Dalton vouches for Bigger. Bigger relates the events of the previous evening in a way calculated to throw suspicion on Jan, knowing Mr. Dalton dislikes Jan because he is a Communist. When Britten finds Jan, he puts the boy and Bigger in the same room and confronts them with their conflicting stories. Jan is surprised by Bigger's story, but offers him help.


Bigger storms away from the Daltons'. He decides to write a false kidnapping note when he discovers that Mr. Dalton owns the rat-infested flat that Bigger's family rents. Bigger slips the note under the Daltons' front door and then returns to his room.


When the Daltons receive the note, they contact the police, who take over the investigation from Britten, and journalists soon arrive at the house. Bigger is afraid, but does not want to leave. In the afternoon, he is ordered to remove the ashes from the furnace and make a new fire. He is terrified and starts poking the ashes with the shovel until the whole room is full of smoke. Furious, one of the journalists takes the shovel and pushes Bigger aside. He immediately finds the remains of Mary's bones and an earring in the furnace, and Bigger flees.


Bigger goes directly to Bessie and tells her the whole story. Bessie realizes that white people will think he raped the girl before killing her. They leave together, but Bigger has to drag Bessie around because she is paralyzed by fear. When they lie down together in an abandoned building, Bigger rapes Bessie and falls asleep. In the morning, he decides he has to kill her in her sleep. He hits Bessie on the head with a brick before throwing her through a window and into an air shaft, then realizes that the money he had taken from Mary's purse was in Bessie's pocket.


Bigger runs through the city. He sees newspaper headlines concerning the crime and overhears various conversations about it. Whites hate him and blacks hate him because he brought shame on the black community. After a wild chase over the rooftops of the city, the police catch him.

Book Three: Fate[edit]

During his first few days in prison, Bigger does not eat, drink, or talk to anyone. Then Jan comes to visit him. He says Bigger has taught him a lot about black and white relationships, and offers him the help of a Communist lawyer named Boris Max. In the long hours that Max and Bigger spend talking, Bigger starts understanding his relationships with his family and with the world. He acknowledges his fury, his need for a future, and his wish for a meaningful life. He reconsiders his attitudes about white people, whether they are aggressive like Britten, or accepting like Jan.


Throughout the trial, the prosecuting team focus primarily on Mary's murder and pay significantly less attention to Bessie's murder. It's also falsely argued that Bigger raped Mary before killing her. Throughout Max's lengthy closing argument, while he doesn't argue that Bigger is innocent, he instead talks about how the white populace intentionally blind themselves to the threat of racial oppression, how the ghettos fueled oppression and crime in the city, and that the court can't sentence Bigger to death since they haven't ever acknowledged that he exists. He urges for them to give him life in prison instead.


Bigger is found guilty and sentenced to death for murder. As his execution draws near, he appears to have come to terms with his fate.

Development[edit]

The Book-of-the-Month Club exerted influence to have Native Son edited. Wright originally had a scene where Bigger and a friend illegally masturbate in a movie theater, and other lines showing that Mary sexually arouses Bigger. Library of America published a restored draft version of the book assembled by editor Arnold Rampersad.[2]

True crime influence[edit]

Wright based aspects of the novel on the 1938 arrest and trial of Robert Nixon, executed in 1939 following a series of "brick bat murders" in Los Angeles and Chicago.[3]

Title[edit]

Native Son was the original title of Chicago writer Nelson Algren's first novel, Somebody in Boots, based on a piece of doggerel about the first Texan. Algren and Wright had met at Chicago's John Reed Club circa 1933 and later worked together at the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago.[4] According to Bettina Drew's 1989 biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, he bequeathed the title "Native Son" to Wright.

Allusions and references in other works[edit]

Films[edit]

Native Son is mentioned in a flashback in the film American History X (1998), when Dennis criticizes his son Derek's teacher for including lessons on African-American literature and affirmative action.


An allusion to the story is presented in part 1 of The Second Renaissance (2003), a short anime film from The Animatrix collection. In this film, a domestic robot named "B1-66ER" is placed on trial for murder. The name is created using Leet Speak.


In the motion picture The Help (2011), the main character (played by Emma Stone) is seen in an oblique camera angle to have a copy of Native Son on her bookshelf.


Film adaptations were released in 1951, 1986 and 2019. The 2019 adaptation was directed by Rashid Johnson and starred Ashton Sanders (as Bigger Thomas), Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson and KiKi Layne.

Literature[edit]

James Baldwin's short story Previous Condition mentions a lead part in a play production of Native Son as "type-casting".


In Cecil Brown's novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969), the protagonist, George Washington, states that he is not fearful, that he is not a "Bigger Thomas".


Native Son is mentioned in Edward Bunker's novel Little Boy Blue (1981) as being read while in solitary confinement by the main character, Alex Hammond, who is said to be greatly fascinated by it.


A large section of Percival Everett's novel Erasure (1999) contains a parody of Native Son, entitled "My Pafology".


A line from the trial speech by Bigger Thomas' lawyer, Boris Max, is woven into the plot of Lemony Snicket's book, The Penultimate Peril (2005): "Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question.... 'Who knows when some slight shock,' he asks, 'disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?' .. So when Mr. Wright asks his question, he might be wondering if a small event, such as a stone dropping into a pond, can cause ripples in the system of the world, and tremble the things that people want, until all this rippling and trembling brings down something enormous,..."[21]


In Ron Suskind's book, A Hope in the Unseen (1998), Native Son is referenced during a discussion the main character takes part in at Brown University.

Music[edit]

Bigger Thomas is mentioned in one of the lyrical hooks of "The Ritual" in Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! (2007).


The U2 song "Vertigo" was called "Native Son" by the band during the recording sessions for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004). The song was originally released digitally as part of Unreleased & Rare, which debuted in The Complete U2 (2004),[22] and later in U2: Medium, Rare & Remastered (2009).

Television[edit]

On the HBO series Brave New Voices, during the 2008 finals, the Chicago team performed a poem called "Lost Count: A Love Story". This poem addresses the youth on youth murder in Chicago and includes the phrase: "Being brown in Bigger Thomas' town".[23]


In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, "Far Beyond the Stars" (1998), Benny Russell cites Native Son as an example of a significant work of African-American literature.


HBO released Native Son, a film adaption of the book, on April 6, 2019. It was directed by Rashid Johnson, starring Ashton Sanders as Bigger Thomas and Kiki Layne as Bessie Mears.

Critical reception[edit]

Critical reception remains mixed given disparities in the perception of Bigger Thomas: "Is he a helpless victim of his environment? A symbol of the proletariat empowered by violence? Is the incompleteness of Bigger's personality a realistic portrayal or an act of bad faith that succumbs to racist caricature?" Audiences were also split along the divide of race and gender: they were forced to choose between sympathizing with a rapist, or condemn him and ignore that he was a victim of systemic racism.[31] Said Ayana Mathis of The New York Times, "I don't imagine many black people would have embraced such a grotesque portrait of themselves. […] What future, what vision is reflected in such a miserable and incompletely realized creature?"[32]


The novel was intended to educate its audience about the black experience in the ghetto. Thus, its intended audience was (and remains) white people. Baldwin called it a "pamphlet in literary disguise," exaggerating characters with the sole purpose of carrying his message. He went on to say that Wright failed because of his "insistence that it is … categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended." Wright exaggerated his characters with the intention of gaining the sympathies of white people, but many of his audiences felt that it perpetuated stereotypes of African Americans with little to no benefit. One of the few successes noted was that the controversial, struggling Bigger Thomas was a strong attack on white people who wanted to be comforted by complacent black characters onstage.

Analysis[edit]

David Bradley wrote in The New York Times that, in his first reading of the novel, while he strongly disliked the work, "It wasn't that Bigger failed as a character, exactly" as Bradley knew of the author's intentions to make Bigger unlikeable, but Bradley felt the author did not succeed in making Bigger symbolize ordinary black men.[33] Upon reading an edition of the book with an introduction, Bradley stated "Suddenly I realized that many readers of Native Son had seen Bigger Thomas as a symbol".[33] Upon researching other writings from the author Bradley interpreted Bigger as Wright's autobiographical view of himself, and Bradley changed his own view to see the work as a tragedy despite Wright initially not meaning for this.[33]


Clyde Taylor, an associate professor of English at Tufts University, criticized Bradley's view, claiming that the analysis failed to perceive how the work "disrupted the accommodation to racism through polite conventions in American social discourse".[34]

African-American literature

Black Boy

Richard Wright

Native Son,  0-06-080977-9

ISBN

Native Son,  0-06-081249-4

ISBN

Native Son (the restored text established by The Library of America),  0-06-083756-X

ISBN

Overview of Native Son at Sparknotes

Wasserman, Jerry (Spring 1976). . Studies in American Fiction. 4 (1). Johns Hopkins University Press: 93-104. doi:10.1353/saf.1976.0019. S2CID 161578578.

"Embracing the Negative: Native Son and Invisible Man"

"The Difficult Lessons of Richard Wright's Native Son" (blog entry) at

Hilary-Holladay.com

at IMDb

Native Son (1951 film)

at IMDb

Native Son (1986 film)

on YouTube

"Screen test for Native Son: Richard Wright as Bigger Thomas"

aired September 6, 2013

Discussion of Native Son on Studio 360

Article on attempted censorship of the book in North Adams, Massachusetts