BOOK EXCERPT: Dancing in the Dark

“There is something about poverty that smells like death,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. “Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.”1 Hurston’s metaphorical language draws our attention less to a social condition than to a state of the soul, a spiritual condition heavy with a sense of illness, decay, and entrapment. Hurston draws her images from nature but she is no naturalist. What interests her most is not the caste or class system that may produce poverty but the feelings of hopelessness that flow from it. Though critics still identify Depression writing with direct, politically engaged social criticism, the work of Hurston and her most powerful rival, Richard Wright, shows how much more is involved.

There is no single work of art or literature that summarizes the deep concern with poverty or the new fascination with the lives of ordinary Americans in the 1930s. The work of documentary photographers like Walker Evans may come the closest, in part because the unvarnished humanity of their subjects seemed to transcend its historical moment. Thanks to the faith in economic individualism and Social Darwinism, the poor had often been blamed for their lack of initiative or their defective morals. But the economic crisis of the thirties drew attention not only to the miserable lot of the poor, but to the daily experience of other people also coping with tough times. Writers and photographers appealed not to middle-class pity or charity but to the widespread fear of falling, the deep sense of insecurity that had corroded the American Dream. The common man became a subject of intense interest at the same time it became a political slogan.

What began with Gold’s Jews without Money in 1930 culminated with the surprising commercial success of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 and Native Son in 1940. The radical novel came of age at the very moment when it was set to expire, undone by the patriotism and prosperity ushered in by the war. In Steinbeck’s book the familiar hero of proletarian fiction, defeated yet dauntless even in death, is replaced by the down-home American family, coming apart, losing its land, yet also learning how the world works, even reconstructing a shattered sense of community as it struggles to survive. Only the pictures of Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, and other photographers for the Farm Security Administration could compete with Steinbeck’s story and its peerless film version in offering vivid images of marginal lives during the Depression.

In this constellation of works that rounded off the decade, Richard Wright’s books occupy a special place, for they brought the Depression home to the cities and highlighted the special disabilities of race, which even the sharecropper images had largely sidestepped. Evans and Agee, avoiding the question of race entirely, portrayed three white tenant families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Native Son, with its thriller plot and visceral violence, its wide circulation thanks to the Book-of-the-Month Club, shocked the nation with bad news about ghetto conditions and black fear and hatred of whites that most Americans had never imagined. It also brought home the inner experience of poverty in an indelible way.

In a decade when many Americans did badly, blacks did worse. The jobs they sought by migrating north throughout the 1920s had disappeared. Some of those jobs fell to poor whites. At the peak of the Depression in the winter of 1932–33, when 25 percent of Americans were unemployed, 50 percent of blacks had no jobs. The Roosevelt administration could not or would not confront such inequities directly because it depended politically on its southern base, but New Deal housing, slum clearance, employment, and relief programs helped, since they were applied without consideration of race. According to the historian William E. Leuchtenburg, “in many areas, Negroes, hit harder than any group by the depression, survived largely because of relief checks.”2 Agricultural subsidies, on the other hand, went only to landowners. Paid to withhold land from cultivation, they often let their black sharecroppers go, worsening the rural Depression for many of their tenants. Efforts to create a tenant farmers’ union were ruthlessly put down by local authorities and night-riding vigilantes. “The New Deal was not to blame for the social system it inherited,” say Leuchtenburg, “but New Deal policies made matters worse. The AAA’s reduction of cotton acreage drove the tenant and the cropper from the land, and the landlords, with the connivance of local AAA committees which they dominated, cheated tenants of their fair share of benefits” (137).

Richard Wright, by contrast, was determined to make not only the condition of blacks but their masked inner lives visible to white Americans, perhaps for the first time. Most directly, in one of the last major works on poverty and the Depression, he described the plight of both rural and urban blacks in the text he wrote to accompany Edwin Rosskam’s extraordinary selection of FSA photographs in 12 Million Black Voices (1941). His commentary covered every phase of black life, but it was especially riveting in describing the typical “kitchenette” of Chicago’s Black Belt, the rat-infested, privacy-deprived, one-room slum apartment that incubates disease, prostitution, and the sullen antisocial violence of a Bigger Thomas.

Thanks to the range and acrid depth of his experience, Wright was uniquely situated to write this book, a collective portrait of black Americans. Born in Mississippi in 1908, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and a schoolteacher mother, he had lived in the rural South, in Mississippi and Arkansas, and in larger cities like Memphis and Jackson before migrating with his family to Chicago in 1927. Poverty and illness kept them on the move. Wright’s father had abandoned the family before Richard turned six, and his mother fell gravely ill two years later, often requiring the care of her parents, her sisters, and her growing children. In Jackson, in Memphis, and later in Chicago, Wright, to provide support for his family, took jobs that exposed him to both the racial oppression of the South and the subtler economic and social segregation of the North; his family’s dire situation finally forced him to leave school after junior high.

In Chicago he became a writer and a Communist, and by the mid-1930s he was a key figure in the city’s vibrant left-wing literary life and the only black supervisor working in Chicago’s WPA Writers Project. He moved to Harlem to work for the party in 1937, but his experiences in the South and in Chicago gave him the material for his three major narrative works. Native Son was preceded by an incendiary collection of long stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and followed by Black Boy (1945), a memoir of growing up in the South. Under the title of American Hunger, the original memoir had gone on to include his northern experiences in Chicago and in the Communist Party, which ended with his disillusionment. But this final third of the book was cut at the urging of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was also responsible for censoring Native Son.

Wright was a classic radical writer, one of the few whose work still reverberates strongly with its passion and bitter intensity. Far from undergoing a conversion from middle-class comfort to middle-class conscience, his own life had made him a social critic. His experience in the party gave him his political education, but it was never free of tension and ambivalence, since the political line of the party never spoke fully to his experience as a black man. He was very much a Communist when he wrote the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, a fierce indictment of the murderously brutal treatment of blacks in the South.

The role of Communists as radical organizers figures prominently in the last two stories of the enlarged edition of 1940, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star.” Local white authorities are convinced that these “outside agitators” have stirred up trouble among their own happy and docile Negroes, and they crack down viciously against any trace of opposition (as they had actually done with organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union). After the Popular Front policy was proclaimed in 1935, the party’s cultural commissars had turned away from the proletarian novel, with its emphasis on class conflict. They toned down their message, gave it a patriotic spin (“Communism is twentieth-century Americanism”), and cultivated alliances with middle-class liberals. But Wright, though by all reports surprisingly gentle in person, was an angry man, and there was every indication that he would become a naturalistic writer in the proletarian mode, a social novelist who would turn his lens on race as well as class.

This bore the seeds of his future troubles with the party, since any stress on race undermined the Communist view that the radical movement should be color-blind. (One of their slogans was “Black and White Unite and Fight.”) This becomes an important issue in “Bright and Morning Star,” since Sue, the heroine, distrusts her two sons’ collaboration with white activists, one of whom, with the loaded name of “Booker,” turns out to be a police spy who betrays them. In his important 1936 manifesto called “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” written at the outset of his career, Wright carefully negotiated this issue of race. Skirting the officially ordained, race-blind emphasis on class issues, he argues, on the one hand, that Negro writing had to be deeply grounded in Negro folklore, which embodied “the collective sense of Negro life in America,” and in Negro social institutions, including the church, the press, the social and business world, and the school system. Conscious of overstepping the party line, determined to avoid the charge of “black chauvinism,” he also insists that “Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it.”3 This suggested that he would not be able to finesse the issue much longer. Even at the height of his Marxist commitment, his break with the party on racial issues looked inevitable.

Uncle Tom’s Children not only illustrates Wright’s ambivalence—the tightrope he was walking as a black Communist—but provides a superb introduction to his strengths and limits as a writer. Though it represents Wright’s apprentice fiction, and its graphic violence at times makes it almost unbearable to read, it remains a cunningly crafted work, especially in its expanded 1940 version. The book loosely follows the template of proletarian fiction, moving its protagonists from sheer blind victimization and desperate flight in the first two stories to rebellion and impassioned conversion in the third and fourth stories and finally to determined, costly opposition in the final tale—a resistance foreshadowed in all the previous stories. The greatest strength of the book is in the physical immediacy of its writing and Wright’s astonishing empathy for the feelings of black people caught in a system that allows them no rights, living among people who accuse them without cause, beat them without mercy, and kill them without compunction or fear of punishment.

Wright is drawn to extreme situations that strain his characters to the breaking point. He found his strength in portraying the physical and mental anguish of people in a state of panic, terror, or entrapment. Typically, he shows, they’re stricken with a sense of numb helplessness. They feel completely overwhelmed; their world has spun out of control: “He felt giddy and a nervous shudder went through him. He rubbed his eyes. Lawd, Ah got fever. His head ached and felt heavy; he wanted sleep and rest.”4 This tells the story of a man caught in a flood, overwhelmed and exhausted by the sheer effort to survive, but his physical ordeal also serves as a metaphor for his besieged life. Besieged by conditions they are unable to control, Wright’s characters feel engulfed as they realize that their fate—rape, sadistic physical punishment, even imminent death—has already overtaken them. To save his family, including his pregnant wife, from the rampaging waters, Mann has stolen a boat, then spontaneously killed the man who tried to claim it. Now he feels completely done in. “Mann rowed: he heard Grannie crying: he felt weak from fear: he had a choking impulse to stop: he felt he was lost because he had shot a white man: he felt there was no use in his rowing any longer: but the current fought the boat and he fought back with the oars” (80–81). This sequence of interlocking phrases, connected only by colons, builds to an unbearable intensity: the very syntax enmeshes this archetypal “Mann” in some iron law of consequences, gripped by a fate he cannot elude.

In these situations Wright’s characters turn passive and numb or else feel impelled to strike out violently, taking their tormentors down with them. As the stories progress, this reflex morphs from a daydream of vengeance to a spontaneous act of violent resistance, however futile. Each of these reactions will be more fully developed in Native Son: not only terror and flight but the defensive, suicidal act of violence that shatters the limits of a lifelong confinement and becomes an act of self-definition. Living under inhuman pressure, Wright’s people rarely choose to kill, but feel no moral compunction for having done so. They kill only when they’re cornered, as if the troubles of a lifetime have converged on a single moment. Theirs is not a moral action based on any rational plan but an existential gesture that sums up and transforms them.

The sequence of stories in Uncle Tom’s Children takes its characters from being victims to becoming agents of their own fate, from a passive sense of helplessness to an authentic if foolhardy gesture of opposition. At first merely instinctive, it soon grows more deliberate, as if to say, as Martin Luther did, “Here I stand, I can do nothing else.” This creates the pattern for Wright’s later fiction, especially Native Son. From story to story the act of resistance takes on a broader meaning, becoming more self-conscious and premeditated. As the mother of two young Communists in the final story, Sue has been threatened and even beaten. One son has already been taken, but she sets out to protect her remaining son’s friends from being exposed to the sheriff and his goons, though she knows it may cost his life, and her own.

She was consumed with a bitter pride. There was nothing on this earth, she felt then, that they could not do to her but that she could take. She stood on a narrow plot of ground from which she would die before she was pushed. And then it was, while standing there feeling warm blood seeping down her throat, that she gave up Johnny-Boy, gave him up to the white folks. She gave him up because they had come tramping into her heart demanding him, thinking they could get him by beating her, thinking they could scare her into making her tell where he was. She gave him up because she wanted them to know that they could not get what they wanted by bluffing and killing. (239–40)

Hurling insults at the sheriff and his minions even as they depart, she goads them into beating her again. Finally, when she learns that this son has been caught, she conceals a gun in a winding sheet, not to protect him but in simple hope of killing the boy before he can be tortured. She also aims to kill some of their persecutors, including the spy who betrayed them, and, most likely, to forfeit her own life in doing so. Wright had once heard such a story—he reported it later in Black Boy—but here he turns it into an almost biblical parable of maternal resistance and self-sacrifice. Like Bigger Thomas in Native Son, but more consciously, more foolishly, more heroically, “she had in her heart the whole meaning of her life; her entire personality was poised on the brink of a total act” (253).

Such passages of fateful choice show us why Richard Wright could not remain a Communist writer, or even a strictly social novelist, as he is still conventionally seen. Wright’s emotional stress on victimization is not compatible with the program of a political party, not even with the bare minimum of activism and optimism required of any radical movement. To authenticate his harsh portrayal of race relations in the South, Wright prefaced the 1940 edition of these stories with a brief memoir, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” offering glimpses of the personal history that would later develop into Black Boy. He describes how his younger self was hemmed in and hounded at every turn by the capricious authority attached to white skin. Thanks to this autobiographical overture, the protagonists of the first two stories, Big Boy (in “Big Boy Leaves Home”) and Mann (in “Down by the Riverside”), become case studies in the workings of Jim Crow ethics, extensions of the real-life author we have just encountered.

These chilling stories are anecdotal but, in Wright’s telling, take on an archetypal power. After trespassing harmlessly with other boys at a swimming hole, Big Boy sees two of his friends shot. In a spontaneous act of self-defense, he takes down the man who killed them. The remaining boys are hunted down by an angry mob, and from his hiding place he sees a boy horribly lynched, though he himself manages to escape. In the next story Mann, caught in the flood, trying only to save his sick and pregnant wife, is also provoked to kill a man who tries to kill them. After losing his wife, he too is hunted down and destroyed. In “Long Black Song,” the third story, we meet Silas, the rare black man who is actually prospering—he owns his farm and is just back from selling his crops. But his world comes apart when he too kills the man (a traveling salesman) who raped his wife while he was away. Under siege, surrounded yet determined to hold out, he goes up in the flames that consume his home. In a sense he commits suicide as a form of moral reckoning, the desperate act of a man who has nothing more to lose.

There can be no doubt that blacks were treated miserably in the South, subjected to an iron caste system that gave them no recourse to the law, with periodic lynchings to keep them in their place. Yet these stories are also fueled by paranoia, rage, nauseatingly vivid violence, and a self-destructive stoicism that owes more to Christianity than to Marxism. Wright exposes the racial sickness of the South with a feverish loathing that limits the range of his work and constricts the humanity of his characters. Surely the worst feature of proletarian writing is not the predictable formulas—Wright’s work transcends these—and not the sacrifice of a complex world on the altar of social protest, but the surprising fatalism, the ideologically enforced pattern of victimization, which Wright’s stories exemplify yet struggle to overcome. Having killed the oily intruder who preyed on his wife, even as she tried to stop him from exacting vengeance, Silas (in “Long Black Song”) sees that he has thrown away everything he worked for: his home, his land, his wife and child, his own life. Done in as much by his hatred of white people as by what they have done to him, he has “a deep and final sense that now it was all over and nothing could make any difference.”

Silas voices one of the themes of the book: “The white folks ain never gimme a chance! They ain never give no black man a chance! There ain nothin in yo whole life yuh kin keep from em! They take yo lan! They take yo freedom! They take yo women! N then they take yo life!” His only resolve is that “Ef Gawd lets me live Ahm gonna make em feel it!” (152–53). Silas’s point has already been made by his helpless wife, who, like Euripides’ Trojan women, serves as the chorus helplessly observing the fatal last act of the drama: “Dimly she saw in her mind a picture of men killing and being killed. White men killed the black men and black men killed the white. White men killed the black men because they could, and the black men killed the white men to keep from being killed” (146–47). Once again, the rolling rhythm of Wright’s style projects an aura of inevitability, a sense of fate at once Greek and Faulknerian. “When the killing started,” she sees, “it went on, like a red river flowing. Oh, she felt sorry for Silas! Silas. He was following that long river of blood. And he did not want to die; she knew he hated dying by the way he talked of it. Yet he followed the old river of blood, knowing that it meant nothing” (153–54).

Intent on showing how people like Silas and Sue surrender their lives to exact revenge and recover a morsel of their dignity, Wright introduces, but fails to pursue, motifs that would complicate this picture. Silas’s wife not only stands apart from his resistance; she herself did not entirely resist her white attacker, for he excited her sexually and may have reminded her of another man she loved before marrying the solid, dependable Silas. In the concluding story, Sue’s most convincing moments come when she feels poignant maternal pangs about losing her sons, not when she courts martyrdom for the sake of an abstract goal. On the surface her goal seems to be radical solidarity, the defense of a political cause to which her sons have introduced her, despite her skepticism. In fact, her goal is Wright’s own, metaphysical, existential; he pushes her to an act of violent self-affirmation that would lay the groundwork for Bigger Thomas in Native Son. So we learn that Sue has her back to the wall but, even more than with Silas, “her entire personality was poised on the brink of a total act.”

In both Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, Wright takes the radical conversion plot of proletarian fiction and transforms it almost beyond recognition. The old pattern can be seen in the fourth story, “Fire and Cloud,” which centers on Taylor, a minister who has always gotten along with local white leaders and enjoyed their condescending respect. He sees himself as a man with a calling, a black Moses shepherding his people and leading them to salvation. But his people are hungry; they live beneath a yoke worsened by the Depression. The white authorities want him to disavow a protest march being organized by Communists; when he is unwilling to do so, they treat him with overt contempt. He has long been their lackey and now he knows it, temporizing, bowing and scraping before their brutal authority. Eventually, in the dark of night, he is kidnapped and mercilessly beaten, then forced to his knees in a mockery of prayer. But he is also transformed by his own powers of stoic endurance. Taylor realizes he has spent his whole life on his knees, “a-beggin and a-pleadin wid the white folks. N all they gimme wuz crumbs! All they did wuz kick me! N then they come wida gun n ast me t give mah own soul! N ef Ah so much as talk lika man they try to kill me.” (209). This blinding realization does not turn him into a Communist; like Wright in his “Blueprint,” his loyalty is “wid the people. Its the people! Theys the ones that mus be real t us! Gawds wid the people! N the peoples gotta be real as Gawd t us!” (210). His children, the next generation, reject the old-time religion, as Wright did, but he has somehow fashioned his own synthesis of Christianity, political resistance, and black populism. “He was the same man, but he was coming back somehow changed” (212).

Superficially, Reverend Taylor’s and Sue’s conversion to the militant stance of the younger generation seems stereotyped and predictable, a cliché of the radical writing of the 1930s. Wright fashions an argument for Communism that uneasily assimilates elements of Christian spirituality and Negro nationalism. But nowhere is the ground more clearly laid for his later differences with the party than in the gruesome, gut-wrenching violence of these last two stories, for they tap into a rage that cannot be contained by any party program, certainly not one as shifting and tactical as the agenda of the American Communist Party. All through Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, white people not only are malignant and unspeakably evil but appear to blacks like Sue as “a vast white blur” that looms over them, an undifferentiated force that has always dominated their lives. To Sue the treacherous Booker takes on the look of a “huge white face” that conjures up “the fear of all the white faces she had ever seen in her life” (242). In Native Son whites appear to Bigger Thomas as “two vast looming white walls,” their faces little more than “white discs of danger.” Wright’s black characters take in these faces as an undifferentiated menace, scarcely human, a wall or mountain that presses in upon them.

When they beat Taylor and Sue to punish and intimidate them, when they torture Sue’s son Johnny-Boy to make him talk, first breaking each of his knees, then bursting his eardrums as his mother looks on, whites become stick figures of beastliness, lacking any trace of pity or humanity. The history of race relations yields up many such sadistic tales, but literature demands something subtler than cartoonish villainy: a treatment complicated by insight into motive and meaning. A literature focused on victims obscures any human grasp of those who torment them. Though many of Wright’s readers, including Eleanor Roosevelt, found this violence exceptionally disturbing, Wright felt he had let them off too easily and was determined to be tougher next time. “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without consolation of tears.”5

Wright accomplished this by substituting the ambiguous, at times despicable figure of Bigger Thomas—a man no one could weep over—for victim-heroes like Silas, Taylor, and Sue, humble yet noble figures who elicit pathos and admiration. Though the writing of Uncle Tom’s Children had been rich with sensory detail, its roots lay in the bone-crushing violence of hard-boiled fiction in the 1930s. The new tough-guy writers like Dashiell Hammett and other contributors to Black Mask, along with crime writers like
W. R. Burnett (author of Little Caesar) and James M. Cain (author of The Postman Always Rings Twice), were the proletarians’ dark twin, peopling their work with drifters, short-order cooks, and petty criminals in grim, tawdry settings rather than workers and bosses locked in economic conflict. Though many of these writers (like Hammett) were leftists, they pictured a world of double-dealing, violence, and corruption so pervasive that it could hardly be blamed on any economic system or power structure. There was no solution to be found in the revolutionary potential of the party or the working class. The scarcely heroic figure who exposed these conditions—the private detective, the insurance investigator—was often himself implicated in the corruption, and he cleaned house by means that were hard to distinguish from those of the villains. Hammett made this a key theme of his first novel, Red Harvest (1929).

Superficially, Bigger Thomas and his poolroom friends belong to the street-corner society of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1930–35) and the work of Chicago’s new urban sociologists, such as Robert Park. But Richard Wright was also influenced by the tainted protagonists of hard-boiled novels and their thriller plots and lurid situations, as well as sensational cases that made newspaper headlines. Bigger’s sexual attraction to his new employer’s daughter, Mary Dalton; his half-accidental murder of her when he suddenly fears being found in her room; the gruesome dismemberment and burning of her body in the house’s furnace; the terrible suspense Wright builds up, reaching into Bigger’s nerves and bones, as her remains are accidentally discovered; his flight, the even more gratuitous murder of his girlfriend when he fears she might expose him, and his capture within a police cordon that surrounds the black ghetto—all these were the kind of potboiler and tabloid material that Wright brilliantly used for serious purposes. He knew how starkly, how emotionally they would grip his readers.

By way of this sensational plot, Wright would make his white readers see the world through the eyes of a despised, threatening, vulnerable figure. He challenged them to comprehend what made Bigger—which rhymes with “nigger”—the man he was, and why he did what he did. If a young black rapist and murderer was the white reader’s worst nightmare, Wright would sound the depths of his frustration and rage yet show how society had created him. Wright would frighten his readers with the specter of Bigger’s hatred yet finally dare them to understand and even sympathize with him.

French writers like Camus and Sartre were drawn to hard-boiled writing because of its pervasive nihilism; it plunges us into a world untouched by “culture” and conventional values, almost beyond good and evil. Breaking free of all easy psychological explanations, Camus’s affectless hero Meursault (in The Stranger) conveys a sense of weightlessness and marginality. Like Bigger Thomas, he defines himself by a random, arbitrary act, by killing and by being killed. The proletarians and the crime writers were both influenced by Hemingway, especially a story like “The Killers,” but proletarian writers borrowed only his flat, understated manner and undercurrent of violence; the hard-boiled writers understood his deeper pessimism, his sense of nada, of isolated men in a world stripped of stable values and idealistic goals, who could justify themselves only by individual acts of self-definition: acts of courage, grace, brutality, or fortitude. For the French, hard-boiled writing became one of the flash points of existentialism, a scene from which all traditional moral constraints, all idealistic motives and transcendental sources of meaning had been excised. As Camus and Sartre were inventing existentialism with the numb, aimless heroes and flat emotional landscapes of The Stranger and Nausea, Richard Wright arrived at a similar worldview in Native Son, set in the violent black slums of Chicago.

Wright grasped how other writers had put lurid material to serious use, especially Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment. He had a real-life model in the Leopold-Loeb case, in which two wealthy (and gay) young Chicagoans had abducted and killed a boy simply for thrills, putting themselves beyond moral inhibition as they tried to commit the perfect crime. (This case is mentioned several times in Native Son.) He also had a model closer to home in the Nixon case, the story of a Negro on trial for murder in Chicago, who was tried in the press as well, and subsequently executed. In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” the lecture Wright wrote and published soon after the book appeared, he gives many examples of obstreperous young blacks he knew growing up in the South, instinctive rebels who resisted Jim Crow, “bad Niggers” who rebelled and were eventually crushed. Wright stresses that he wanted Bigger to be both an individual and an archetype, a symbol of resistance latent everywhere in the black psyche.

Wright always tried to create representative figures to convey the whole condition of his people. In Uncle Tom’s Children he calls his characters Big Boy and Mann, taking the reader from the innocence and fears of boyhood through the stresses of besieged manhood—a rocky transition for powerless black men—and finally to the hard-won wisdom of older people. In an unusual twist, the elders are forced to learn from the toughness and impatience of their grown-up children as the young try to usher in a different world. As biographers and critics have shown, in writing Black Boy, Wright shapes his memories to turn his past into the prototypical experience of a black boy growing up in the Jim Crow South. In his text for 12 Million Black Voices, which bowled over his young protégé Ralph Ellison, Wright crafts a Whitmanesque prose poem in the first-person plural, trying to speak for his people in a collective black voice. It can be seen even in the sequence of the picture captions:

Our lives are walled with cotton

We plow and plant cotton

We chop cotton

We pick cotton

When Queen Cotton dies

how many of us will die with her?6