Wright was far from sympathetic to the black church. With characters like Bigger’s God-fearing mother, he treats religion as a narcotic that allays black suffering without challenging it, but for 12 Million Black Voices he deploys the hypnotic rhythms of the pulpit to evoke the bare, exposed lives of black people. In a powerful passage on “kitchenettes”—the squalid one-room flats in which families like Bigger’s live—Wright punctuates the stomach-churning photos with a series of staccato paragraphs that continue for seven pages:

The kitchenette blights the personalities of our growing children, disorganizes them, blinds them to hope, creates problems whose effects can be traced in the characters of its child victims for years afterward.

The kitchenette jams our farm girls, while still in their teens, into rooms with men who are restless and stimulated by the noise and lights of the city; and more of our girls have bastard babies than the girls in any other sections of the city.

The kitchenette fills our black boys with longing and restlessness, urging them to run off from home, to join together with other restless black boys in gangs, that brutal form of city courage. (110–11)

This is almost a commentary on the beginning of Native Son, which unfolds in a room exactly like the ones pictured here, with a similar impact on Bigger and his peers.

Wright hit upon the opening scene only after he had written more than half the novel, but it struck exactly the right note. As a piece of urban realism and social criticism, it introduces us not just to the family’s poverty and pinched living conditions but also to Bigger’s violence, rebelliousness, and offhand cruelty. The scene could be described as a rude awakening. It opens with the crude, disruptive sound of an alarm clock; this stands in for the book itself, which Wright hopes will serve as a wake-up call to his genteel readers. The slum building is rat-infested, and the rat that scurries around the room highlights the vulnerability of the family and the squalor in which it is forced to live. But when Bigger chases and kills it we sympathize with the rat, for its trapped situation points us toward the family stuck in this room, the black community locked into the segregated world of the ghetto, and Bigger himself in his later flight from the law. When he is surrounded and hunted down, he will envy the freedom of a rat that can slip easily through a hole in the wall.

But even this scene and the poolroom scenes that follow, all typical of ghetto sociology, introduce touches that will make this novel different. The Bigger who corners and kills the rat, who is surly toward his mother and teases his sister with the rodent’s carcass, is fearless, mischievous, and uncontrollable, a disaster waiting to happen. But he is also a caged animal with few options and a large potential for trouble. “We wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you,” his mother tells him.7 With a spell of reform school already behind him, he is taking a job reluctantly as a chauffeur for the Daltons; if he doesn’t look for work, his family will be thrown off relief. In a limited way, he understands his predicament: “Yes, he could take a job at the Daltons and be miserable, or he could refuse it and starve. It maddened him to think that he did not have a wider choice of action” (456).

But Wright is not content with what Bigger thinks about it; he wants us to understand it in a larger way. So he begins a chorus of explanation that will punctuate the novel, introducing a reflective voice in which the insight of the author, articulate and analytical, fuses with the partial awareness of the character, which pulses through his nerves and muscles rather than his conscious thoughts. Violating a cardinal rule of modern fiction, one he himself underscored as the need “to render, depict, not merely to tell the story” (878), Wright set out to explain and explain and explain, elaborating on Bigger’s point of view in ways Bigger himself could never do. The first of these commentaries comes a few pages after the book begins:

He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fulness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough. (453)

Straining at the limits of Bigger’s conscious awareness—indeed, trying to account for why he closes off his thinking—Wright heightens the reader’s horror—the moral horror, as Wright later described it—at how the family lives. He shifts his subject to the mechanisms of Bigger’s mind, his fear, shame, distance, toughness, and potential for violence.