584
PARTISAN REVIEW
H errenvolk
makes a truly "new" society impossible to conceive. What
is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear,
in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed
at all or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places. But,
finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of
status, acceptance within the present commu·nity. Thus, the African,
exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on
his knees before that God in Whom he must now believe; who had
made him, but not in His image. This tableau, this impossibility,
is
the heritage of the Negro in America:
Wash me,
cried the slave to
his Maker,
and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!
For black is the
color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white. It is this cry,
implacable on the air and in the skull, that he must live with. Beneath
the widely published catalogue of brutality-bringing to mind, some–
how, an image, a memory of church-bells burdening the air-is
this
reality which in the same nightmare notion, he both flees and rushes
to embrace. In America, now, this country devoted to the death of
the paradox-which may, therefore, be put to death by one-his lot
is as ambiguous as a tableau by Kafka. To flee or not, to move or
not, it is all the same, his doom is written on his forehead, it is carried
in his heart. In
Native Son,
Bigger Thomas stands on a Chicago street
corner watching air-planes flown by white men racing against the sun
and "Goddamn" he says, the bitterness bubbling up like blood, re–
membering a million indignities, the terrible, r,at-infested house, the
humiliation of home-relief, the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, hating
it; hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire. All of
Bigger's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And
later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies,
having come, through this violence, we are told, for the first time,
to a kind of life, having for the first time redeemed his manhood.
Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a conti–
nuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to
destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly
opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems
that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England
woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battIe; the one utter–
ing merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses. And, indeed,
within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and
