MANY THOUSANDS GONE
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that community of phantoms which is our tenaciously held ideal of
the happy social life. It is the socially conscious whites who receive
him-the Negroes being capable of no such objectivity-and we
have, by way of illustration, that lamentable scene in which Jan,
Mary's lover, forgives him for her murder; and, carrying the explicit
burden of the novel, Max's long speech to the jury. This speech,
which really ends the book, is one of the most desperate performances
in American fiction. It is the question of Bigger's humanity which is
at stake, the relationship in which he stands to all other Americans–
and, by implication, to all people- and it is precisely this question
which it cannot clarify, with which it cannot, in fact, come to
any coherent terms. He is the monster created by the American
republic, the present awful sum of generations of oppression; but
to say that he is a monster is to fall into the trap of making
him
subhuman ,and he must, therefore, be made representative of a way
of life which is real and human in precise ratio to the degree to which
it seems to us monstrous and strange. It seems to me that this idea
carries, implicitly, a most remarkable confession, that is, that Negro
life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims;
and, further, that the use to which Wright puts this idea can only
proceed from the assumption- not entirely unsound- that Americans,
who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore
no way of assessing the experience
of
others and no way of establish–
ing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own.
The privacy or obscurity of Negro life makes that life capable, in our
imaginations, of producing anything at all; and thus the idea of
Bigger's monstrosity can be presented without fear of contradiction,
since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and
no Negro has the voice.
It
is an idea, which, in the framework of
the novel, is dignified by the possibility it promptly affords of pre–
senting Bigger as the herald of disaster, the danger signal of a more
bitter time to come when not Bigger alone but all his kindred will
rise, in the name of the many thousands who have perished in fire
and flood and by rope and torture, to demand their rightful
vengeance.
But it is not quite fair, it seems to me, to exploit the national
innocence in this way. The idea of Bigger as a warning boomerangs
not only because
it
is quite beyond the limit of probability that
