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PARTISAN REVIEW
Negroes in America will ever achieve the means of wreaking ven–
geance upon the state but also because it cannot be said that they
have any desire to do so.
Native Son
does not convey the altogether
savage paradox of the American Negro's situation, of which the social
reality which we prefer with such hopeful superficiality to study is
but, as it were, the shadow. It is not simply the relationship of op–
pressed to oppressor, of master to slave, nor is it motivated merely
by hatred; it is also, literally and morally, a
blood
relationship, per–
haps the most profound reality of the American experience, and
we cannot begin to unlock it until we accept how very much it con–
tains of the force and anguish and terror of love.
Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country's destiny.
They have no other experience besides their experience on this
continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet
remains to be embraced.
If,
as I believe, no American Negro exists
who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull,
then what most significantly fails to be illuminated here is the
paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made, the Negro being
compelled to accept the fact that this dark and dangerous and un–
loved stranger is part of himself forever. Only this recognition sets
him in any wise free and it is this, this necessary ability to contain and
even, in the most honorable sense of the word, to
exploit
the 'nigger'
which lends to Negro life its high element of the ironic and which
causes the most well-meaning of their American critics to make such
exhilarating errors when attempting to understand them. To present
Bigger as a warning is simply to reinforce the American guilt and
fear concerning
him,
it is most forcefulIy to limit him to that previ–
ously mentioned social arena in which he has no human validity, it
is simply to condemn him to death. For he has always been a warn–
ing, he represents the evil, the sin and suffering which we are com–
pelled to reject. It is useless to say to the courtroom
in
which this
heathen sits on trial that he is their responsibility, their creation, and
his crimes are theirs; and that they ought, therefore, to allow him
to live, to make articulate to himself behind the walls of prison the
meaning of his existence. The meaning of his existence has already
been most adequately expressed, nor does anyone wish, particularly
not in the name of democracy, to think of it any more; as for the
possibility of articulation, it is
this
possibility which above all others
