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PARTISAN REVIEW
his death in 1960, he told Georges Charbonnier: "You know, we Negro
artists are in a rather difficult position..
.I
don't want to provide whites
with words to strike at black people. This is a moral trap." And there was
the difficulty of criticizing whites. He told himself: ''I'd be acting out of
fear
if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me."
The problem he almost certainly underestimated was that his fighting
words had to pass muster in what was then the all-white territory of book
publishing.
While Wright was absorbed in the process of creating Bigger
Thomas, the angriest, most violent anti-hero ever to have appeared in
black American literature, he had to fight his anxiety. He wanted to show
that stunting and deforming psychosocial conditions have a stunting
deforming effect on the individual-any individual, whi te or black. But
since Bigger is a black man, Wright worried that whites would see him
as the confirmation of all their prejudices. And he could already hear black
voices protesting: "But, Mr. Wright, there are so many of us who are
not
like Bigger! Why don't you portray in your fiction the best traits of our
race?"
This has been a common response to Wright among black critics. It
is hardly surprising. Bigger played into the stereotype of the semi-social–
ized black man who threatens the established order of white civilization.
His very name, Bigger, deliberately evokes racist terminology. On the sur–
face,
Native Son
appears to confirm the very prejudices wi th which whi te
supremacy propped itself up: here was a black man ready (it seemed) to
rape a whi te woman, kill her and chop her body into pieces to stuff her
into a furnace . Here was a brute prepared to pulverize his black girlfriend
with a brick, then pitch her body down an airshaft.
In a 1946 article called "It's About Time," Langston Hughes wrote
pointedly: "It's about time some Negro writer wrote a good novel about
good
Negroes who do
not
come to a bad end....With all of the millions
of colored people in America who never murder anybody, or rape or get
raped or want to rape, who never lust after white bodies, or cringe before
white stupidity...with all the millions of normal human, lovable colored
folks in the United States, it is about time some Negro writer put some
of them into a book."
Some thirty years later, the African-American writer David Bradley
proclaimed that he hated
Native
SOI1
"with a passion." He too was con–
vinced that the novel "was pandering to whi te expectations." As he put
it: "I myself did not want a nut like Bigger Thomas sitting next to me on
a bus or in a schoolroom, and certainly I did not want him moving in next
door." In Bradley's view, Richard Wright had "sold his people down the
river to make a buck."
