HAZEL ROWLEY
629
than any other of the Book-of-the-Month Club judges, took it upon her–
self to "improve"
Native Son
and
Black Boy.
What this meant, essentially,
was to make them into narratives that were less shocking to white readers.
With
Native Son,
the selection committee asked for some deletions.
Nothing major. They wanted some of the Oab cut out of the speeches in
the trial scene, and since this scene was longwinded and highly didactic,
this was on the whole a good thing. But the cuts they asked for in the early
expository sections had nothing to do with longwindedness.
The question that looms large in the novel is that of Bigger Thomas's
guilt. Just how guilty is he? He inadvertently kills a white woman, and he
willfully murders his black girlfriend, Bessie. The episode that sets off this
train of disasters is a scene between Bigger and Mary-a scene that burns
itself into the reader's imagination because it deliberately hovers around the
edges of an issue primordial in race mythology: the alleged rape of a white
woman by a black man.
It
is Bigger's terror at being falsely accused of this
crime that causes him to silence the white woman by smothering her with
a pillow. But what if the shadowy figure of Mrs. Dalton, Mary's mother,
had not hovered in the doorway at that point? What if Bigger had kept his
hands on Mary's breasts? Would he have raped her?
If Wright was to challenge this racist stereotype rather than reinforce
it, it was crucial that his readers understood that Mary Dalton desired her
black chauffeur every bit as much as he desired her-if not more so. The
build-up of Mary Dalton's somewhat wanton sexuality is every bit as
important as the build-up of Bigger as a highly libidinous young man. By
modifYing what they called Wright's "savage frankness" when it came to
sex, the Book-of-the-Month Club judges upset the novel's delicate balance.
It is true that Wright was testing the boundaries of 1930s literary real–
ism in an early scene (some twenty-five years ahead of its time) which was
a graphic portrayal of two boys masturbating. No sooner has Bigger seat–
ed himself in the darkened movie theatre than he starts "polishing [his]
nightstick." His friend Jack races him to orgasm. In the background the
pipe organ is playing; otherwise, Wright leaves little to metaphor.
It
is a
credit to Wright's publisher, Ed Aswell, that he was prepared to leave in
this scene, though he found it "a bit on the raw side." There was, admit–
tedly , less at stake for him: he was publishing the book, not promoting it,
in his own name, to the one hundred thousand members of the Book-of–
the-Month CI ub.
After Canfield Fisher and her colleagues had gone through the man–
uscript with their editing pencil, the masturbation scene disappeared
completely. So did the newsreel that then came on, which to Bigger's
surprise, featured Mary Dalton (the daughter of his future employer) and
her boyfriend, barelegged and kissing on a gleaming Florida beach. Bigger
