HAZEL ROWLEY
had her a lot flashed through his mind. He kissed her again and fel t
the sharp bones of her hip move in a hard and veritable grind. Her
mouth was open and her breath came slow and deep.
631
This is a woman who, like her famous fictional predecessor Madame
Bovary, has just been carrying on in the back seat of her chauffeured vehi–
cle. She is, we understand, using her drunkenness as a pretext; suddenJy she
makes movements that are not limp at all. In the same way that Camus, in
his novel
L'Etranger
(1942) intended the shafts of sunJight and the glint of
the Arab's knife when Meursault kills the Arab, Wright intended every
detail of Mary Dalton's thrusts and grinds.
In the censored published version, the white woman's hips have been
stilled. She is pure passivity, as limp as a rag doll, scarcely conscious. The
whole delicate balance of desire, guilt and responsibility has been altered.
Bigger has become the archetypal black beast pawing the sleeping beauty.
The white woman, once again, has been completely absolved from respon–
sibility. Seemingly minor changes had made
Native
SOI1
a less provocative,
less disturbing novel for white readers.
Four years later, when the galleys of Wright's autobiographical narrative
AlIlerican Hunger
arrived at the Book-of-the-Month Club, typeset and
ready for publication, the selection committee again liked the manuscript.
Or so they said. In fact, they liked some of the manuscript. They approved
of the first part, called "Southern Night," about Wright's formative years
amid Southern racist terror. But the second part of the manuscript (the last
third), about Wright's initiation into the white world through communist
circles in Chicago, was an indictment of racism in the North. The ending
was a passionate call for struggle: "If this country can't find its way to a
human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense oflife, then all of
us, black as well as whi te, are going down the same drain."
The judges told Wright they would consider the book if he left off the
second part. Nor did they approve of the title,
American Hunger.
Their sug–
gestion , thoroughly innocuous, was
First Chapter.
And they wanted Wright
to add a few pages
to
the ending of the first part, "Southern Night," con–
cluding the narrative on a more hopeful note.
The Chicago section served an important function: Richard Wright
wanted to show racism in the United States generally, not just the South.
His title,
American Hunger,
referred to the physical and spiritual hunger of
black people in America. He had no interest in ending his narrative on a
false note of resolution. Nevertheless, pressured by his publishers as well by
this stage, he consented to ending the book when he left the South.
