HAZEL ROWLEY
The Shadow of the White Woman:
Richard Wright and the
Book-of-the-Month Club
From the time he first put pen to paper, Richard Wright became a signifier
for race. No issue is more emotionally charged. What he wrote about, and
what Wright himself symbolizes, generates so much passion that it is
scarcely possible to see him or his work through the steam. His art has
been consistently reduced to statements. The man himself has been
stripped of his ambiguity and complexity.
The surviving drafts of Wright's works in the Beinecke Library at
Yale, as well as his unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, reveal the
almost impossible context in which he was writing. The conflicting forces
were such that the Richard Wright we know is a censored, mediated, pack–
aged Richard Wright. Like a ball of wool, there is a complex tangle of
threads wound around Wright's work and its reception. It is not easy to
disentangle.
Wright passionately believed in the revolutionary potential of writing;
his words were going to "tell" and "march" and "fight." Seeing himself as
a mediator between cultures, he aimed to "build a bridge of words"
between the black and white worlds he inhabited. And yet, in order to
conunit words to paper at all, Wright had to shut out the clamor of
protesting voices inside hi s head. As Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out in
((Qu'est-ce que La litterature"
(1947), Richard Wright was writing for a "split
public," one black, one white, and this gave his every word, his every
phrase, an " incomparable tension." Rem.iniscent of Virginia Woolf's strug–
gle with "the angel in the house," Richard Wright comments in his essay
"How 'Bigger' Was Born": " I felt a mental censor...standing over me,
draped in white, warning me not to write." There were black censors out
there too, not just white, and there were real censors, not just those in the
head.
Wright wanted to tell the truth, as he saw it, and he wanted to be crit–
ical, like any other good writer, but since he was writing about the charged
issue of race, these aspirations had repercussions quite outside his control.
There was the difficulty of criticizing blacks. In an interview shortly before
