Richard Wright’s literary career begins with a lynching and ends with a serial murderer. “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the 1936 story that leads off Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), renders the vicious mob-execution of a young black man falsely accused of rape. A Father’s Law, Wright’s last novel, left unfinished at his unexpected death in 1960 and published this year on the centennial of his birth, centers on a murderer terrorizing the Chicago suburb of Brentwood Park.
In between those bookends lie some of the most violent and disturbing stories in all of American literature — and also the flowering of the American civil-rights movement. It’s not surprising, then, that at an international conference on Wright that I just attended, in France, new questions about the last book kept coming up, along with familiar old ones about Wright’s ambivalent global revolutionary politics and his uncomfortable relationship with the civil-rights movement.
Native Son, Wright’s 1940 best-selling novel about a young black man who kills a white woman by accident and then a black woman on purpose, made him immediately famous and remains a classic. Black Boy, his terrifying 1945 memoir of growing up in the segregated South, became a literary landmark despite his publisher’s amputation of part of the manuscript to eliminate the account of Wright’s flirtation with the Communist Party. Wright also wrote essays, poetry, drama, and travel narratives, but it was by wedding the undecorous realism of naturalist fiction to the experience of a subjugated race that he redirected the course of African-American storytelling. After Native Son, African-American literature embraced not just lonely rural but also urban experience. It also abandoned a longtime reliance on Christian forbearance, meeting fear with anger and resistance.
By calling attention to the frightening conditions facing black people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Wright’s books also helped clear the way for the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the myriad others who fought segregation in the United States in the 1950s and 60s.
But Wright could never join their chorus for integration. He yearned for integration in his writing, certainly. In Black Boy, young Richard looks up hopefully to kind white characters. Some of them help him, and others shy away, fearful of the violent reprisals that awaited white people who helped black people in the segregated South. Bigger Thomas, the young murderer in Native Son, is assigned an idealistic white lawyer, whose emotional connection with his client provides perhaps the only hopeful moment in a bleak book.
Unlike King and his fellow crusaders, Wright never acquired the language to imagine what integration might look like. He created Bigger Thomas before the civil-rights movement coalesced. Bigger is a memorably inarticulate creature of the segregated Chicago ghetto, boiling with unchanneled rage against the white people who restrict his movements, and with hopeless ambition to fly airplanes he can’t even approach, let alone enter. Lacking the ability to articulate what they want, Wright’s characters can only speak — and act — the language of frustration, anger, and violence. Bigger thus fulfills white society’s greatest fear of him, by killing the white woman he works for.
King, on the other hand, used the language of sentiment to express the goal of human connection as the emotional basis for integration. In some of the century’s most memorable rhetoric, he drew repeatedly on family imagery, and his strategy of nonviolent engagement — combining peaceful confrontation with an open appeal to sympathy — reflects that choice. King used family metaphors as a way of underscoring the solidarity among black people in the face of white prejudice, but he also used the family to convey his goal of interracial harmony. Desegregate, he said in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” not because it’s the law but “because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.”
Wright — who knew King and spent a day with him in Paris in 1959 — spoke in a harsher tone. His 1957 collection of essays, published two years after King’s successful Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, was entitled White Man, Listen! Such asperity precluded the sentimental. In “How Bigger Was Born,” given as a speech in 1940 and later published with editions of Native Son, Wright lamented that the sentimentalism he had employed in Uncle Tom’s Children allowed “even bankers’ daughters” to sympathize with the beset characters in the stories and cry over them. His readers, he complained, would read his book and “feel good about it,” instead of feeling a spur to action. Native Son, he vowed, would avoid “the consolation of tears.” So it does, and the result is a gruesome crime story.
Murderous violence, not family harmony, remained at the root of Wright’s emotional lexicon for his entire career. Granted freedom from an oppressive identity by a train accident in which he is presumed killed, the main character of The Outsider (1953) gravitates toward murder. An unemployed executive in Savage Holiday (1954) accidentally locks himself out of his apartment — and events cascade until he, too, becomes a murderer.
Living in self-imposed exile in France, Wright worked feverishly on A Father’s Law through the last summer of his life. A few months before he began the novel, black students in North Carolina began sit-ins at lunch counters that refused to serve them. The protesters endured beatings, arrests, and even dousings with ammonia to carry out one of the civil-rights movement’s iconic acts of civil disobedience.
Wright put A Father’s Law aside in the fall of 1960 to work on revisions to his final collection of short stories, Eight Men (1961), and then died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the end of the year. Julia Wright, her father’s literary executor, arranged for the publication of the incomplete draft of A Father’s Law this year because, she explains in the preface, it may be “faulty, sketchy,” and “sometimes repetitive,” but it’s also “fascinating.” (The book has received mixed reviews.)
A Father’s Law follows a black police chief, Ruddy Turner, who stands as an apparent success story of integration: He has advanced through the police force as “a credit to his race” and lives in a white neighborhood. But beneath his conformity, Ruddy nurses violent fantasies that express long-held desires to “collar smooth, smug, cleanshaven white men,” and he has guilty nightmares of black “roustabouts” trying to cut his throat with razors.
One might imagine such twinned guilt and longing as accumulating through Wright’s career of enraged alienation and then searching for an outlet. “How did one talk of a guilt that came from not doing the things that one wanted so much to do?” Ruddy asks himself. The question may be viewed as Wright’s retrospective on the totality of his own work.
Ruddy is the rare Wright character who fends off the temptation to commit the violent acts he dreams of, although his own son may be performing those acts for him. Assigned to investigate a wave of killings in a white suburb, Ruddy slowly comes to suspect that his son is behind them.
Wright links random murders to a generalized sense of guilt in A Father’s Law. The murders serve as “a kind of language” to express this free-floating angst that moves — as Ruddy’s son, Tommy, a sociology student at the University of Chicago, explains — from individual to society and back again. Ruddy and his police colleagues conclude that the murderer is “a man against the law … in the deepest sense.”
But such opposition to the law comes freighted with ambivalence. For Ruddy himself, the “yearning to take a smashing potshot at society” is coupled with an urgent desire “to be part of that society.” Ruddy is a joiner, then, but he can imagine joining only in terms that also involve destruction. In that respect, he resembles his creator.
African-American writers have shown understandable anger in their work, but few have ever approached Wright’s explosive rage. One has to go back to David Walker’s 1829 Appeal for the kind of carefully crafted yet seething anger that’s present on virtually every page of Wright’s work, whether on display (as in Native Son) or hidden (as in A Father’s Law).
Indeed, Wright’s fiction consistently spotlights people who explode. Crime stories are the natural place for such characters, but A Father’s Law is the only Wright plot that takes the point of view of the police. Wright’s last novel shows that the cops, too, are in constant danger of detonating. Ruddy articulates what amounts to Wright’s worldview: wanting to “hit out at everybody,” yet needing also to “learn to trust life again.” One can read Wright’s oeuvre as a series of statements of that advice, with each book offering it from a different angle.
The wide-ranging discussions at the recent Wright conference confirmed him as a restless thinker, not a movement politician. Wright largely ignored the American civil-rights movement in his writing, dwelling instead during the 1950s on postcolonial conditions in Africa. The conference, held last month at the American University of Paris, brought renewed attention to Wright’s conflicted politics, to his writing during his years in exile in general, and to the critical controversy that attended some of his later work.
James Baldwin attacked Wright after the latter’s death, in “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961), for a willful ignorance of the American “Negro problem.” But Wright’s elemental depictions of the pain, fear, anger, and violence — both physical and emotional — of black Americans helped make Baldwin’s more reflective probing possible. Baldwin knew that: His Notes of a Native Son (1955) pays homage to his predecessor even as it maps new paths through the broken black city.
Ruddy’s son insists in A Father’s Law that “there’s in us something more powerful than love.” Wright put those words in Tommy’s mouth at the same time that King was eloquently insisting that love had the power to reform American society and rescue it from the evil of segregation. Wright longed, in effect, for the civil-rights crusaders to be right, but his writing expressed his continuing skepticism about the movement that was taking place an ocean away. “What can and will conquer,” says Tommy, “are fear and hate.” Such words amount to a direct commentary on the American civil-rights movement, and they unveil Richard Wright in this final novel as an angry and anguished integrationist. Although A Father’s Law was composed near the height of civil-rights activism, it lies outside of the movement’s main currents, with Wright sharing its goals but unable to fully embrace its nonviolent mission.
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University. He is author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, to be published in December by Columbia University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 46, Page B12
