Big Black Good Man

Richard Wright
1958

Introduction

"Big Black Good Man" was published in French in 1958, three years before Richard Wright's death. It appears in the story collection Eight Men, one of the author's last works. Its themes of suspense, fear, and alienation mark it as typical of Wright's fiction. The story, although not one of the author's better-known works, is included in The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Daniel Halpern and published in 1987.

Author Biography

Richard Wright was born September 4, 1908, on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His father, Nathaniel, was a sharecropper who left the family when Richard was a young boy. His mother, Ella Wilson, was an educated woman who worked as a schoolteacher and a cook. Throughout his childhood, Richard moved often, living at various times with his mother, his maternal grandmother, and other relatives in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He attended school sporadically but was an avid reader.

Wright's first short story was published in 1924 in an African American newspaper, the Southern Register. For a few years, Wright worked at odd jobs and continued to write. In 1927, Wright moved to Chicago. There he wrote articles for Communist Party newspapers as well as short stories, and when Wright moved to New York in 1937, he became editor of the Communist Daily Worker.

Four of Wright's short stories were published in 1938 as a collection entitled Uncle Tom's Children. The following year Wright married Dhimah Rose Meadman. With financial support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, Wright wrote his first novel, Native Son, which was published in 1940. Wright's first marriage was brief, and in 1941 he married Ellen Poplar, with whom he had two daughters. His autobiography, Black Boy, was published in 1945 and became, along with Native Son, his best-known work.

Wright moved his family to Paris, France, in 1946. He became a French citizen and befriended existentialist authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose work influenced his own, especially the novel The Outsiders (1953). In the ensuing years, Wright traveled widely and continued to write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. As the years went by, he suffered increasingly from ill health and financial problems. The story collection Eight Men, in which "Big Black Good Man" first appeared, was among Wright's last works and was published in 1961, after his death.

Wright died in Paris on November 28, 1960. The official cause of death was a heart attack, though rumors that Wright was murdered have persisted through the years.

Plot Summary

"Big Black Good Man" opens on an August night in Copenhagen, Denmark. The year is not specified, but the setting seems to be contemporary with the time of the story's writing, the late 1950s. Olaf Jenson sits in the office in a cheap hotel that caters to sailors and students. Jenson, the night porter, will be sixty years old the next day. He finishes a beer, smokes a cigar, and reflects on his comfortable, unremarkable life.

It is late, and Jenson is about to take a nap when a very large black man opens the office door and asks for a room. Jenson is so taken aback by the man's size that he does not answer until the man repeats his request. Jenson asks if the man is an American (yes) and a sailor (yes). The porter thinks

that, although he is not a bigot, "this particular black man … Well, he didn't seem human. […] There was something about the man's intense blackness and ungamely bigness that frightened and insulted Olaf."

Jenson wants to refuse the man lodging but is afraid to do so. As soon as he agrees to give the man a room, the sailor hands Jenson a roll of fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills to keep in the safe. Wracking his brain for a way to get the man out of the hotel, Jenson plans to tell him that the hotel does not let rooms for one night only. The man, however, says that he is staying five or six nights.

The man refuses to let the elderly porter carry his suitcase, but Jenson shows him to his room. The man asks Jenson to get him whiskey and a woman, which are common requests in this hotel. Still revolted by the man, Jenson returns to the office and reluctantly calls Lena, a prostitute who regularly visits men at the hotel. He warns Lena about the man's size, but she is unconcerned and soon arrives. Jenson worries about her while she is with the man, but she later leaves, first giving Jenson his percentage of her fee.

The next night, the man comes in late and asks for Lena by name. This pattern continues for six nights. Then the man comes to the office to pay his bill and get his money from the safe. The man gives Jenson a tip. Then, instead of leaving, he simply stares at Jenson, who becomes increasingly terrified. Finally, the man commands Jenson to stand up. He then approaches and places his hands around Jenson's neck, grinning. Convinced that he is about to be strangled, Jenson urinates on himself. The man moves his fingers on Jenson's neck gently and then withdraws them. Jenson pleads with the man not to hurt him, and the man replies, "I wouldn't hurt you, boy. So long."

When the man is gone, Jenson weeps out of humiliation, fear, and anger. He wishes that he had killed the man with the gun he keeps in the desk drawer. He calls the hotel owner to say that he is ill, and she comes to take over so that Jenson can go home and change out of his soiled clothes. He lies to his wife also, again saying that he is sick.

For the next year, Jenson fears the man's return and harbors detailed fantasies of revenge. He imagines that the man's ship sinks in a storm and that the man drowns "gasping and choking like a trapped rat." His rotting corpse is eaten by a white shark.

Then, on an August night one year after his first appearance, the man returns. Jenson tells him that there are no rooms available. The man says that he does not want a room. When Jenson asks what he wants, the man grins, opens his suitcase, and takes something out of it. Then he approaches Jenson and again puts his hands around Jenson's neck. Jenson tries to reach the drawer where the gun is, but the man pushes him away from the desk. The man then proclaims, "A perfect fit!" and takes from his suitcase six new white shirts—gifts for Jenson, one for each night that Jenson sent Lena to him.

Jenson becomes hysterical, laughing and crying. The man asks him what is wrong and then tells him to try on a shirt, which Jenson does. Jenson asks the man if it is Lena he wants, adding that she has not returned to the hotel since the man left a year ago. The man answers that he and Lena have been writing and that he is going to her house.

Jenson admits that he thought the man was going to kill him. Incredulous, the man laughs and tells Jenson that he would not hurt him because he, Jenson, is a good man. Jenson tells the man that he is a good man, too, adding, "a big black good man." The man replies, "Daddy-O, you're crazy." As he leaves, Jenson thanks him. The man turns back, grins, and says, "Daddy-O, drop dead."

Characters

Karen Jenson

Karen is Olaf's wife. She appears in the story only in Olaf's thoughts, as conveyed by the narrator. Olaf never talks to her about what happens at the seedy hotel, implying that she is a proper woman.

Olaf Jenson

Olaf is the night porter in the hotel where Jim arrives asking for a room. The story begins on the night before his sixtieth birthday. He is an ordinary man, who is married, owns a home, and likes to garden. As he sits at his desk in the hotel office, he reflects that it would have been nice if he and his wife had had children and if he had saved more money. But, all in all, he is content.

From the moment when Jim first arrives at the hotel, Olaf is overwhelmed by revulsion and terror. It seems to be neither Jim's race nor his size alone that so profoundly affects Olaf but the combination of the two. His reaction to Jim shows his inability to rightly judge people, as he continues to be convinced that Jim is a cruel, threatening man capable of unprovoked violence even though Jim's behavior contradicts this.

Jim

Jim is a black American sailor (on a passenger ship) who arrives at a cheap hotel on the Copenhagen waterfront on the night when the story begins. His clothes and a large roll of cash mark him as well off, but the most remarkable thing about him is his size. He is about six and one-half feet tall and huge in every aspect. The story refers to his "gorillalike arms" and "mammoth hands." As well, Jim's skin is not brown but so black that it has a bluish cast.

Upon his arrival, Jim entrusts Olaf, the night porter, with twenty-six hundred dollars in cash. He also refuses to let the older, much smaller porter carry his suitcase to his room. When he returns a year later, Jim brings Olaf six custom-tailored white shirts—one for each night that Olaf sent the prostitute Lena to him the year before. In contrast to his generous actions, Jim's verbal communication is somewhat ambiguous, giving little clue to his feelings and intentions.

Lena

Lena is a prostitute who regularly visits the sailors who stay at the hotel. It is Lena whom Olaf calls when Jim asks for a woman on the night of his arrival. Lena is a big, strong, blonde, and Olaf thinks that if any woman can handle Jim, it is Lena. He also appreciates that she gives him a larger share of her earnings than the other women do.

Lena has four young children to support and is quite willing to visit Jim. In fact, she visits him on all six nights of his stay, and when Jim returns a year later, he stays at her home. The narrator reveals that Lena never went to the hotel again after the end of Jim's stay there, implying that Jim began supporting her.

Themes

Ambiguity

"Big Black Good Man" is shot through with ambiguity. Wright gives clues to the attitudes and intentions of Olaf and Jim, but some of these clues are contradictory so that, all in all, they lead to question marks in readers' minds. The narrator reports that Olaf is not racially prejudiced and provides some evidence to support this statement: Olaf regularly provides rooms at the hotel for men of all races. Yet Olaf's negative reaction to Jim is extreme and unrelenting, and the terms that the narrator, speaking from Olaf's point of view, uses to describe Jim are clearly racist. Throughout the story Jim is referred to as a "black beast" with animal qualities—"gorillalike arms" and "mammoth hands." Further, Olaf feels that if Jim's skin were brown rather than black, Jim would not convey the same horror.

Jim is equally ambiguous. Most of his actions toward Olaf speak of a trusting and courteous man. He gives Olaf a large sum of money for safekeeping and does not ask for a receipt. He refuses to let the elderly porter carry his suitcase. Yet, as he checks out of the hotel, he places his hands around Olaf's neck without asking permission or explaining his purpose. Most people would feel threatened by such an action, especially given Jim's size, regardless of his race.

The result of this layered ambiguity is that readers' own attitudes and experiences come into play as they attempt to interpret the two characters. At the end of the story, when both characters are finally revealed more clearly, readers also see clearly how their own interpretations colored the men—accurately or not. The term "interactive" probably had not been coined at the time this story was written, but the author's carefully crafted ambiguity makes it an authentically interactive story.

Racially Based Fear and Alienation

This story shares with much of Wright's fiction the theme of fear and alienation growing out of racial differences. The alienation is one-sided; Jim seems completely comfortable with Olaf. Olaf, on the other hand, has a horror of Jim that seems to stem mostly from his blackness. The old porter may well have been intimidated by any man as large as Jim, but it is hard to imagine that his revulsion and fear could have been as lasting and as extreme if Jim had not been black. Again, this impression is supported by the words the narrator uses to describe Jim as Olaf sees him. These words convey that Olaf sees Jim as something less than human and as someone who therefore cannot be counted on to have human thought processes and responses. To Olaf, Jim is a beast who may kill him in a fit of unprovoked rage.

Olaf's baseless, relentless fear of Jim is echoed in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century studies that find that many white people are afraid of, or at least suspicious of, black men in situations where they are not afraid of white men. It is a long-known fact of human nature that human beings generally react negatively to people who are different from themselves. Further, race has been shown to be a difference that many people find particularly threatening. These facts are the central realities of Wright's story.

Style

Point of View

"Big Black Good Man" has a third-person narrator who tells the story from Olaf Jenson's point of view. The narrator is privy to Olaf's thoughts but not to Jim's. Through this device, Jim's thoughts and intentions remain as much a mystery to readers as they are to Olaf. This means that readers see Jim through Olaf's eyes and at the same time through the lens of their own experiences and attitudes. The result is a heightening of tension and suspense. On one level, the reader gets caught up in Olaf's blind fear of Jim. At the same time, the reader stands outside the story and so has a different, more detached perspective. Depending upon his or her own race, age, and attitudes, the reader may have responses that closely match Olaf's or that conflict with them. Readers, therefore, struggle to resolve not only the tension between Olaf and Jim but also the tension between Olaf's attitudes and their own. The question of who is right about Jim—Olaf, or the reader, or both, or neither—looms larger and larger as the story progresses, and Jim remains (until the very end) a towering uncertainty.

If the narrator revealed Jim's thoughts throughout the story, the suspense would be greatly reduced. Readers would never be required to confront their own responses to Jim or to wrestle with the question of whether or not Olaf's responses were warranted.

Figurative Language

The story is rich in figurative language, particularly in similes and metaphors that emphasize Olaf's view of Jim as something inhuman. When Jim first appears, the narrator describes him as Olaf sees him: "His chest bulged like a barrel; his rocklike and humped shoulders hinted of mountain ridges; the stomach ballooned like a threatening stone; and the legs were like telephone poles." In these phrases, Jim is a force of nature or an inanimate object. In many other descriptions, he is an animal, with a "buffalolike head," a neck "like a bull's," "gorillalike arms," "mammoth hands," and so on. Jim is repeatedly described as anything and everything except a human being.

One especially interesting use of figurative language occurs when Lena's first visit to Jim's room is described as an "errand of mercy." The phrase stands out, since the narrator does not generally use euphemistic language to describe the tawdry goings-on at the hotel. Lena is called a whore, not a call girl, and the woman who owns the hotel is a "hard-bitten [b——]." The lone euphemism "errand of mercy" is unexpected and humorous in such gritty company.

Topics for Further Study

• Jim, who is a sailor on a passenger ship, is well dressed and carries a large amount of cash. Do some research to find out what passenger ships were like in the days before air travel. Is Jim's affluence realistic? What might have been his job on the ship?
• Jim's final words at the end of the story—"Daddy-O, drop dead"—are ambiguous, especially since he "flashed a grin" as he said them. What do you think Jim was thinking and feeling at that moment?
• Discuss the three women who appear or are mentioned in the story. What character types do they represent? What do they have in common with one another, and how are they different?
• What possible reasons might Wright have had for setting the story in Copenhagen? What role does the setting play in the story's mood and effectiveness? Do you think another location would have been more effective?
• Wright implies more about Jim and Lena's relationship than he explains. What can you infer about their relationship, and what clues allow you to make these inferences? What do you think will happen between them in the future?

Historical Context

Harlem Renaissance

Scholars are divided as to whether Wright should be considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, but all agree that his work was powerfully influenced by the cultural movement that was ending just as Wright's career was beginning. After World War I, the Harlem neighborhood of New York City was home to more African Americans than any other urban area in the United States. It soon became a cultural epicenter where musicians, artists, and writers thrived. The impact of what became known as the Harlem Renaissance was magnified by the fact that white audiences embraced its artists and their works. For the first time, large numbers of white Americans supported African American artists by listening to their music in nightclubs and by reading their literary works. It was a time when a broad spectrum of Americans learned about and came to appreciate African American culture.

Wright moved to Harlem from Chicago in 1937 and was part of the area's literary community by virtue of his position as the editor of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. He met and was influenced by some of the leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

American Artists in Europe

Another phenomenon that began after World War I and continued through much of the twentieth century was the popularity of Europe—particularly France—among American artists and writers. Artists of all races were attracted to France by its rich cultural history and by its high regard for artists and the arts. In addition, African Americans found that they faced much less racial prejudice in France and other parts of Europe than they did at home. Many jazz musicians and singers, artists, and writers, Wright among them, became expatriates, remaining in France for the rest of their lives. Some returned to the United States, temporarily or permanently, when Europe was ravaged by World War II. Harlem Renaissance painter William H. Johnson, for example, spent about fifteen years living in France and traveling throughout Europe before returning to New York in 1939.

Compare & Contrast

• 1950s: A man like Olaf, who is sixty years old, is considered quite elderly, since the life expectancy for men who were born at or before the beginning of the twentieth century is less than fifty years.
  Today: In developed nations, the average life expectancy for men is about seventy-five, and a man of sixty has not yet reached retirement age.
• 1950s: Europe is still recovering from the economic effects of World War II, while the United States is experiencing unprecedented prosperity. Americans are rich compared to Europeans, as evidenced by Jim's clothing, his roll of cash, and his generous gift to Olaf.
  Today: Americans continue to be among the wealthiest people on earth and to have a higher standard of living than Europeans. Although the economic slowdown in the first years of the new millennium has been a global event, the American economy has proved more resilient than those of European nations. Low interest rates and high productivity have minimized the impact of the slowdown on Americans' standard of living.
• 1950s: Jazz musicians are the source of popular slang terms such as "Daddy-O," which is what Jim calls Olaf.
  Today: Hip-hop musicians are the source of popular slang terms. An African American man might use the slang term "Money" to refer to a man whose name he does not know.

Critical Overview

Eight Men, the collection in which "Big Black Good Man" first appeared, was published after Wright's death and contains some of his last writing. The volume is not considered to be among Wright's most important work, and within the volume, "Big Black Good Man" is not considered to be among the strongest stories.

Most critics were disappointed with Eight Men when it first appeared, judging the stories inferior to Wright's earlier fiction. One exception was Irving Howe, according to an article by Yoshinobu Hakutani in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 102, American Short-Story Writers, 1910–1945. Hakutani quotes Howe as writing that "Big Black Good Man" shows "a strong feeling for the compactness of the story as a form…. When the language is scraggly or leaden there is a sharply articulated pattern or event."

Considering the story collection in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 76, Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, Edward D. Clark writes, "The works in Eight Men display the variety and development in Wright's literary and thematic skills. Clark calls "Big Black Good Man" "one of Wright's few humorous stories" and notes that it "develops the theme of black pride through the adventures of a black sailor."

Clark concludes his overview of Wright's work by declaring that Wright is "undeniably one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century," noting that Wright's writing has been translated and read around the world. According to Clark, "no black writer between Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has offered so moving a testimony and delivered so scathing an indictment of America's racial dilemmas to so large an audience as has Richard Wright."

Criticism

Candyce Norvell

Norvell is an independent educational writer who specializes in English and literature. In this essay, Norvell discusses three types of conflict in Richard Wright's story "Big Black Good Man."

Much of Richard Wright's fiction can correctly be said to be about race. His early stories and novels deal with the experiences of African Americans both in the North and in the South, within their own communities as well as in their relationships with white individuals and white institutions. It is easy, then, to categorize "Big Black Good Man" as a story about race, particularly since it is the story of a relationship between a black man and a white man. It is not wrong to say that "Big Black Good Man" is about race, but it is not the whole story either. In a mere ten pages, Wright has managed to tell a story about race, a story about maleness, and a story about the nature of goodness.

Clearly, race is a central concern of the story. It is perhaps not coincidental that "Big Black Good Man" is set in the far northern reaches of Europe, in a land of blue-eyed blonds that in every way is about as far from Africa as it is possible to get. The narrator of "Big Black Good Man" comments repeatedly that Jim is the blackest of black men. That he is blue-black, and not brown, is one thing about Jim that disturbs Olaf. The narrator never mentions, however, that Olaf is surely the whitest of the white, just as Jim is the blackest of the black. The two men are not just members of different races, they are the extremes of different races.

Although Olaf repeatedly protests that he is not a racist, it is clear that he is. One place where this becomes evident is in Olaf's gory fantasy of Jim's being drowned and eaten by a shark. The only guilt Olaf feels about the fantasy comes when he thinks about the fact that "many innocent people, women and children, all white and blonde" would die along with Jim when his ship went down. Not only does Olaf value the lives of white people above those of black people, he views Jim as something less than human because of his extreme blackness. The narrator, describing Jim through Olaf's eyes, never refers to Jim by name. Readers only know Jim's name because he tells Olaf to write "Jim" on the roll of cash that he asks Olaf to keep for him. Although Olaf knows Jim's name from that point on, he never uses it. Instead, he consistently likens Jim to an animal or an inanimate object. Jim is a "black beast." Various parts of Jim's body are described as being like rocks, mountain ridges, telephone poles; like parts of bulls, gorillas, mammoths, and more.

Olaf's horror of Jim—his complete misreading of Jim—stems largely from his racist assumption that since Jim is absolutely black, he cannot possibly be human. He must be a brute beast who does not know or care that it would be wrong to murder a defenseless old man. Olaf believes that Jim does not need a reason to kill; violence for the sheer thrill of it must be his nature.

The white man, therefore, is superstitious about race, equating black skin with all that is primitive and dangerous. The black man, on the other hand, is portrayed as being color blind. Olaf's whiteness seems to have no significance to Jim. What the black man notices about Olaf is his age (he refuses to let the old porter carry his suitcase), not his race. One clear message of the story is that the white man is a racist but the black man is not.

But race is only one point of conflict between the two men. Their maleness, and the competitiveness that is a part of maleness, is another. Olaf sees Jim as an adversary and a threat not only because he is black but also because he is bigger, stronger, and more successful. As the story opens, Olaf, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, is reviewing and evaluating his life. Readers learn that he was a sailor, that he has a wife but no children, and that he owns a home but has little money to see him through the last years of his life. The reason for Olaf's childlessness is not explained. He may or may not be impotent in the sexual sense, but he is portrayed, generally, as a man who, while not a failure, has not amounted to much.

As soon as readers have been given this information about Olaf, Jim appears. While Olaf is a physically small man who is well past his physical prime, Jim is much younger, much larger, and also obviously quite strong. As Olaf once was, Jim is a sailor. Unlike Olaf, though, Jim has done well financially. Olaf is confronted with Jim's affluence, first in the form of his expensive clothing and shoes and next in the form of a large roll of cash. The roll contains twenty-six hundred dollars in fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills. This amount was worth much more in the 1950s, when the story was written, than it would be in the early 2000s, of course. It is quite possible that Olaf had never before seen that much money at one time. It is even possible that Jim's roll of ready cash represented more money than Olaf had saved after a lifetime of work.

Wright therefore reveals much about the two main characters and leaves it up to readers to reflect on how the facts influence the men's attitudes toward each other. Jim does not know all that readers know about Olaf, but much is easily inferred. The old man is working as a night porter in a cheap hotel instead of being comfortably retired. Jim shows Olaf a modicum of courtesy and trust, but not respect. In deference to Olaf's age and size, Jim carries his own suitcase when Olaf leads him to his room. He trusts Olaf to label and keep a large amount of money. But Jim calls Olaf "boy" and, later, "Daddy-O." The narrator more than once describes Olaf's chafing at Jim's confident manner. Jim has every expectation that Olaf will do as Jim tells him to. To put it another way, Jim is secure in

the knowledge that he is the more successful and powerful man, and this security shows in his classist actions toward Olaf. Conversely, Olaf is aware of his own relative smallness and powerlessness—an awareness that greatly inflames Olaf's hatred of Jim. On this level, the conflict in the story is a conflict between two males and one that would exist regardless of the men's races. Even if Jim were white, his far greater strength and success would have been an affront to Olaf. It is understandable for a man to compare himself to other men, especially in terms of physical prowess and financial success. And it makes sense that the man who grasps his own inferiority would despise the man who is his better.

As was true of the racial conflict, this conflict between males is one-sided. Because of Olaf's age and low social position, Jim does not have any interest in Olaf beyond acknowledging that he deserves, as a human being and as an elderly person, to be treated with decency. Olaf, on the other hand, is obsessed with Jim and feels slighted by his every word and gesture.

The third level of conflict in "Big Black Good Man" is the most basic and universal: the conflict between good and evil. On this level, too, Wright provides readers with certain facts about each man. Olaf lives a quiet, settled life with his wife. Out of respect for her, he never tells her about the unsavory events that routinely occur at the hotel. Even in his old age, he works to support himself and his wife. He limits his drinking, deciding on the first night of the story to take a nap rather than have another beer. He worries about Lena's safety on the night of her first visit to Jim. All of these are hallmarks of a "good" man.

Jim, by contrast, does not seem to be married or to live a settled life. He spends every night with a prostitute, and every night he drinks an entire bottle of whiskey. Many people, even those who are completely free of racial prejudice, would be inclined to judge Olaf as a "good" man and Jim as a "bad" one. But the story asks readers to consider whether traditional gauges of morality, such as sexual behavior, are really accurate measures of a man's goodness. It demonstrates that a man may live a conventionally moral life and still walk around seething with hate toward another man who has done him no harm.

At the end of the story, Jim tells Olaf that Olaf is a good man because he has helped Jim by sending him Lena. Jim says this, even though at the time he has at least some understanding of the dark thoughts Olaf has harbored about him. This makes Jim seem generous in his definition of a "good" man. He is willing to overlook the bad in Olaf and appreciate the good, even though the good that Olaf did for Jim was done under duress.

Similarly, Olaf finally calls Jim a good man. He finally sees Jim more accurately—finally recognizes that he is a human being—and tells him that he is a "big black good man." It is telling that Olaf still puts "big" and "black" in front of "good" and "man" in his description of Jim. The things that Olaf finds threatening about Jim still loom larger in his mind than Jim's goodness and his humanity.

The story ends with all conflicts between the characters resolved in a mutual declaration of goodness. Whether each man is correct in his evaluation of the other is an issue that Wright leaves up to readers.

Source: Candyce Norvell, Critical Essay on "Big Black Good Man," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2005.

Yoshinobu Hakutani

In the following essay, Hakutani discusses Wright's short-story collection Eight Men (which contains "Big Black Good Man") as well as the collection Uncle Tom's Children and events from Wright's biography.

Richard Wright was a preeminent African-American writer whose influence on the course of American literature has been widely recognized. As Irving Howe has said, "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever." The importance of Wright's works, beginning with Uncle Tom's Children (1938; enlarged, 1940), comes not so much from his technique and style but from the particular impact his ideas and attitudes have made on American life. His early critics' consideration was that of race. They were unanimous in the view that if Wright had not been black his work would not have been so significant. As his vision of the world extended beyond the United States, his quest for solutions expanded from problems of race to those of politics and economics in the emerging Third World. Finally, his long exile in France gave his national and international concerns a universal dimension. Wright's development was marked by an ability to respond to the currents of the social and intellectual history of his time.

Wright was born on 4 September 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, to an illiterate sharecropper, Nathaniel Wright, and a well-educated black woman, Ella Wilson Wright. When Wright was six, his family moved to Memphis in search of employment, but his father left the family for another woman. After several more moves to various places, in 1918 his mother fell ill, and the family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with Ella's mother, a fanatic Seventh Day Adventist. The harsh religious code Wright's grandmother imposed on him is well portrayed in the first volume of his autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945). At twelve Wright was enrolled in a Seventh Day Adventist school near Jackson, and later he attended public schools in the city for a few years. In Spring 1924 the Southern Register, a local black newspaper, printed a short story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre," his first attempt at writing. No complete version is known to exist.

From 1925 to 1927 Wright worked at a few menial jobs in Jackson and Memphis. In Memphis he began reading literature, especially the works of H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. In Black Boy Wright tells how he was inspired by Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911): "It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novels, and I could not read enough of them."

In 1927 Wright traveled to Chicago and obtained a position as a post-office clerk. As the Depression hit, he lost the position, but the relief office gave him several temporary jobs, including work with the Federal Negro Theatre and later the Illinois Writers' Project. In April 1931 his first major short story, "Superstition," was published by Abbott's Monthly. The following year he attended meetings sponsored by the John Reed Club in Chicago, a leftist literary group, and became a member of the Communist party. Before moving to New York in 1937, he had written poems, short stories, and essays, many of which appeared in leftist periodicals.

In New York, Wright became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper, and helped edit New Challenge, a short-lived literary magazine. In 1938 four of his stories were collected and published as Uncle Tom's Children and won a literary prize from Story magazine. The following year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his first novel, Native Son (1940). In August 1939 he married his first wife, Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white dancer. The couple soon separated, however. The year 1940 brought him fame and financial success: the Book-of-the Month Club chose Native Son as its March selection, and an enlarged edition of Uncle Tom's Children was published.

What Do I Read Next?

• Wright's first and best-known novel, Native Son (1940), is the story of Bigger Thomas, an African American teenager who accidentally kills someone and is sentenced to death.
• White Man, Listen! (1957) is a collection of Wright's better-known essays.
• James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is the story of an African American family in Harlem during the depression. Baldwin, like Wright, was an expatriate living in France, and in fact the two knew each other and had a stormy friendship.
• Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison, became an immediate classic for its portrait of racial intolerance in the United States in the 1950s—an ugly picture painted by the narrator, a young, unnamed black man.

On 12 March 1941, after divorcing Rose, Wright married his second wife, Ellen Poplar, a white member of the Communist party, from Brooklyn. In the same year, he published Twelve Million Black Voices, the first of a series of nonfiction books on racial issues. His first child, Julia, was born in 1942. By the end of 1944 he had broken with the Communist party, as indicated in his Atlantic Monthly (August-September 1944) article "I Tried to Be a Communist" (incorporated into American Hunger, the second volume of his autobiography, published in 1977). His novella "The Man Who Lived Underground" was included in Cross-Section (1944), an anthology edited by Edwin Seaver (and later collected in Wright's Eight Men, 1960). Black Boy, published in 1945, captured wide publicity and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

From after World War II until his death in 1960, although he traveled often, Wright became a permanent voluntary exile in Paris. He and his family became French citizens in 1947 and eventually bought a farm in Ailly, which they maintained along with a Paris apartment. Before the publication of his second novel, The Outsider (1953), no new books of his had come out since 1945, but he cherished his Parisian life, associating with French and African writers and intellectuals. His second daughter, Rachel, was born in 1949. In 1954 he published a minor novel, Savage Holiday. He also continued to travel in Africa, Europe, and Asia, which led him to write several nonfiction books: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954); Pagan Spain (1956); The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956; first published in French, 1955); and White Man, Listen! (1957). Wright's last years were plagued by illness (amoebic dysentery) and financial hardship. He tried his hand at writing English haiku, four thousand of them, most of which were not published. He also tried to write a novel," Island of Hallucination," which was never fully published (part of it—"Five Episodes"—was anthologized by Herbert Hill in Soon, One Morning, 1963). Wright did publish another novel, The Long Dream (1958), but it was doomed by adverse criticism. Nevertheless, he was successful in preparing another collection of short stories, Eight Men, published posthumously. Wright died in Paris at age fifty-two. A few years later Lawd Today (1963) was published; he had begun this short novel in 1936.

Wright was a remarkably resilient thinker and writer. His successes are beyond dispute, his failures understandable. He has fascinated not only literary critics, but also philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and historians. Though many of his works failed to satisfy the rigid standards of New Criticism, his evolution as a writer has excited readers the world over. Biographer Michel Fabre speculates that toward the end of his life Wright "was once again going through a period of ideological change which, had its course been completed, might have caused him to start writing in a new vein. It is highly probable that the civil rights and Black Power movements would have given him a second wind, had he lived another five years."

The enlarged (1940) version of Uncle Tom's Children, Wright's first book, consists of five stories about the lives of black people in the deep South. These stories prefigure the theme, structure, and ideology of his later fiction. Wright seems to imply here, as he does in his other fiction, that American social conditions are directly responsible for the degradation of black people. Recent criticism, however, has modified this interpretation, suggesting that Wright went beyond naturalism. The pessimistic determinism often associated with naturalism taught the young Wright the meaning of racial oppression. A victim of oppression himself, Wright directed his energy toward rebellion. While he escaped the pessimistic outlook of naturalism, his respect for that philosophy helped him develop his own individualism and endow his characters with self-awareness. Only vaguely are the black characters in Uncle Tom's Children conscious of their racially oppressive environment, but they willfully seek freedom and self-determination.

"Big Boy Leaves Home" (anthologized in The New Caravan, 1936), the first story in Wright's collection, features a young boy's escape from his violent southern community. Four innocent, happy-go-lucky black boys are discovered naked by a white woman while they are swimming in a pond on a white man's premises. When she screams, her male companion without warning begins shooting and kills two of the boys. Big Boy manages to overcome the white man and accidentally kills him. Now the two surviving boys must take flight; Bobo is captured, but Big Boy reaches home and is told by church leaders to hide in a kiln until dawn, when a truck will come by to take him to Chicago. While hiding, he poignantly watches Bobo lynched and burned. Witnessing such an event gives Big Boy not only a feeling of terror and hatred but a sense of selfawareness and maturity. Although the events take place in less than twenty-four hours, the story is divided into five parts that correspond to the crucial stages in Big Boy's development from innocence, through violence, suffering, and terror, to freedom.

"Down by the Riverside" (previously unpublished), the next story in Uncle Tom's Children, dramatizes the tragic death of Brother Mann, who steals a boat during a Mississippi flood to take his pregnant wife to a hospital for the child's delivery. On Mann's way to the hospital he is discovered by the owner of the boat who tries to shoot him, but Mann, in self-defense, kills the owner. When Mann reaches the hospital, he finds his wife is dead. Later he is asked by the town authorities to join their rescue work for stranded citizens. The first house to which he is sent, with a black companion, both of them on another boat, happens to be that of the owner of the stolen boat, whose family recognizes Mann. Although he considers killing them, he changes his mind and rescues them. Once the boat safely reaches the hills, they tell the white authorities that Mann is a murderer. As Mann flees down the riverside, he is shot to death. The story is filled with coincidental events that foreshadow Mann's doom. In contrast with "Big Boy Leaves Home," this story suggests the futility of a man struggling against the elements of chance and fate that undermine his perseverance and will to survive.

The plot of "Long Black Song" (also previously unpublished) is less complicated than the other stories. A white phonograph salesman seduces a black farmer's wife, Sarah, while her husband, Silas, is away during the day. When Silas returns home, he discovers her infidelity and fumes over it. The next day the salesman comes back, with another white man waiting in the car. Sarah leaves the house with her child to warn the salesman of Silas's presence. Silas then exchanges gunfire with the men, killing one of them. Later white lynchers arrive and set fire to the house with Silas inside. The story is told from Sarah's point of view. On the one hand, Sarah, unconcerned with the materialistic strivings of men, is trying to recapture the memories of a past love; on the other, Silas is trying to realize his dream of owning a farm. Both dreams, however, come to naught in the face of a caste system that allows for the exploitation of others. The success of the story lies in the noble victory of Silas, who realizes at his death that his wife's disloyalty to him has been permitted by the white bourgeois code to which he had so easily acquiesced. When white men sexually exploited black women other than his own wife, Silas did not think about it seriously.

The last two stories in Uncle Tom's Children deal with the Communist ideology as it affects the black communities of the South. "Fire and Cloud" (Story, March 1936) takes place during the Depression and presents a black minister trusted by both blacks and whites. His dilemma is whether to dissuade his congregation from demonstrating for the food they need, or to support the march at the risk of violence. While many of the elders in his church cannot break with their traditional faith in passive resistance, the Reverend Mr. Taylor can change and does opt for solidarity and militancy. Similarly, "Bright and Morning Star" (New Masses, 10 May 1938)—the story added to the collection in 1940—deals with the change of attitude a black woman takes toward Christianity. Aunt Sue, the mother of two revolutionary black youths, is accustomed to the attitude of forbearance preached by black church leaders, but now that she is awakened by the "bright and morning star" of Communism, she becomes a martyr instead of a victim of white power. When she is summoned by the white authorities to claim the body of her murdered son, she shoots the official dead before she is killed.

The initial critical reception of Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 was generally favorable. James T. Farrell, appreciative of Wright's direct and realistic style, remarked in the Partisan Review (May 1938) that the book serves as an exemplary refutation for those who wished to write "such fancy nonsense about fables and allegories." In response to those critics who wanted Wright to pace more steadily in his narrative and delve more deeply into his material, Farrell argued that Wright effectively employs simple dialogue "as a means of carrying on his narrative, as a medium for poetic and lyrical effects, and as an instrument of characterization." Most reviewers, both black and white, praised Wright's first work without reservation; all respected him for breaking away from stereotypes. Malcolm Cowley found the stories "heartening, as evidence of a vigorous new talent, and terrifying as the expression of a racial hatred that has never ceased to grow and gets no chance to die" (New Republic, 6 April 1938). Cowley considered legitimate the Communist aim to unite black and white and regarded racial violence in the South as inevitable. Many critics were also impressed by Wright's language and art, especially his use of black dialect. Robert Van Gelder compared him to Ernest Hemingway (New York Times Book Review, 13 April 1938); Allen Maxwell likened his style to John Steinbeck's (Southwest Review, April 1938).

Some readers were antagonistic to Wright's racial views. As if in return for Wright's unfavorable review of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (New Masses, 5 October 1937), Zora Neale Hurston categorized Uncle Tom's Children as a chronicle of hatred with no act of understanding and sympathy (Saturday Review, 2 April 1938). She opposed Wright's politics, too, arguing that his stories fail to touch the fundamental truths of black life.

The earliest extended critical analysis of Wright's short fiction was by Edwin Berry Burgum (in the Quarterly Review of Literature, Spring 1944), who confirms Wright's skill in structuring the stories in the form of modern tragedy: the hero's individualism collides with the external forces of society. For example, Wright skillfully illustrates a black man's rebellion against society in the heroism of Silas, the protagonist in "Long Black Song." Burgum also finds Wright's style extremely congenial to his material, claiming that his style in the short stories was influenced by Hemingway: both writers use short sentences to describe surface activities; but whereas Hemingway disguises the confusions beneath the surface, Wright clarifies them.

Later estimates of the book concur with Burgum's. Edward Margolies, in The Art of Richard Wright (1969), observes that one of the successes of Uncle Tom's Children is Wright's use of Marxism for didactic purposes. Portraying conflicts that are true to the facts of life in the South, his stories usually succeed by their integration of plot, imagery, character, and theme. Wright also renders his stories sometimes in biblical terms. The Reverend Mr. Taylor and Aunt Sue, for example, arrive at their moments of truth through Communistic or Christian ideals, but also as a result of "their peculiar Negro folk mysticism." The sweep and magnitude of Wright's stories are, Margolies observes, "suffused with the author's impassioned convictions about the dignity of man." Dignity, as Blyden Jackson, an eminent black critic, suggests, is a central issue in "Big Boy Leaves Home," as it is in Wright's fiction in general. He explains in Southern Literary Journal (Spring 1971) that "Big Boy Leaves Home," instead of showing the quality of a black man's will to survive oppression, presents the lynching of Bobo as "the ultimate indignity that can be inflicted upon an individual."

Eight Men, the other volume of Wright's short fiction, comprises seven short stories and one novella, published in various periods of his career. "The Man Who Saw the Flood" (New Masses, 24 August 1937—as "Silt") and "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" (Harper's Bazaar, January 1940—as "Almos' a Man"), both written in the 1930s, reflect the hard times black farmers faced in the South. The first story portrays a family of three stranded by a flood and then threatened by a white store owner because of their overdue debt; the second deals with the initiation of a black boy whose family all work for Hawkins, a prosperous southern farmer. Dave, the sixteen-year-old black boy, learns the meaning of white oppression the hard way: when he realizes his dream of owning a gun, a symbol of self-respect and power for him, but accidentally kills Hawkins's mule, he is forced to pay for it by working two full years. Rather than accepting this unjust punishment, he jumps on a train that will carry him North.

The stories Wright wrote in the 1940s, in contrast with those of the 1930s, have an urban setting in common. "The Man Who Went to Chicago" (anthologized as "Early Days in Chicago" in Cross Section, 1945) is based on Wright's own experience: he was employed first in a Jewish delicatessen—where he saw a woman cook spit in the food she prepared—and later in a hospital, where he observed a scientifically unreliable experiment being conducted in the name of science. "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" (originally published in French in Les Lettres Françaises, 4 October 1946) treats the psychology of fear in a black man. Saul Saunders, encountering in a library a white seductress who falsely "cries rape," kills her for fear of being discovered.

"The Man Who Lived Underground" (a short version of which appeared in Accent, Spring 1942) is an allegory of any man, black or white, who feels an innate, inescapable sense of guilt. Fred Daniels, a black man falsely accused of murdering a white woman, hides in a sewer and witnesses various aboveground activities: a church service, a business transaction, and a suicide resulting from the false accusation of a crime. In the course of his underground life, Daniels comes to realize, as "the man who went to Chicago" does, that much of life is chaotic and meaningless. When he finally emerges from underground to relate this revelation to the police, he learns that they have caught a white man who was the woman's murderer and that he is exonerated. But Daniels declares that he himself is guilty for the sake of all humanity. He then takes the police down the sewer to show where he had lived. One of them, tired of hearing his strange testimony, kills him, saying, "You've got to shoot his kind. They'd wreck things."

Wright's short stories from the 1950s focus attention on white men rather than black men in dealing with racial issues. "Man of All Work" (written in 1957 but previously unpublished) describes an unhappily married white man, who is shocked after he makes amatory advances to a maid who turns out to be a black man in disguise. "Man, God Ain't like That" (also previously unpublished) portrays a white American painter, John, who adopts a native African boy, Babu, as his servant. Babu privately conducts a secret ritual of making sacrifices to his Ashanti ancestors but publically sings Christian hymns. Impressed by white civilization, he reasons that white men must have killed Christ to create such a civilization and that he must kill John, his master, whom he regards as a Christ figure. "Big Black Good Man" (published in French in La Parisienne, January-February 1958) treats humorously the inferiority complex of a Danish hotel clerk confronted by a huge black sailor who asks for a room, a bottle of whiskey, and a woman companion.

Eight Men received a decidedly less positive response from critics than Uncle Tom's Children. Saunders Redding, a distinguished black critic, dismissed Eight Men as the work of a declining author (New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 22 January 1961). Though all the stories in the collection indicated distress with Wright's rootlessness, Redding theorized that his long exile, somehow lightened "his anguish," which was "the living substance of his best books." For Redding, even the most impressive story, "The Man Who Lived Underground," seemed only "a first-class Gothic tale." In a similar vein, Richard Gilman (in Commonweal, April 1961) found the collection of stories inept, "dismayingly stale and dated." Wright's attempts at humor, tragedy, and pathos "all fail." Eight Men, however, pleased Irving Howe, Wright's consistent champion, for its signs of the author's continuous experimentation despite uneven results. Howe found in "Big Black Good Man" "a strong feeling for the compactness of the story as a form…. When the language is scraggly or leaden there is a sharply articulated pattern or event." In "The Man Who Lived Underground" Howe found not a congenial expression of existentialism, as other critics did, but an effective narrative rhythm, "a gift for shaping the links between sentences so as to create a chain of expectation" (New Republic, 13 February 1961).

Later critical estimates of Eight Men are more favorable. Even James Baldwin, who was critical of Native Son, considered the collection a reflection of Wright's authentic rage: "Wright's unrelentingly bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, of the human heart" (Encounter, April 1961). Recent criticism of Eight Men has concentrated on "The Man Who Lived Underground." David Bakish regards this novella as Wright's finest accomplishment because it is an intellectualized story based upon an authentic experience. Michel Fabre (in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 1973) testifies to the authenticity of the story, showing that it derives not from Fyodor Dostoyevski, but from an account in True Detective (August 1941) of Herbert C. Wright, a Los Angeles white man who lived underground and robbed businesses in 1931 and 1932. Fabre reads "The Man Who Lived Underground" as an "existential parable" that presents a humanist message: while an individual can impose masks upon himself, he "acquires his identity from other men."

There is a distinct change of tone in Eight Men in comparison with Uncle Tom's Children. The earlier racial hatred is replaced by racial understanding in a story such as "Big Black Good Man." Moreover, Daniels's adventures in "The Man Who Lived Underground" may suggest Wright's own feelings after ten years in the Communist underground. In any event, Wright thrived on naturalism, for when he moved from his naturalistic style in Uncle Tom's Children to a more subtle technique in Eight Men, he was not as impressive a writer as he was in Native Son and Black Boy.

Wright's reputation as a major American author was firmly established by his early works: Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Black Boy. His emergence as a black writer was a phenomenon, as Black Boy clearly demonstrates, for not only did he endure oppression and lack of freedom in the South and the North but he triumphed over them. His successful transformation of that experience into enduring art has been recognized by readers of different races. Before Wright, the African-American writer primarily addressed himself to the black audience. Had he written for a white audience, he would have been expected to present stereotyped pictures of black people. Exceptions such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt went largely unheeded, because blacks, as Wright said, "possessed deep-seated resistance against the Negro problem being presented, even verbally, in all its hideous dullness, in all the totality of its meaning." Therefore, it was somewhat miraculous that both black and white readers believed what they read in Wright's early works, in which he destroys the white myth of the patient, humorous, subservient black man.

Source: Yoshinobu Hakutani, "Richard Wright," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 102, American Short-Story Writers, 1910–1945, Second Series, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel, Gale Research, 1991, pp. 378–86.

Edward Margolies

In the following excerpt from his The Art of Richard Wright, Margolies discusses Wright's development as a writer, focusing on the thematic progression of Wright's fiction.

Wright at his best was master of a taut psychological suspense narrative. Even more important, however, are the ways Wright wove his themes of human fear, alienation, guilt, and dread into the overall texture of his work. Some critics may still today stubbornly cling to the notion that Wright was nothing more than a proletarian writer, but it was to these themes that a postwar generation of French writers responded, and not to Wright's Communism—and it is to these themes that future critics must turn primarily if they wish to reevaluate Wright's work….

Wright not only wrote well but also he paved the way for a new and vigorous generation of Negro authors to deal with subjects that had hitherto been regarded as taboo. [His] portraits of oppressed Negroes have made a deep impression on readers the world over….

Wright's existentialism, as it was to be called by a later generation of French authors, was not an intellectually "learned" process (although he had been reading Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in the thirties) but rather the lived experiences of his growing years. The alienation, the dread, the fear, and the view that one must construct oneself out of the chaos of existence—all elements of his fiction—were for him means of survival. There were, of course, externals he grasped for as well….

In general, Wright's nonfiction takes one of two directions. The first concerns itself with the devastating emotional impact of centuries of exploitation on its individual victims. The second is the overall cultural characteristics of oppressed peoples. The first is largely psychological; the second socio-anthropological. Obviously no such absolute division obtains since it is impossible to discuss one without making reference to the other, but for purposes of analysis it may be said that Wright lays greater or lesser stress on one or the other of these issues in each of his works of nonfiction. Black Boy (1945), Wright's autobiography of his Southern years, serves perhaps as the best point of reference from which to make an examination of his ideas, since, as we have seen, Wright generalizes from his own experiences certain conclusions about the problems of minorities everywhere….

Possibly the problems presented by Black Boy are insoluble since the environment in which Black Boy operates is so alien to the average reader that it is almost essential for Wright to hammer home in little digressive essays the mores of the caste system so that Black Boy's psychology and behavior may be better understood. As a result, its authority as autobiography is reduced—Wright frequently appears to stand aside and analyze himself rather than allow the reader to make inferences about his character and emotions from his actions—and its strength as sociology seems somewhat adulterated by the incursions of the narrative. Yet, despite these failures—or possibly because of them—the impact of the book is considerable and this perhaps is Wright's artistic triumph….

Wright's theme is freedom and he skillfully arranges and selects his scenes in such a way that he is constantly made to appear the innocent victim of the tyranny of his family or the outrages of the white community. Nowhere in the book are Wright's actions and thoughts reprehensible. The characteristics he attributes to himself are in marked contrast to those of other characters in the book. He is "realistic," "creative," "passionate," "courageous," and maladjusted because he refuses to conform. Insofar as the reader identifies Wright's cause with the cause of Negro freedom, it is because Wright is a Negro—but a careful reading of the book indicates that Wright expressly divorces himself from other Negroes. Indeed rarely in the book does Wright reveal concern for Negroes as a group. Hence Wright traps the reader in a stereotyped response—the same stereotyped response that Wright is fighting throughout the book: that is, that all Negroes are alike and react alike….

[It] is in [Uncle Tom's Children] that the reader may find the theme, the structure, the plot, and the ideational content of all his later fictional work. Although Wright, when he wrote these stories, was a convinced Communist, it is revealing how related they are to the later phases of intellectual and political development. Here, for example, one finds Wright's incipient Negro nationalism as each of his protagonists rises to strike out violently at white oppressors who would deny him his humanity. More significantly his Negro characters imagine whites as "blurs," "bogs," "mountains," "fire," "ice," and "marble." In none of these stories do his heroes act out of a sense of consciously arrived at ideology (most of them, as a matter of fact, are ignorant of Marxism), but rather out of an innate, repressed longing for freedom—or sometimes merely as an instinctive means of self-survival. Often the act of violence carries along with it a sudden revelatory sense of self-awareness—an immediate knowledge that the world in which the protagonist dwells is chaotic, meaningless, purposeless, and that he, as a Negro, is "outside" this world and must therefore discover his own life by his lonely individual thoughts and acts. We find thus in these first short stories a kind of black nationalism wedded to what has been called Wright's existentialism—the principal characteristics of Wright's last phase of political and philosophical thinking.

Paradoxically, Wright's Marxism seldom intrudes in an explicit didactic sense…. To be sure, Communists are viewed in a kindly light in the last two of Wright's stories, but they are only remotely instrumental in effecting his heroes' discovery of themselves and their world. Oddly enough, in three of the stories ("Down by the Riverside," "Fire and Cloud," and "Bright and Morning Star"), Wright's simple Negro peasants arrive at their sense of selfrealization by applying basic Christian principles to the situations in which they find themselves. In only one ("Bright and Morning Star"), does a character convert to Communism—and then only when she discovers Communism is the modern translation of the primitive Christian values she has always lived. There is a constant identification in these stories with the fleeing Hebrew children of the Old Testament and the persecuted Christ—and mood, atmosphere, and settings abound in biblical nuances. Wright's characters die like martyrs, stoic and unyielding, in their new-found truth about themselves and their vision of a freer, fuller world for their posterity…. The spare, stark accounts of actions and their resolution are reminiscent in their simplicity and their cadences of Biblical narrations. The floods, the songs, the sermons, the hymns reinforce the Biblical analogies and serve, ironically, to highlight the uselessness and inadequacy of Christianity as a means of coping with the depression-ridden, racist South. Even the reverse imagery of white-evil, black-good is suggestive in its simple organization of the forces which divide the world in Old Testament accounts of the Hebrews' struggle for survival….

There is a thematic progression in these stories, each of which deals with the Negro's struggle for survival and freedom. In the first story ["Big Boy Leaves Home"] flight is described—and here Wright is at his artistic best, fashioning his taut, spare prose to the movements and thoughts of the fugitive….

Although "Big Boy" is a relatively long story, the rhythm of events is swift, and the time consumed from beginning to end is less than twenty-four hours. The prose is correspondingly fashioned to meet the pace of the plot. The story is divided into five parts, each of which constitutes a critical episode in Big Boy's progress from idyll, through violence, to misery, terror, and escape. As the tension mounts, Wright employs more and more of a terse and taut declaratory prose, fraught with overtones and meanings unspoken—reminiscent vaguely of the early [Ernest] Hemingway….

"Down by the Riverside," the next story in the collection, is not nearly so successful. If flight (as represented by "Big Boy Leaves Home") is one aspect of the Negro's struggle for survival in the South, Christian humility, forbearance, courage, and stoic endurance are the themes of Wright's second piece. But here the plot becomes too contrived; coincidence is piled upon coincidence, and the inevitability of his protagonist's doom does not ring quite as true….

Yet, there is a certain epic quality to the piece—man steadily pursuing his course against a malevolent nature, only to be cut down later by the ingratitude of his fellow men—that is suggestive of [Mark] Twain or [William] Faulkner. And Mann's long-suffering perseverance and stubborn will to survive endow him with a rare mythic Biblical quality. Wright even structures his story like a Biblical chronicle, in five brief episodes, each displaying in its way Mann's humble courage against his fate. But if Mann's simple Christian virtues failed to save him, it was in part because the ground had not yet been laid on which these virtues might flourish. The recognition that the bourgeois ethic is incapable of providing men with the possibility of fulfilling themselves is an element of Wright's next story ["Long Black Song"]….

The success of the story, perhaps Wright's best, lies in the successful integration of plot, imagery, and character which echo the tragic theme of Silas's doomed awareness of himself and the inadequacy of the bourgeois values by which he has been attempting to live. Silas's recognition is his death knell, but he achieves a dignity in death that he had never known in life….

It is Sarah, though, who is the most memorable portrayal in the story. The narrative unfolds from her point of view—and she becomes, at the end, a kind of deep mother earth character, registering her primal instincts and reactions to the violence and senselessness she sees all about her. But for all that, she remains beautifully human—her speech patterns and thoughts responding to an inner rhythm, somehow out of touch with the foolish strivings of men, yet caught up in her own melancholy memories and desires…. Wright conveys her mood and memories and vagaries of character in sensuous color imagery—while certain cadences suggest perhaps Gertrude Stein whom Wright regarded as one of his chief influences….

Sarah is Wright's most lyrical achievement, and Silas, her husband, Wright's most convincing figure of redemption….

Wright's militant Negroes, despite their protestations to the contrary, often sound more like black nationalists than Communist internationalists. It was perhaps this facet of Wright's work, in addition to the obvious, extreme, and frequent isolated individualism of his heroes that [began] to disturb Communist Party officials. Yet regardless of whether Wright had been at heart a Communist, an outsider, or a nationalist when he wrote these pieces, there can be little doubt that they draw a good deal of their dramatic strength from the black and white world Wright saw. There is little the reader can do but sympathize with Wright's Negroes and loathe and despise the whites. There are no shadings, ambiguities, few psychological complexities. But there are of course the weaknesses of the stories as well.

How then account for their overall success? First of all, they are stories. Wright is a story teller and his plots are replete with conflict, incident, and suspense. Secondly, Wright is a stylist. He has an unerring "feel" for dialogue, his narrations are controlled in terse, tense rhythms, and he manages to communicate mood, atmosphere, and character in finely worked passages of lyric intensity. But above all they are stories whose sweep and magnitude are suffused with their authors impassioned convictions about the dignity of man, and a profound pity for the degraded, the poor and oppressed who, in the face of casual brutality, cling obstinately to their humanity….

Unlike the pieces in Uncle Tom's Children, [the stories in the posthumously published Eight Men] are not arranged along any progressively thematic lines; instead the order in which they are assembled indicates that Wright was more concerned with showing a variety of styles, settings and points of view. To be sure, they all deal in one way or another with Negro oppression, but they do not point, as Wright's previous collection of stories did, to any specific social conclusion….

The only significant work of fiction Wright produced in the decade of the forties was his long story, "The Man Who Lived Underground."

Here Wright is at his storytelling best, dealing with subject matter he handles best—the terrified fugitive in flight from his pursuers. Like Wright's other fugitives, Fred Daniels exercises a kind of instinct for survival that he perhaps never knew he possessed. But what makes him different from the others is that he is not merely a victim of a racist society, but that he has become by the very nature of his experiences a symbol of all men in that society—the pursuers and the pursued. For what the underground man has learned in his sewer is that all men carry about in their hearts an underground man who determines their behavior and attitudes in the aboveground world. The underground man is the essential nature of all men—and is composed of dread, terror, and guilt. Here then lies the essential difference between Wright's Communist and post-Communist period. Heretofore dread, terror, and guilt had been the lot of the Negro in a world that had thrust upon him the role of a despised inferior. Now they are the attributes of all mankind….

Fred Daniels is then Everyman, and his story is very nearly a perfect modern allegory. The Negro who lives in the underground of the city amidst its sewage and slime is not unlike the creature who dwells amidst the sewage of the human heart. And Fred Daniels knows that all of the ways men attempt to persuade themselves that their lives are meaningful and rational are delusions…. But paradoxically despite Fred's new found knowledge of the savagery of the human heart and the meaninglessness of the aboveground world, he recognizes its instinctive appeal as well, and he must absurdly rise to the surface once more….

The dread, the terror, the guilt, the nausea had always been basic thematic elements in Wright's fiction—and now in "The Man Who Lived Underground," they are made the explicit components of the human personality. Like Wright's heroes, the characters of existentialist authors move about in a world devoid of principles, God, and purpose—and suffer horror at their awesome godlike powers as they create their own personalities and values out of the chaos of existence. But in some respects Wright's heroes are different. They are alienated often enough not from any intellectually reasoned position (at this stage in Wright's career), but by chance happenings in their lives or an accident of birth—race, for example. (In Fred Daniels' case, for instance, he is a Negro who quite by chance happened to be near the scene of a crime.) They arrive then accidentally at their insights, and as a result of having discovered themselves outside the rules of conventional social behavior recognize that they are free to shape (and are therefore responsible for) their own lives. But this is not primarily why they suffer guilt. Wright seems to prefer a Freudian explanation; guilt is instinctively connected with the trauma of birth. Hence, for Wright, a man's freedom is circumscribed by his very humanity. In ways he cannot possibly control, his nature or "essence" precedes his existence. But however different the routes French existentialist authors and Wright may have taken, they meet on common ground in regard to their thrilled horror at man's rootlessness—at the heroism of his absurd striving.

"The Man Who Lived Underground" undoubtedly owes something in the way of plot and theme to [Victor Hugo's] Les Miserables, and to what Camus called the "Dostoevskian experience of the condemned man"—but, above all, Fred Daniels' adventures suggest something of Wright's own emotions after ten years in the Communist underground. The air of bitterness, the almost strident militancy are gone—momentarily at least—and in their place a compassion and despair—compassion for man trapped in his underground nature and despair that he will ever be able to set himself free….

The fifties saw Wright experimenting with new subject matter and new forms. Problems of race remain the central issue, but are now dealt with from changing perspectives. For the first time there are two stories with non-American settings, and race neurosis is treated more as the white man's dilemma than as the black man's burden. This shift in emphasis from black to white is accompanied by corresponding shifts in social viewpoint. Racial antagonisms do not appear to be immediately—or for that matter remotely—traceable to compelling class interests. It is clear that Wright was trying to broaden the range and scope of his fiction—that he was trying to move away somewhat from the psyche of the oppressed Negro peasant or proletariat toward characters of varying social and ethnic backgrounds. The three novels Wright produced in this ten year period bear out this conclusion. In the first, The Outsider (1953), he wrote of his hero that though a Negro "he could have been of any race." Savage Holiday, written the following year, contains no Negro characters and deals with the misfortunes of a white, "respectable" middle-aged retired insurance executive. The Long Dream (1957) is written from the point of view of an adolescent, middle-class Negro boy. Wright was apparently reaching for a universality he felt he had not yet achieved—but his craft was not quite equal to the tasks he had set for himself. Too often, as before, his whites appear as stereotypes, and his Negroes are a bit too noble or innocent. In the 1930's Wright's social vision lent his stories an air of conviction, a momentum all their own; in the 1950's Wright's quieter catholicity, his wider intellectuality, perhaps removed his stories from this kind of cumulative dread tension, the sense of urgency, that made his earlier works so immediately gripping.

Nonetheless it cannot be said that Wright's new stories do not possess their own narrative qualities…. What these stories sorely lack are the charged, vibrant rhythms and vivid lyric imagery that so rounded out character and theme in his earlier works. Perhaps Wright wanted to pare his prose down to what he regarded as bare essentials—just as he may have fancied his idol, Gertrude Stein, had done. Whatever the reasons, the results are only occasionally successful….

Source: Edward Margolies, Excerpt, in The Art of Richard Wright, Southen Illinois University Press, 1969.

Sources

Clark, Edward D., "Richard Wright," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 76, Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris, Gale Research, 1988, pp. 199–221.

Hakutani, Yoshinobu, "Richard Wright," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 102, American Short-Story Writers, 1910–1945, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel, Gale Research, 1991, pp. 378–86.

Wright, Richard, "Big Black Good Man," in The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Daniel Halpern, Penguin Books, 1987, pp. 786–95.

Further Reading

Coles, Robert, Black Writers Abroad: A Study of Black American Writers in Europe and Africa, Garland Publishing, 1999.

Coles catalogues the African American writers who left the United States over the course of two centuries, examining their reasons for moving abroad and the impact of the decision on their work.

Crossman, R. H. S., ed., The God That Failed, Columbia University Press, 2001.

Wright is one of six contributors to this collection of essays by respected writers, all of whom had first embraced and later renounced communism. The authors relate their personal experiences with communism and their reasons for rejecting it. André Gide of France and Arthur Koestler of Germany are among the other contributors to what is widely considered an important record of cold war issues.

Lewis, David L., ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, Penguin USA, 1995.

This volume of short fiction, essays, memoirs, drama, and poetry provides a snapshot of the literature produced during the Harlem Renaissance. More than forty writers are represented.

Wright, Richard, American Hunger, HarperCollins, 1982.

This volume, first published seventeen years after Wright's death, is a continuation of the autobiography begun in Black Boy.

——, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, 1945, reprint, Everbind Anthologies, 2003.

Black Boy is the first part of Wright's autobiography, covering his early life in Mississippi and Tennessee.