"Jim Crowism" in Richard Wright's early fiction

© 2007 Dr. Ahad MehrvandDuring the Great Depression in America, Jim Crow laws and customs were intensified and came to affect African Americans in almost all facets of their lives. This thesis argues that Richard Wright's early fictional works—Lawd Today! (1965), Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Native Son (l940)—portray the new violent measures adopted by whites, but they also represent an attempt to understand the destructive physical and psychological impact they had on African Americans. I argue that beginning with Lawd Today! the reader is able to track a development in Wright's thinking on the matter of how African Americans should both think about and respond to white violence. Thus in the first of these works, the attention is on understanding the causes of domestic violence in the African American community, with black on black violence being seen as a direct response to white cruelty and hypocrisy. At the same time, Wright appears to offer no alternative vision for coping with white violence other than the two extremes of submission or violent resistance, a bleak scenario, which in turn helps account for the novel's heavy use of irony and satire. The collection of short stories titled Uncle Tom's Children, by contrast, poses several alternative modes of response to the hopeless cycle of physical violence so graphically depicted in Lawd Today! I argue that by offering the reader a series of characters, some of whom have learnt to perform the role of submission—thereby becoming a sort of subversive Uncle Tom, so to speak—and some of whom plot their escape to the North, Wright aimed to introduce his fellow African Americans to the possibility of a non-violent form or response which from the point of view of retaining identity and dignity and getting one's own way, was a considerable improvement on the option of submission. In addition to this, he used other characters to show that a second possibility existed in the form of carrying out both planned and spontaneous acts of violence directed at white property and the bodies of the white oppressors themselves; an initiative aimed at stirring up African Americans if not to the point of outright rebellion then at least to abandon their passive and subservient attitude. In Native Son, the third text of this group, I argue that Wright contrived to present the reader with a character who embodies the transition from submissiveness to outright rebellion. The main protagonist, Bigger Thomas, begins by trying to emulate whites but because he is unable to control his own frustration in the face of white social power and privilege, he ends up murdering a white woman. To the extent that Wright portrays the experience as cathartic and as restoring the black protagonist's sense of pride, such actions lend themselves to being interpreted in a positive light. Conversely, to the extent that Wright portrays his character finally recognizing the humanity of his white oppressors and being brought to trial for his crime, the novel can be interpreted as a warning against violent and ill-considered forms of revenge. Underpinning my argument is the idea that in these early novels Wright anticipated many of the concepts that were to form the basis of Frantz Fanon's theory of decolonization. In addition, I argue that a particular set of postcolonial concepts, namely those formulated by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Albert Memmi (1920-), Paulo Freire (1921-1997), Suzanne Lipsky, Homi K. Bhabha (1949-), and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (1950-), all having to do with the loss and recovery of identity, constitute an appropriate framework through which to read Wright's early fictions since the destructive forms of racism that African Americans endured during the Jim Crow era were in many regards identical to those perpetuated by European colonialism in other parts of the globe. Finally, in order to give specificity to the racism that Wright was both highlighting and analyzing, and to demonstrate that there was a clear evolution in his thinking about the problems of rebellion and violence, I read these early novels in relation to the historical events of the Jim Crow period itself as these have been presented and elaborated by recent social historians and Wright's critics