Native Son - Richard Wright [7]
In the 1960s, however, with the dawning of the Black Power movement after the most bloody stage of the civil rights struggle, and the shocking upsurge of violent crime in the cities, especially among young black males, Wright’s novel increasingly seemed strikingly accurate and, indeed, prophetic. Later, in the 1980s, Wright’s reputation suffered again, this time under the scrutiny of feminist literary criticism, which could hardly miss the fact that, with few exceptions, the world of his fiction is fundamentally hostile to women, especially black women.
Nevertheless, Wright seems certain to continue to enjoy a lasting place of high honor in the African American and American literary traditions, and to be recognized as an author of world-class dimensions. While his overall reputation rests on a number of texts in different genres, including autobiography, essays, and travel writing, Native Son remains his greatest achievement. In 1963 (three years after Wright’s sudden death in a Paris hospital), the acclaimed cultural historian Irving Howe summed up, perhaps for all time, the epochal significance of the novel even as he criticized several of its aspects. “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,” Howe declared. “It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.”
ARNOLD RAMPERSAD
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
BOOK ONE
FEAR
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman’s voice sang out impatiently:
“Bigger, shut that thing off!”
A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring of metal. Naked feet swished dryly across the planks in the wooden floor and the clang ceased abruptly.
“Turn on the light, Bigger.”
“Awright,” came a sleepy mumble.
Light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow space between two iron beds, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. From a bed to his right the woman spoke again:
“Buddy, get up from there! I got a big washing on my hands today and I want you-all out of here.”
Another black boy rolled from bed and stood up. The woman also rose and stood in her nightgown.
“Turn your heads so I can dress,” she said.
The two boys averted their eyes and gazed into a far corner of the room. The woman rushed out of her nightgown and put on a pair of step-ins. She turned to the bed from which she had risen and called:
“Vera! Get up from there!”
“What time is it, Ma?” asked a muffled, adolescent voice from beneath a quilt.
“Get up from there, I say!”
“O.K., Ma.”
A brown-skinned girl in a cotton gown got up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Sleepily, she sat on a chair and fumbled with her stockings. The two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed. Abruptly, they all paused, holding their clothes in their hands, their attention caught by a light tapping in the thinly plastered walls of the room. They forgot their conspiracy against shame and their eyes strayed apprehensively over the floor.
“There he is again, Bigger!” the woman screamed, and the tiny, one-room apartment galvanized into violent action. A chair toppled as the woman, half-dressed and in her stocking feet, scrambled breathlessly upon the bed. Her two sons, barefoot, stood tense and motionless, their eyes searching anxiously under the bed and chairs. The girl ran into a corner, half-stooped and gathered the hem of her slip into both of her hands and held it tightly over her knees.