The extent to which Wright himself acknowledged the impact on his artistic sensibility of the American naturalists, of Russian realists such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and of Marxist thought tends to obscure the importance of other crucial literary sources. The first consists of the popular fiction that Wright devoured in his youth; Horatio Alger novels, detective stories, and other “pulp” works—he read them all. The second is that diverse body of literature broadly termed “Modernist,” produced by, among others, James Joyce, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and Marcel Proust. Wright himself singled out Gertrude Stein, whose “Melanctha” he describes in I Wish I’d Written That as “the first realistic treatment of Negro life I’d seen when I was trying to learn how to write…. [T]his story made me see and accept for the first time in my life the speech of Negroes, speech that fell all around me unheard.”14 (Echoes of Stein’s experiments are especially evident in “Long Black Song.”) Finally, like most of the young leftist authors of his generation, Wright was tremendously moved by the unadorned, straightforward prose style of Ernest Hemingway.
A third, often underestimated influence on Uncle Tom’s Children is the literature produced by the New Negro Renaissance writers, a group with whom Wright, in some ways, did not want to be associated. In “Blueprint,” for example, he contends that the contemporary black realist “requires a greater discipline and consciousness than was necessary for the so-called Harlem school of expression.”15 Yet he also urges black authors to acknowledge not just “the nationalist character of the Negro people” but also the extent to which “this nationalism is reflected in the whole of Negro culture, and especially in folklore.”16 The path that Wright and others took in seeking to tap the creative resistance and communal spirit informing the rich folklife of their people was one blazed a decade earlier by the very New Negro writers whose limitations Wright wished to transcend. In the case of Langston Hughes, the most influential Harlem Renaissance poet of the black folk, not only did Wright know of his work, but in the mid-1930s he delivered at least one public lecture on it.
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Hughes and other black authors on Wright’s handling of folk materials, for Uncle Tom’s Children represents one of the most ambitious and complex fictional uses of black folklore that had appeared to that time. The recurring motif of the train and the verbal jousting of the young men in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the biblical echoes underlying the role of the flood in “Down by the Riverside,” and the depiction of Sue and her winding sheet in “Bright and Morning Star” all take on added resonance when one considers the rich black cultural freight that they carry. Indeed, much of the structural glue holding together the six pieces in this collection is provided by the pervasive and skillful manipulation of Afro-American folklore.
Although a few commentators have questioned the decision to open the expanded edition of Uncle Tom’s Children with “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” this autobiographical sketch constitutes one of the most potent firsthand indictments of the psychic costs of racial subordination to be found in American literature. In “Ethics” Wright dramatizes the arbitrary violence of whites, the explosive sexual component of racism, and the struggle of blacks to accommodate themselves to constant injustice and humiliation while maintaining a modicum of personal dignity—all of which serve as unifying themes for the entire volume.
But why, one might ask, did Wright feel the need to supplement the critically acknowledged power of his stories in this way? To answer this question, one must keep in mind Wright’s commitment to literature as protest. As had scores of earlier black authors who sought to effect social change through their creative work, Wright probably experienced some ambivalence about using fiction as a political tool. On the one hand, it permitted a play of imagination that he must have found both deeply self-affirming and aptly suited for the assault on his white readers’ sensibilities—on their hearts as well as their heads—that he hoped would lead to a new understanding of the horrors to which blacks were so unfairly exposed. On the other hand, as several of the reviews of Uncle Tom’s Children demonstrated, readers overly discomforted by the frankness of Wright’s vigorous critique could doubt the “reality” of the stories themselves. By describing in his own voice instances of racism not dissimilar to those experienced by his protagonists, Wright no doubt hoped that his authorial credibility would prevent skeptical readers from questioning the veracity of his fictional depiction of Southern race relations. This authorial credibility is further reinforced by his tightly controlled tone in “Ethics.” Here, for instance, Wright describes the fate of a black hotel worker caught with a white prostitute:
He was castrated and run out of town. Immediately after this all the bell-boys and hall-boys were called together and warned. We were given to understand that the boy who had been castrated was a “mighty, mighty lucky bastard.” We were impressed with the fact that next time the management of the hotel would not be responsible for the lives of “troublemakin’ niggers.” We were silent. (12)
We react with dismay to this passage not simply because of the brutal events that Wright describes but more so because his prose is so flat, so emotionally uninflected. The effectiveness of this strategy is even clearer when we then move to the more charged, at times poetic, language of the stories themselves. This urge to take advantage of both the potent appeal of fiction and the documentary solidity of firsthand personal testimony informs much of Wright’s work.
The five stories that comprise the bulk of Uncle Tom’s Children fall into two sections. The first consists of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” “Down by the Riverside,” and “Long Black Song”; the second, of “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star.” And although these pieces were initially published independently, together they present the evolution of what might be called a black revolutionary consciousness.
In “Big Boy Leaves Home” and “Down by the Riverside,” nature, a fate given to cruelly absurd coincidence, and Southern whites all conspire in unrelenting assaults on the bodies and spirits of blacks whose only crime is to be black and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The names of Wright’s protagonists—Big Boy and Mann—suggest the representative nature of their victimization and, especially in “Riverside,” the extent to which the veritable erasure of black individuality is the ultimate goal of the racist white South. Even here, however, we see the beginnings of resistance. In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the black community, while distraught over the imminent explosion of white retaliation for Big Boy’s act, nonetheless mobilizes to protect him with a practiced, nearly ritualistic set of strategies which eventually enable him to escape North. This flight from death manifests a survival instinct which, Wright would contend, can serve as the first step toward a more assertive and potentially successful form of self-defense.
If “Down by the Riverside” and “Long Black Song” both highlight the paucity of available options through which blacks can maintain their humanity in the face of racism, Wright also suggests in these stories that choosing the terms of one’s own death in a world that refuses to let you live as a human being constitutes an existential triumph of no small order. And where Mann’s decision in “Riverside” entails the simple act of running from the white troops who have him in custody, Silas in “Long Black Song” actually engages in armed combat with whites, determined to extract as dear a toll as possible before he is taken. Furthermore, Silas is far more mature and self-aware than either Big Boy or Mann. Thus, when confronting what he sees as the ultimate violation of trust by his wife, Sarah, and the irreparable damage done to his carefully constructed world by the white traveling salesman, Silas knows the precise nature of the alternatives before him:
Ahm gonna be hard like they is! So hep me, Gawd, Ah’m gonna be hard! When they come fer me Ah’m gonna be here! N when they git me outta here theys gonna know Ahm gone! Ef Gawd lets me live Ahm gonna make em feel it!… But, Lawd, Ah don wanna be this way! It don mean nothin! Yuh die ef yu
h fight! You die ef yuh don fight! Either way yuh die n it don mean nothin…(152–53)
Silas’s militant resistance even in the face of apparently empty options dramatizes Wright’s belief that one must finally impose his or her own meaning on reality. And doing so in the face of death is, to Wright, heroic.
The remaining stories in Uncle Tom’s Children elaborate on these issues by presenting the protagonists—Reverend Taylor in “Fire and Cloud” and Sue in “Bright and Morning Star”—not as isolated individuals, but as social actors whose decisions have real consequences for those for whom they care. This shift in focus allows Wright to introduce for the first time in the book the ideological alternative offered to Afro-Americans by communism. “Fire and Cloud,” the story with which the original edition of Uncle Tom’s Children concluded, may be the one piece in the book that most nearly approaches the Marxist paradigm for polemical fiction. Yet Wright’s commitment to taking seriously the cultural integrity of Afro-American religious beliefs prevents him from rejecting outright as ideologically backward and counterrevolutionary what he calls in “Blueprint” the “archaic morphology of Christian salvation.”17 Indeed, the figurative death that Taylor must endure on his way toward a stronger and more secular faith is couched in biblical terms even as his dilemma calls into question the efficacy of traditional Christian responses in combatting racial oppression.
“Bright and Morning Star,” the final story in the collection, weaves together into a single fabric many of the major thematic and stylistic threads evident in the preceding pieces. In particular, we see even more vividly than in “Fire and Cloud” the complex psychological transition from a sensibility grounded in Christian ideology to a more activist perspective that engenders an empowering awareness of the revolutionary potential in this world of self-sacrifice, and even martyrdom. In further contrast to “Fire and Cloud,” with its concluding image of interracial cooperation, “Bright and Morning Star” leaves unresolved the tension with which Wright himself struggled between the nationalist strain in black culture and the integrationist imperative underlying the Communist party’s appeal to class solidarity. In Sue, Wright gives us a black character who can draw strength from both sources. However, that her mother-wit and well-justified suspicion of whites prove to be her most reliable tools in her attempt to safeguard an interracial group of local Communists demonstrates Wright’s refusal to reduce the relationships between culture and ideology and between race and class to simple formulas.
In an oft-quoted statement from his 1940 essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright renders an extremely harsh judgment on Uncle Tom’s Children: “When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.”18 It is true that the testimony of commentators such as Eleanor Roosevelt, who described the book as “beautifully written and so vivid that I had a most unhappy time reading it,” embodies the sentimental response to which Wright so vehemently objected.19 Yet half a century later it appears that Wright was reacting less to particular flaws in Uncle Tom’s Children and more to mainstream American culture’s capacity to defuse the potency of harsh critique through the very act of commercial consumption and subsequent emotional release.
This is not to imply that Wright’s first book is without weaknesses. Since its publication, critics have argued that the collection is uneven, with certain stories more finely constructed and effective than others. Particular attention has been paid to awkward coincidences in the plotting, especially in “Down by the Riverside.” The success of Wright’s attempt to yoke Marxist polemics to his powerful dramatizations of black Southern life has also been debated, as has what Michel Fabre calls his “compulsion to explain while describing.”20
In her harsh 1938 review of Uncle Tom’s Children, Zora Neale Hurston strongly objects to the violent male perspective that dominates the text. And although she does not specifically address Wright’s depiction of black women, her comments anticipate reservations that many contemporary readers share on this issue.21 Among other critics, Sherley Anne Williams argues that Wright consistently portrays black women in this collection (even the heroic Sue) as symbolic of “the reactionary aspects in Afro-American tradition.”22 Furthermore, she suggests that in focusing on the extent to which racism constitutes “an affront to the masculinity of black men,” Wright reveals his inability to appreciate fully the pervasive nature of the sexism that is so deeply implicated in the oppressive patriarchal social order in the United States.23
Any thorough consideration of Wright’s achievement in Uncle Tom’s Children must take these problems into account, if only to remind us that he wrestled far more successfully with certain demons than he did with others. In the final analysis, much of the real strength of this book resides not in the verisimilitude with which he consistently represents the psychology of his black men and women but rather in the extent to which his fiction-making was propelled by a fierce determination to break the silence surrounding racism in the United States, a silence maintained in the interest of white supremacy and one to which too many blacks had acceded. As Saunders Redding puts it, “His talent was to smite the conscience—and to smite the conscience of both white and black Americans.”24 In violating the unspoken agreement regarding what could or could not be uttered about race relations in this country, Wright brought to bear both the rhetorical force of leftist polemic and the imaginative energy and cultural richness of Afro-American folklore with a power and a coherence that he may never have again achieved in his later work.
As the title and epigraph of Wright’s collection imply, Uncle Tom’s Children constitutes a self-conscious rejection of the past, of roles and traditions that impoverished the spirit rather than nurtured it, that indirectly helped to perpetuate what sociologist Allison Davis terms “the age-old repressions formed under slavery and peonage.”25 Although he may have been illsuited to the task of constructing the new roles and traditions that would mark the next phase of the black struggle for empowerment, with Uncle Tom’s Children, Richard Wright, anticipating countless black authors who followed in his wake, could indeed proclaim, “Uncle Tom is dead!”
RICHARD YARBOROUGH
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
The post Civil War household word among Negroes—“He’s an Uncle Tom!”—which denoted reluctant toleration for the cringing type who knew his place before white folk, has been supplanted by a new word from another generation which says:—“Uncle Tom is dead!”
The Ethics of Living Jim Crow
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
I
MY FIRST LESSON in how to live as a Negro came when I was quite small. We were living in Arkansas. Our house stood behind the railroad tracks. Its skimpy yard was paved with black cinders. Nothing green ever grew in that yard. The only touch of green we could see was far away, beyond the tracks, over where the white folks lived. But cinders were good enough for me and I never missed the green growing things. And anyhow, cinders were fine weapons. You could always have a nice hot war with huge black cinders. All you had to do was crouch behind the brick pillars of a house with your hands full of gritty ammunition. And the first woolly black head you saw pop out from behind another row of pillars was your target. You tried your very best to knock it off. It was great fun.
I never fully realized the appalling disadvantages of a cinder environment till one day the gang to which I belonged found itself engaged in a war with the white boys who lived beyond the tracks. As usual we laid down our cinder barrage, thinking that this would wipe the white boys out. But they replied with a steady bombardment of broken bottles. We doubled our cinder barrage, but they hid behind trees, hedges, and the sloping embankments of their lawns. Having no such fortifications, we retreated to the brick pillars of our homes. During the retreat a broken milk bottle caught me behind the ear, opening a deep gash which bled profusely. The sight of b
lood pouring over my face completely demoralized our ranks. My fellow-combatants left me standing paralyzed in the center of the yard, and scurried for their homes. A kind neighbor saw me and rushed me to a doctor, who took three stitches in my neck.
I sat brooding on my front steps, nursing my wound and waiting for my mother to come from work. I felt that a grave injustice had been done me. It was all right to throw cinders. The greatest harm a cinder could do was leave a bruise. But broken bottles were dangerous; they left you cut, bleeding, and helpless.
When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her. I could just feel in my bones that she would understand. I knew she would tell me exactly what to do next time. I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then slapped me.
“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh awways fightin’?”