“Whut yuh kill im fer, hunh?”
It was the sheriff’s voice; she did not answer.
“Mabbe she wuz shootin at yuh, Sheriff?”
“Whut yuh kill im fer?”
She felt the sheriff’s foot come into her side; she closed her eyes.
“Yuh black bitch!”
“Let her have it!”
“Yuh reckon she foun out bout Booker?”
“She mighta.”
“Jesus Chris, whut yuh dummies waitin on!”
“Yeah; kill her!”
“Kill em both!”
“Let her know her nigger sons dead firs!”
She turned her head toward Johnny-Boy; he lay looking puzzled in a world beyond the reach of voices. At leas he cant hear, she thought.
“C mon, let im have it!”
She listened to hear what Johnny-Boy could not. They came, two of them, one right behind the other; so close together that they sounded like one shot. She did not look at Johnny-Boy now; she looked at the white faces of the men, hard and wet in the glare of the flashlights.
“Yuh hear tha, nigger woman?”
“Did tha surprise im? Hes in hell now wonderin whut hit im!”
“C mon! Give it t her, Sheriff!”
“Lemme shoot her, Sheriff! It wuz mah pal she shot!”
“Awright, Pete! Thas fair ernuff!”
She gave up as much of her life as she could before they took it from her. But the sound of the shot and the streak of fire that tore its way through her chest forced her to live again, intensely. She had not moved, save for the slight jarring impact of the bullet. She felt the heat of her own blood warming her cold, wet back. She yearned suddenly to talk. “Yuh didnt git whut yuh wanted! N yuh ain gonna nevah git it! Yuh didnt kill me; Ah come here by mahsef…” She felt rain falling into her wide-open, dimming eyes and heard faint voices. Her lips moved soundlessly. Yuh didnt git yuh didnt yuh didnt… Focused and pointed she was, buried in the depths of her star, swallowed in its peace and strength; and not feeling her flesh growing cold, cold as the rain that fell from the invisible sky upon the doomed living and the dead that never dies.
Note on the Text
This volume presents a collection of stories by Richard Wright. All were completed between 1936 and 1940. The texts of the five stories and one essay in Uncle Tom’s Children are from their first collected appearance, and these texts are the last, or last-known, versions that Wright approved. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of this work, including typescripts, page proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is contained in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Other significant materials are held in the Fales Collection of the New York University Library and the Firestone Library at Princeton University.
Uncle Tom’s Children was Wright’s first book to be published. Issued by Harper and Brothers in 1938 as a Story Press Book, it contained four stories, two of which had been published previously: “Big Boy Leaves Home” in The New Caravan in 1936; and “Fire and Cloud” in the March 1938 Story Magazine. The other two stories—“Long Black Song” and “Down by the Riverside”—appeared for the first time in the Harper collection in 1938. Wright had entered the stories in a contest for members of the Federal Writers’ Project sponsored by Story Magazine, and “Fire and Cloud” won the first prize of $500. Collation of the periodical texts of the two previously published stories with the book publication reveals a number of differences, and the extant typescripts and proofs for Story Magazine reveal that the book publication of “Fire and Cloud” follows the typescript rather than the periodical version. In addition, the correspondence between Wright and Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper and Brothers, shows that Wright oversaw the production of the book collection in each of its stages—from assembling the manuscript to reading proofs. Therefore the text of these four stories presented in this volume is that of the first book printing, published by Harper and Brothers in 1938.
Wright sent a fifth story, “Bright and Morning Star,” in January 1938 for inclusion in the first edition of Uncle Tom’s Children, but Harper and Brothers rejected it. The story was first published in a literary supplement to the May 10, 1938, issue of New Masses and was later collected in Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories of 1939 and in The Fifty Best American Short Stories 1914–1939. In 1940 Wright arranged for a second printing of Uncle Tom’s Children and offered to pay the costs of including “Bright and Morning Star” and his essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which had first appeared in American Stuff: WPA Writers’ Anthology, published by Viking in 1937. Harper and Brothers absorbed the costs of including the new pieces, and correspondence between Wright and Aswell shows that Wright read and corrected proofs for the two additions. The second printing of Uncle Tom’s Children in 1940 used the 1938 plates for the first four stories and new plates for the additional two parts. The texts of “Bright and Morning Star” and “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” presented in this volume are those published in the expanded second printing of Uncle Tom’s Children, published by Harper and Brothers in 1940.
This volume presents the texts of the original edition or typescripts chosen for inclusion; it does not attempt to reproduce features of the typographic design, such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. The text is reproduced without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often are expressive features and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of the typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 49.35, trou; 90.24, says; 90.24, boys; 109.17, Ahll; 139.26, mantle; 141.31, mantle; 143.28, mantle; 144.12, Eh; 148.24, cried; 180.29, “There; 191.3, gonan; 204.18, days; 218.1, though; 226.23, chile; 231.14, mucha like; 240.17, Gut; 249.17–18, on way; 259.29, sheriffs.
About the Author
RICHARD WRIGHT won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his books, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. His final, unfinished novel, A Father’s Law, was recently rediscovered and published posthumously. He died in 1960.
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ALSO BY RICHARD WRIGHT
A Father’s Law
Rite of Passage
American Hunger
Eight Men
The Long Dream
White Man, Listen!
Pagan Spain
The Color Curtain
Black Power
Savage Holiday
The Outsider
Black Boy
Native Son
Copyright
UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN. Copyright © 1936,1937,1938 by Richard Wright. Restored edition copyright © 1991 by Ellen Wright. Introduction copyright © 1993 by Richard Yarborough. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-193527-5
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1Alain Locke, “The Negro:‘New’ or Newer: A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1938.” Opportunity 17 (1939): 8.
10Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 53.
11Ibid., 59.
12Sterling A Brown, “From the Inside,” review of Uncle Tom’s Children, by Richard Wright, Nation 146 (1938): 448.
13Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174.2 (1944): 62.
14Richard Wright, Introduction to “Early Days of a Woman,” in I Wish I’d Written That: Selections Chosen by Favorite American Authors, ed. Eugene J. Woods (New York: Whittlesey-McGraw Hill, 1946), 254.
15Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 63.
16Ibid., 56.
17Ibid., 55.
18Richard Wright, “How Bigger’ Was Born,” in Native Son, res. ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 531.
19Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: Morrow, 1973), 162.
2Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (New York: Amistad-Warner, 1988), 13.
20Ibid., 84.
21Zora Neale Hurston, “Stories of Conflict,” review of Uncle Tom’s Children, by Richard Wright, Saturday Review of Literature 2 April 1938: 32.
22Sherley Anne Williams, “Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright, in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: Hall, 1982), 398.
23Ibid., 406.
24Saunders Redding, “The Alien Land of Richard Wright,” in Five Black Writers, ed. Donald B. Gibson (New York University Press, 1970), 5.
25Allison Davis, Leadership, Love, and Aggression (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 179.
3Richard Wright, Black Boy, res. ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 293.
4Richard Wright, “ New Challenge 2.2 (1938): 61.
5Michel Fabre, “ Beyond Naturalism?” in Richard Wright, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 41.
6Richard Wright, Introduction, in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, vol. 1, revised edition, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton (New York: Harbinger-Harcourt, 1970), xviii.
7Ralph Ellison, “Remembering Richard Wright,” Delta 18 (1984): 6.
8Arna Bontemps, “Famous WPA Authors,” Negro Digest 8.8 (1950): 46.
9Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; reprint, New York: Antheneum, 1968), 5.
Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children
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