"The Reds Are in the Bible Room": Political Activism and The Bible in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children

Abstract

When Israel was in Egyptland, Let my people go. Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go. Go down, Moses Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go. Despite Ralph Ellison's proclamation that Richard Wright facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering forms of American Negro humanity,(1) Richard Wright could not help but discover various forms of his own African-American heritage. As Ellison has also said, quoting Heraclitus, geography is fate.(2) While first volume of Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, does claim the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes and cultural barrenness of life,(3) it also catalogues many of joys and strengths of that same black life: Thomas Wolfe-like lists of beautiful sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of Southern rural life; lyrical catalogues of folk beliefs that, like Zora Neale Hurston, he recognized as being vital to African-American survival in racially hostile South; indomitable will that Wright inherited from his mother; and, perhaps most importantly for Wright as an artist, his imaginative quest through literature for insight into his own lived experience.(4) It is important to remember that Wright's geographic destiny also included a thorough indoctrination into South's religiosity, a fact also documented in Black Boy, but often overlooked. His initiation into symbology of biblical stories and power of verbally constructed images as taught to him in church formed a vital part of his literary apprenticeship. And while Wright did not embrace church, as an African American from violently Jim Crow state of Mississippi, he certainly did recognize vital role church played as a bulwark against tide of white racism in lives of Southern blacks; he recognized that African-American religiosity provided psychic health for blacks by assuring them that they would not always be oppressed in Egyptland of Jim Crow South; and, moreover, he came to recognize radical potential of church and its ability to equip Southern blacks with an indigenous belief system for hastening and contributing to their own liberation.(5) political, revolutionary lessons Wright learned during his affiliation with American Communist Party (CPUSA) in Chicago allowed him to recognize revolutionary potential within Bible lessons he learned from church. lessons from these seemingly conflicting sources entered into what he once called medium of exchange(6) of his imagination and were transmuted into fictive works of Uncle Tom's Children. Each of collection's stories demonstrates either tragic consequences of life without a church committed to revolutionary politics, or victorious results of a Christian praxis driven by a Marxist demand for social justice. As Abdul JanMohamed has noted, cohesion of Uncle Tom's Children derives from its incremental repetition of themes,(7) with Wright's concerns progressing outward from individual survival toward community solidarity and eventual political activism. Wright revised collection for its subsequent 1940 publication by adding an introductory essay, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, and a fifth and concluding story, Bright and Morning Star, which make this outward expansion even more explicit. Wright explained his decision to revise collection in How `Bigger' Was Born, introduction to his next work, Native Son. He says, had written a book of short stories which was published under title of Uncle Tom's Cabin [in 1938]. When reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. …