Uncle Tom's Children Research Articles

Overt Challenging of Jim Crowism in the Short Stories of Richard Wright's <em>Uncle Tom's Children</em>

Overt Challenging of Jim Crowism in the Short Stories of Richard Wright's <em>Uncle Tom's Children</em>

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

Notes on a Marxist Interpretation of Black American Literature

As its title Notes on Interpretation of Black American Literature indicates, this paper is tentative and suggestive. It aims to present some initial thoughts about subject, raise some relevant issues, and chart some possible directions that criticism of black could take. Perhaps first question to be confronted is this: What does phrase a interpretation of black American literature mean? As obvious as answer may at first appear to be, it is not. Even though Marx and Engels left large body of commentary about art, they did not devise an original, formal, Marxist aesthetic system. Therefore, as one writer has put it, the history of aesthetics has been history of unfolding of possible applications of ideas and categories to arts and to theory of art. This yields many approaches and critical possibilities. However, at base of them all is belief that writer and work are dialectical products of particular historical moment, conditioned by economic-class realities. With this conception of as starting point, one can move in many directions (tracing correspondences between art and class, arguing revolutionary function of art, demystifying existing artists and works, and so on) or adopt methodology of any number of critics (Georg Lukacs, Ernest Fischer, or Herbert Marcuse, to name only three). For general, introductory purposes of this paper, a interpretation of black American literature can be taken simply to mean looking at body of black American from perspective of Marxism to see what relationships exist between two. This would involve examining elements in literature, as well as critiquing from point of view. Specifically, investigation could encompass at least five different tasks: (1) compiling bibliography; (2) studying authors and their works; (3) studying works of non-Marxist authors which contain elements; (4) discussing according to categories of realism, modernism, and socialist realism; and (5) comparing critical tenets with literature. Undoubtedly, most basic service that scholar could provide would be making list of works which would be necessary and helpful to interpretation of black literature. While Baxandall bibliography, Marxism and Aesthetics, contains section on black writers, reference that goes beyond this is needed. 2 The bibliography should list black writers and works, secondary criticism of them and their productions, and other sources which provide historical, sociological, and literary background (for example, James 0. Young's Black Writers of Thirties and Harold Cruse's The Crisis of Negro Intellectual). Al works which concern blacks and Marxism-communism-even those which are not focused on writers and literature-would be valuable. The bibliography should also be annotated to provide maximum guidance and assistance, especially to beginning students. Many of books and articles included in it would have an anti-Marxist, anti-communist bias. (Notation would indicate this as well as identify strongly partisan works.) Consequently, critic could see opposing view (which bibliography would also supply) and/or study raw materials and basic documents personally in order to form his or her own conclusions. An obvious beginning approach to per se could certainly be study of black writers and their works. Looking at writer as whole would necessitate paying attention to both his Marxistoriented and non-Marxist-oriented works, but former would be of greater interest. Furthermore, many black authors were for only period of their careers, and when they ceased subscribing to philosophy, they usually stopped overtly presenting that world view in their writings. The list is impressive: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, to name some of them. The nature of criticism given these writers would, of course, vary according to volume and quality of their works, their general stature, and degree to which they express philosophy. Richard Wright, for instance, has been accorded great deal of this type of critical attention. One of poems which he wrote in first eager flush of enthusiasm, I Have Seen Black Hands, is fairly well-known, anthologized, and commented upon in terms of its political origin. The same thing can be said of two of stories in Uncle Tom's Children

“Down by the Riverside”: Race, Class, and the Drive for Citizenship

In this essay, I argue that Richard Wright's “Down by the Riverside” provides a way of examining the complex relationship between the citizen and the refugee during social breakdown. The federal government's lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina raised this issue, but it remains understudied. I turn to Wright's Depression-era story, originally published in Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas, because he explores a similar question regarding the 1927 Mississippi Flood, which many consider the precursor to Hurricane Katrina. Wright's story not only clues readers in to the racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics of exploitation operating before and during social upheaval catalyzed by natural disaster, but he also reveals a general potential among the dispossessed for critical thinking and action in overwhelming circumstances. This article has several implications: it recovers an understudied story from Wright on its own terms, thereby challenging the tendency to read his early work as premature versions of Native Son; second, it acknowledges black radical thought and aesthetics as a distinct tradition with fascinating convergences and divergences from European leftisms; third, it treats “Down by the Riverside” as a precursor to contemporary novels whose protagonists live outside the confines of the citizen or even the human; fourth, and most important, this article contributes to a materialist theory of trauma that I call thinking through crisis. While trauma theory implies that overwhelming experience halts thought and action, I argue that black radical aesthetics reveals how overwhelming experience engenders agency.

Flinging a New Star: “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star” as Reflections of Richard Wright’s Changing Relationship with Communism

Richard Wright's collection of short novella's, Uncle Tom's Children , was originally published in 1938; in 1940, after the success of Native Son, a new printing of the text appeared with two additions. first was the introductory essay entitled The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, which was written in 1937, and later served as part of Black Boy. second was the novella Bright and Morning Star. Michel Fabre notes that Harper's Magazine rejected this story, but since it fit Party specifications even better than had the four previous stories, New Masses published it as part of a special literary supplement on May 10, [1938] (164) . In fact, perhaps because New Masses originally published the final story, critical attention to the revised edition of book almost exclusively posits that the 1940 edition reflects Wright's commitment to Communism at the time. However, several of Wright's other writings-including the introductory essay to the 1940 edition, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow; Blue print for Negro Writing, first published in New Challenge in the fall of 1937; Tried to be a Communist, first published in Atlantic Monthly in August and September 1944; and his responses to the Communist party's review of Native Son in 1940-also indicate that his focus in the late 1930s was more on the development of an individual black consciousness than on advancing the causes of the Communist party. By juxtaposing the final two stories, Fire and Cloud and Bright and Morning Star, and considering them in terms of the other writings indicated above, I argue that the 1940 edition of Uncle Tom's Children (with the two additions) demonstrates Wright's growing ambivalence with the Communist Party between the years of 1937 and 1940.

The Introductory Essay: Richard Wright's Covert Challenging of Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism

Richard Wright’s introductory essay to his collection of short stories Uncle Tom's Children describes hidden forms of resistance against Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism. The essay entitled The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch relates Wright’s daily confrontations with Jim Crowism with a particular emphasis on his evasive actions, and his covert activities, such as silence, playing the role of the Monkey trickster in the library, lying consistently to whites if this act did not question his life and “sly civility,” to fight the humiliation imposed by Jim Crow laws and customs back. In the short stories, however, he focuses on more open forms of defying Jim Crowism, especially the resort to physical violence. In all the stories of the collection of Uncle Tom’s Children and in its introductory essay, whites are the originators of the violence; however, blacks are not always portrayed as entirely innocent. The essay is divided into nine “lessons”. For the purpose of this paper, I limit my study of the introductory essay to four of Wright’s so called Jim Crow “lessons,” selecting two examples from the beginning of the essay and two examples from the end to show what Wright meant by “covert tactics” and how he used them in his day-today life. Towards the end of the essay, I conclude, Wright increases his attacks on Uncle Tomism either by criticizing the submissive reactions of his family and black folks or by refusing to be meek and loyal to whites. When he was seriously threatened, though, he had no choice but to play the role of an Uncle Tom.

The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children

1. Living with Injustice How should one live? This central philosophical question can be separated into at least two parts. The first concerns the conduct and attitudes morality requires of each of us. The second is about the essential elements of a worthwhile life; it’s about what it means to flourish, which includes meeting certain moral demands but is not exhausted by this. Answering this two-pronged question traditionally falls within the subdiscipline of ethics, broadly construed. Philosophers have also sought to explain what makes a society just or good, to specify the values and principles by which we are to evaluate institutional arrangements and political regimes. This is the traditional domain of political philosophy. This essay addresses a question that arises where ethics and political philosophy meet. Philosophers who attempt to answer the question of how should one live typically abstract away from the concrete sociopolitical circumstances within which individuals make their lives, circumstances that, as it turns out, may be shaped by serious injustices. This kind of idealization has its place. It is often productive to start with ideal theory, where we assume individuals are acting under reasonably just background conditions, using what we learn to better understand what choices we ought to make in our less than ideal, real lives. But there are vexing ethical questions that can be answered only if we theorize them against the background of societal injustice. The question within nonideal theory that I want to take up is how one should live under conditions of serious societal injustice. I am particularly concerned to understand how members of oppressed groups ought to live when the prospects for overcoming their oppression are uncertain or dim. As with ideal theory, answering the question of how the oppressed ought to live is not limited to specifying their moral obligations. It also entails explaining what a life well lived in the face of oppression would involve. Obviously, to fully flourish (on almost any account of what this

(Re)Claiming Legacy in the Post-Civil Rights South in Richard Wright's "Down by the Riverside" and Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men

Mark Arax's 2004 Los Angeles Times article In a Reverse Migration, Blacks Head he informs us that urban northern and western destinations of African Americans from 1910 to 1970, what we refer to as The Great Migrations, have been undergoing a full scale reversal as African Americans began retracing steps to a place their families once fled--the (A1). The spike southern black population--an increase of 3.6 million during 1990s--coincided with changing ethnic demographics areas to which African Americans traditionally moved opposition to Jim Crow South. Therefore, with appearance of cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis as black Meccas, as DeWayne Wickham points out, the South has emerged as leading source of economic opportunity for black businesses and fertile ground for black politicians (A13). The realignment that Civil Rights Movement engineered resulted a southern transformation that could not overtly and legally deny rights and humanity of African Americans. Yet a landscape that maintains a deep connection to its traditions and legacy, African Americans still find themselves, at times, erased from mythic construction of South and marginalized material areas of social and political power. addition to its role conservative counterrevolution of 1980s and 1990s, a litany of recent events South--specifically dragging death of James Byrd Jasper, Texas, punitive indictments of six African American boys Jena, Louisiana, and federal government's belated response during Hurricane Katrina--have reinforced ideas of South as a site which African Americans still remain an incredibly vulnerable populace. The depiction of South as a dangerous (and at times nightmarish) space for African Americans has an extensive history African American literature. Richard Wright's 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, for example, depicts southern African Americans struggling to achieve agency an unforgiving, violent Jim Crow South, a struggle buoyed by contemporaneous events like trial of Scottsboro boys and Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Wright's second story collection, Down by Riverside, also points to future by forecasting pervasive instances of white supremacy that accompanied tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, from governmental response to mostly black poor to media construction of black looters and refugees. Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men presents a late 1970s South that directly contradicts idea of a rapidly changing nation after passage of Voting and Civil Rights Acts 1960s. Gaines's novel, we are witness to a world that has barely changed from world of 1940s that Gaines captures works like Of Love and Dust (1968) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Wright and Gaines are part of a larger literary tradition that, as Anissa Wardi claims Death and Arc of Mourning African American Literature, bears witness to truncated narratives of Middle Passage, brutal practices of slavery, and paradoxical configuration of South through myth and memory (28). Instead of merely bearing witness, African Americans Gaines's south Louisiana community assert a collective subjectivity that foreshadows significance of black political, social, and economic life rewriting southern racial narrative and myth that has marginalized or erased legacy of African Americans. Jerry Ward claims that in aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and flooding of New Orleans, 'Down by Riverside' speaks to much more than Flood of 1927 (347). Similarly, return of African Americans to South leads us to view A Gathering of Old Men not only as site of a final battle Civil Rights Movement, but as a potentially regenerative space for a more inclusive, restructured South. …

Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial Barbara Foley James A. Miller . Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 280 pp. $27.95. In this ably documented and engagingly written study, James Miller traces the ways in which the Scottsboro case of the 1930s—"arguably the most celebrated racial spectacle of twentieth-century American history, at least up to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till"—has functioned as "a broad signifier for the history of American racial atrocities" (2-3). The words "remembering" and "legacy" are key to Miller's project. While he is concerned with the substance of the issues raised by the Scottsboro case—in which nine African American youths were falsely accused in 1931 of raping two working-class white women, nearly legally lynched, and subsequently positioned at the center of an internationally renowned trial—he focuses primarily upon the ways in which the "Scottsboro Narrative" has been told and retold over the years. It supplies, he argues, a touchstone to changing (and not-so-changing) U. S. attitudes toward the imbrication of race, sex, and political radicalism. Remembering Scottsboro covers a range of representations—journalistic, literary, dramatic, and cinematic. The opening chapter, aptly titled "Framing the Scottsboro Boys," retraces the contestation between the Communist Party (CP) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for control of the legal battle fought to free the defendants. While less thoroughly documented accounts of this rivalry have favored the reformist (and anticommunist) position adopted by the NAACP, Miller demonstrates that the CP—and its legal affiliate, the International Labor Defense (ILD)—mounted an effective defense that continually forced the state of Alabama to back down from its attempts to execute the defendants. [End Page 768] The call for class-conscious multiracial unity touched many a journalistic nerve and brought the political economy of Jim Crow to widespread attention, even for a time creating dissension within the NAACP. Several subsequent chapters address the representation of Scottsboro by a range of 1930s creative artists. Miller examines closely Langston Hughes's avant-garde "mass-chant," Scottsboro Limited—with its prominent featuring of the "New Red Negro"—as well as poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Herman J. D. Carter, and Kay Boyle; Nancy Cunard's compendious 1934 anthology, Negro, was, Miller argues, largely inspired by the Scottsboro case. John Wexley's They Shall Not Die, and Paul Peters and George Sklar's Stevedore brought the case to the stage, either directly or obliquely; the "Scottsboro Narrative" supplied the intertext of William Wellman's 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road and of Fritz Lang's Fury (1936). Grace Lumpkin's A Sign for Cain, a novel treating contemporaneous communist organizing in the Jim Crow South, as well as Guy Endore's Babouk and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, novels depicting historical slave revolts, drew upon their readerships' acquaintance with the Scottsboro case. Indeed, Miller argues, Bontemps's contrast between the heroic Gabriel and the craven Ben and Pharaoh cannot be understood apart from their allegorical reference to the different personalities and values of various Scottsboro defendants. Finally, Richard Wright is shown to have been deeply absorbed by the toxic blend of racism, sexism, economic exploitation, and state violence informing the Scottsboro Narrative. From his earliest poems through Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son, Wright wrestled with both the explanatory power and the practical limitations of the communist position on the "Negro Question," as these had emerged in the trials taking place in northern Alabama. The rest of Remembering Scottsboro carries the Narrative beyond the 1930s. Perhaps the most riveting chapter, "The Scottsboro Defendant as Proto-Revolutionary: Haywood Patterson," examines both the life and the autobiography (Scottsboro Boy, 1950) of the "baddest" of the defendants, a real-life counterpart both to Hughes's somewhat mythical "New Red Negro" as well as to Wright's Bigger Thomas. Exploring in detail Patterson's correspondence with various CP and ILD members, Miller highlights the admixture of courage, rage, and cynicism that sustained Patterson through a brutalized life spent almost entirely in prison, even as the rising tide of anticommunism beleaguered his defenders and divested his situation...

Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (review)

Reviewed by: Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories Lawrence E. Hussman Jr. Leonard Cassuto. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. 327 pp. $27.50. This complex study centers on a convincing argument. Cassuto locates two apparently opposing conceptual influences on "hard-boiled" American crime fiction. He traces the genre's code of machismo back to the gender disassociation that gained momentum early in the twentieth century. Teddy Roosevelt famously rode roughshod over the perceived effeminacy of his day and thereby helped enshrine "masculinity" as the male lodestar for more than the next hundred years. The genre's sentimental, or more humanly integrated element derives directly from the sort of "feminine" male model Roosevelt abhorred and sought to displace. That softer type, characterized not so much by manly strength as by the perceived virtues of empathy, sensitivity, and domestication, had been endorsed in the previous century by British moral philosophers. It had also been brought to fictional life then, especially by the female creators of sentimental novels about the middle class. In America, the influence of evangelical Christianity played a role in elevating the sentimental by reemphasizing community and family values. The traditional hard-boiled hero or antihero of American crime fiction beginning in the 1920s, customarily a detective, almost always displayed elements of both gender models. He was a rugged, sometimes violent loner whose existential code required him to fight amoral heavies and [End Page 211] care about their real and potential victims in order to make an empty world safe for society. As the genre has developed over decades, Cassuto argues, hard-boiled protagonists have become mellower while their antagonists have turned more vicious. Cassuto names other prior persuasions that have colored the structure, style, and world view characteristic of "hard-boiled" crime fiction. These include the traditional mystery writer's preference for suspenseful plots, Hemingway's tough-guy stance and laconic, expressionless voice, as well as literary naturalists' grim take on existence. He devotes considerable space to Dreiser's hugely popular An American Tragedy (1925) as a "gateway" novel for the writers who launched the first "hard-boiled" crime books. And Cassuto underpins his main argument about the teaming of the tough and the tender by citing the conflict within Clyde Griffiths, whose sensitive side stays his hand at the moment of his planned murder. Hemingway's work figures here too in that his hardened heroes fight their feelings but occasionally lose the battle, as when Jake Barnes cries himself to sleep in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Cassuto calls these defeats Hemingway's "anti-sentimental sentimentalism." As his analysis develops, Cassuto applies his premise to a host of the genre's practitioners, from Dashiell Hammett to Sue Grafton. Along the way, he includes a chapter on the emergence of hard-boiled crime fiction written by black writers. In it, he argues that these writers' relatively recent arrival on the scene owes to a delayed convergence of their interests and those of white U. S. crime writers. He shows how, after the appearance of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), African American fiction had most often reflected ambivalence about the relative efficacy of moral suasion (read sentimentalism) and aggressive challenge to authority as routes to full freedom. His lucid discussion of the central players in this debate among black writers who chose crime as a subject includes a recognition of Richard Wright's importance. In the original version of Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Wright arranged his stories in an ascending order of available responses to white authority and injustice, moving from timorous acquiescence to angry political agitation. But for subsequent editions of the book, he added and ended with "Bright and Morning Star," a story that honors self-sacrifice. Cassuto stresses Wright's oscillation between opposites in Uncle Tom's Children and underscores its resolution in the rallying call to rise up implicit in Native Son (1940). He believes that Wright's masterpiece marks the beginning of modern African American crime fiction. An American Tragedy inspired the naturalistic veneer and three-section structure Wright used in Native Son, but by the time he wrote it...

Jena, Abu Ghraib, and Katrina: Using Popular Culture to Teach Wright's Works

cultural productions of the time in which they were written is an important pedagogical practice. Yet students can benefit from a particular kind of de-historicizing of his oeuvre as well. This involves correlating his texts with references to popular culture, or more specifically, mass media narratives of current events. According to my students, doing so highlights some of the profound ways in which Wright speaks to issues of our own time. Their response is not surprising, for his work is indeed vital and prophetic. As Julia Wright remarks in the Introduction to A Father's Law, there is an eeriness to the premonitions in her father's writing (xi). This essay outlines such an approach to teaching selected works by Wright, including the poem Between the World and Me, short stories Big Boy Leaves Home and Down by the Riverside from Uncle Tom's Children, and Native Son. The events to be discussed herein are ones I have found students

The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death (review)

Reviewed by: The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death Jeffrey Atteberry Abdul R. JanMohamed . The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 327 pp. Via a sustained engagement with the entire arc of Richard Wright's career as a writer of narrative prose, Abdul JanMohamed's The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death implicitly retrieves the moment when Western political philosophy articulates the ideological grounds for slavery and, through its critical reappraisal, rigorously works through "the agency of death," thus clearing the way for—as the title of the book's conclusion declares—"renegotiating the death contract." Although JanMohamed never points to John Locke as an explicit reference point, preferring instead to stick closer to Hegel and Heidegger, his project clearly situates itself on theoretical terrain that was laid out by Locke in his 1690 Second Treatise. Regardless [End Page 731] of where one stands on the question of Locke's philosophical position on actually existing slavery, his phenomenologically accurate description of slavery as a coercive institution sketches the basic structural outlines for a "death contract" theory of slavery that would rest upon the passive consent of the enslaved. In Book IV, Locke writes, Indeed having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of his to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it. For, whenever he finds the hardship of his Slavery out-weigh the value of his Life, 'tis in his Power, by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death he desires. (284) It is precisely this structure of slavery as a living under a conditionally commuted death sentence that JanMohamed will take up as the necessary precondition for both slave and Jim Crow societies. Of course, he does so with a difference, however; for whereas Locke claims that "no injury" is suffered by the slave under these conditions, JanMohamed's reading of Wright rigorously demonstrates how these conditions in their social embodiment violently produce a death-bound-subject. For such a subject, JanMohamed argues, a certain desire for death is the ineluctable result of the psychopolitical process of the subject's formation precisely because such a subject "can gain access to the potentiality of his life only via his willingness to risk the actualization of his death" (283). The central conceit of The Death-Bound-Subject is that with each successive work of fiction and autobiography Richard Wright excavates another layer in the psyche of a subject forged through a dialectic of death. JanMohamed plots the dynamics of this dialectic through a triad of terms: actual-death, social-death, and symbolic-death. In short, the ever-present threat of actual-death for both the slave and the black American in the Jim Crow South induces a terrorizing fear that results in a social-death, a condition in which the subject is denied any sociopolitical standing, including protection from the arbitrary execution of the suspended death sentence. By contrast, through confronting this fear and wielding the threat of actual-death on its own terms, the death-bound-subject undergoes a symbolic-death, which is a dialectical negation of social-death that confers a measure of agency that is otherwise foreclosed. The Hegelian resonances of this dialectic are duly noted, but JanMohamed argues that Wright's dialectic of death, with its emphasis on symbolic-death as a political and existential moment of sublation, constitutes a significant revision of Hegel's "uncritical valorization of 'work' as the singular avenue through which the slave can supposedly find his salvation" (13). [End Page 732] The unfolding of Wright's dialectic takes place in stages over the course of his career, and JanMohamed's book traces its coming to consciousness through a series of chapters, each devoted to an individual work and arranged in chronological order. According to JanMohamed, the dialectic initially comes into view over the course of Uncle Tom's Children, but the critical moment of symbolic-death begins to receive focused examination...

Richard Wright's "Lawd Today!" and the Political Uses of Modernism

Readers have long considered Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's first written and last published novel, an anomaly--when they have considered at all. The novel, which Wright began perhaps as early as 1933 and which he continued to compose and revise until 1937, (1) simply seems inconsistent with our image of what a Wright text of the 1930s, a decade which saw the of Wright's radical poetry and the short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children, should do or be. Set in Chicago during the Great Depression, Lawd Today! features petit bourgeois postal worker Jake Jackson as its protagonist. Jake, a drunken, abusive lout who spends his days lusting after prostitutes and beating his wife, never achieves any real revolutionary awakening, and indeed continues to endorse capitalism and the American success myth and to condemn 'Commoonists' despite his own debtridden and fundamentally unsuccessful life. When the small publishing house Walker and Company released the posthumously in 1963, critics greeted with a mixture of confusion, qualified praise, and disgust. Indeed, Nick Aaron Ford, the novel's most vociferous early critic, found this dull, unimaginative novel so impossible to reconcile with his vision of Wright that he wrote, is difficult to believe that Lawd Today was written by Richard Wright.... It is doubtful that the mature Wright ever have agreed to its publication (368). Although Ford may have articulated the most extreme critique of the novel, he was by no means completely out of step with his fellow reviewers. Granville Hicks' unenthusiastic comment that it is less powerful than either Native Son or Black Boy, but has its own kind of interest (363) typifies the lukewarm response that continues to guide critical discussion--or the lack thereof--of the today, with a few notable exceptions. (2) Yoshinobu Hakutani, a more recent Wright critic, claims that few readers can deny that Lawd Today lacks the tension of Native Son. Although he admires certain satiric elements o f the novel, he takes to task primarily for its failings as a work of naturalistic protest fiction, a la Native Son: On the one hand, [Wright] has accumulated documentary detail characteristic of a naturalistic style. But his manner is flawed because his selected scenes are imparted with gratuitous and images (222). The stylistic flaw that Hakutani identifies here--the preponderance of metaphors and images--speaks to another difficulty critics have had in reconciling Lawd Today! to the traditional view of Wright, and indeed of literature in general, in the 1930s. The seems influenced less by the naturalism or social realism that we typically associate with Wright and more by modernist aesthetic and thematic concerns. Wright, however, was an active member of the Communist Party throughout the 1930s, (3) and he served as head of the Chicago branch of the literary John Reed Club, published pieces in Party-sponsored and Party-friendly magazines like New Masses and Partisan Review, and rose to prominence as a poet, short story writer, literary critic, and journalist. Since official Communist Party doctrine treated modernism as irredeemably bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, goes the conventional argument, its stable of critics doubtlessly have roundly condemned Wright's novel. Indeed, Granville Hicks asserts that the would have been disturbing to most orthodox Communists in the Thirties (364), and Edward Margolies claims that even a cursory glance at its contents will reveal what the party have found objectionable (91). True, Lawd Today! has little to do, on the surface, with socialist realism, the literary mode ostensibly endorsed by the Communist Party. Mike Gold, one of the Party's most famous aesthetic theorists, lobbied for a proletarian literature [that] will reflect the struggle of the workers in their fight for the world. It portrays the life of the workers . …

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

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. …

Richard Wright's The Long Dream as Racial and Sexual Discourse

When The Long Dream, Wright's last novel, written in exile in France, appeared in 1958, two years before his death, it encountered largely negative reviews in America. Despite Wright's efforts to portray black people's bitter experiences in the deep South, as he had done so successfully in Uncle Tom's Children and Black Boy, The Long Dream, some readers felt, betrayed distinct decline in his creative power. Saunders Redding, who had earlier detected danger inherent in Wright's exile, observed that in The Long Dream Wright had cut the emotional umbilical cord through which his art was fed, and all that remains for it to feed is the memory, fading, of righteous love and anger (329). In A Long Way from Home, Nick Aaron Ford, another black critic, concurred with Redding that Wright had lost touch with his native soil and the swiftly changing racial current in the United States (335-36). Agreeing with Redding and Ford, Maxwell Geismar remarked that, while Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Black Boy are solid, bitter, savage, almost terrifying fictional studies of the Negro mind, The Long Dream turns out to be a surrealistic fantasy of paranoid and suicidal impulses, veiled in political terminology (333). Yet the lack of depth some critics deplored was appreciated as socially authentic by others. Such reviewers as Redding and Ford considered the novel merely repetitious of what Wright had shown before, whereas others deemed Wright's racial discourse as developing and continuing in relevance. Roi Ottley argued that the novel presents a social document of unusual worth, depicting lynching, police brutality, and race riot in Southern town (327). Writing in Best Sellers, another reviewer found value in Wright's depiction of black characters as amoral and as interested in practically nothing but irregular but frequent sexual relations, although this reviewer cautioned that Wright blames this idiosyncrasy of black the white people (Kiniery 332). Still another reader compared The Long Dream with Native Son for its direct treatment of race problems, as well as with well-established social novels like An American Tragedy and The Grapes of Wrath (Shapiro 334). What is implicit in much of the criticism The Long Dream has received is the perception that, even though the novel thrives on authentic details, its structure and characterization lack artistic merit. Most critics have accepted Wright's racial views in the novel as realistic and convincing, but found the ending of the book abrupt, because Wright allows Fishbelly, despite his emerging manhood, to remove himself from the African-American world, go to jail, and then flee to France in search of freedom and equality. What seems lacking at the crucial point in Fishbelly's development is his mental and physical toughness in battling against racism and achieving the independence of other Wright heroes such as Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon.(1) To reassess The Long Dream would require new approach - not to its social and cultural backgrounds, which are history and legend, but to Wright's construction of unique discourse. It was especially important for Wright to express what he actually felt as black youth growing up in the deep South. This subjectivity, which early critics of the novel overlooked, enabled Wright to develop the theme of miscegenation as personally felt experience for Fishbelly, rather than as the background for character development, as is the case in Native Son. For The Long Dream, Wright would construct twofold discourse racial reality and self-portrait - unified on the strength of the sexual theme, for the taboo of interracial sex is the product of socio-historical environment and personal desire. Although the title The Long Dream suggests that the novel is concerned with an unrealistic quality which Wright finds in Fishbelly's life, the book is based on solid facts and believable events. In fact, many of its episodes draw upon the young Wright as he is portrayed in Black Boy. …

Conversations with Richard Wright.

For more than two decades Richard Wright was interviewed by the American and foreign press, first as the author of Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945), next as a famous expatriate recently arrived and lionized in postwar Paris, and finally as the seasoned writer of a dozen books. At the end of his life the young man from Mississippi had become a well-traveled intellectual deeply interested in the social and political as well as literary and racial issues of the Old, the New, and the Third World. Conversations with Richard Wright collects some fifty interviews, many of which are little known in the United States because they appeared in non-English European periodicals and newspapers. This collection reveals a serious, often didactic Wright, giving voice to his inarticulate brothers and sisters as he reveals his racially representative colonialism. Most of his interviewers were white men, and he was always trying to make them listen. European issues also claimed his attention as he struggled to reconcile Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism to the political realities from 1945 to his death in 1960.

Richard Wright's Long Journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky

Ours is an age, in Russia as in the United States, which revels in ethnic revivals and romanticizes cultural difference. In such a time of enthusiastic and sometimes euphoric reconstruction of a usable national identity, Richard Wright, like Maxim Gorky, appears to be a toppled idol of proletarian internationalism, a massive remnant from a discredited humanism. Yet monuments, especially literary monuments, pile up high ruins--all those uncirculating books--and leave a large absence that never quite disappears from cultural memory. Even in a time of relative neglect, Richard Wright continues to occupy a distinctive and disturbing position in African-American letters that is comparable to Gorky's place in the evolution of Russian literary history. Gorky and Wright are the two modern writers who most inconvenience the cultural separatists and sentimental populists among their own people. No two major writers were raised closer to the folk who had recently risen from bondage, and yet both Gorky and Wright rejected the vestiges of the traditional peasant cultures of survival that had spawned them.(1) Both writers carried the large psychic burden of the inside outsider, ever seeking to account for the source of the rage and removal that made them so different. Ultimately the pressure of Gorky's bitter knowledge forced him to imagine and then to help canonize the positive hero of socialist realism, the universal proletarian who would replace the ex-peasant has-beens (byvshie liudi) of his early fiction. But Richard Wright's black-and-blue sensibility, the pain of his profoundly alienated and wounded individuality, eventually led him away from Gorky's faith in collectivist culture and social engineering. Sometime around 1942 Richard Wright began to risk a desperate transcendentalism, an absurd Dostoevskian faith in solitary leaps of consciousness that prefigured the later existential humanism of his expatriate years in France. First, though, the young Richard Wright experienced a powerful identification with the life and writing of Maxim Gorky, and with good reason. Coming to social consciousness in Depression-era Chicago's John Reed Club, at the height of the Popular Front campaign to unite the intellectual proletariat of the world, Wright could not help but be aware of Gorky's legendary life and inspirational example, as promoted in pamphlets, newsprint, and in the world-famous autobiography in its translated and even filmed representation.(2) Indeed, Richard Wright came into literary prominence as the beau ideal of the proletarian revolutionary artist. His early prose and pronouncements emulated Gorky's call for the dialectical transformation of suffering peasant souls into militant socialist masses. By 1937, Wright had fully emerged as the American Communist Party's most illustrious recruit to the newly established literary standards of proletarian realism.(3) In his first important manifesto, Blueprint for Negro Writing, Wright took issue with what he considered the black chauvinism of the Harlem Renaissance, insisting that one could not responsibly advance the race by conspicuous ornamentation of the institutions imposed by segregation: Negro writers must accept this nationalism, but only in order to understand it, possess it, and transcend it.... a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.... To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity. (58-60) Very much resembling Gorky's 1934 address to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, Wright was calling for a selective integration of the progressive aspects of folk culture and religion into a consciously refashioned collective myth that would promote a revolutionary attitude toward reality. Not surprisingly, an activist reconception of Negro spirituals and black Christianity is precisely what distinguished the plotting of Wright's first collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children. …

Black South Literature: Before Day Annotations (For Blyden Jackson)

Spike Lee prefaced She's Gotta Have It with the famous opening of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a fitting gesture of honoring his ancestors while projecting for his audience a gendered joke about the Black South rage to explain: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. some they come in with the tide. others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. It is possible to escape the yoke Hurston fashioned in the second paragraph by turning to the haunting stories in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938), stories that remember everything we must not forget. The escape, however, is rather an instance of jumping from the frying pan the kettle, because one intriguing gloss on Hurston's illusion of forgetting and Wright's verifiable remembering issued from the lips of an ex-slave who problematized the South whence the fictions emerged. It appears in Booker T. Washington's An Address Delivered at the Opening of the Cotton Stated Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, September, 1895: A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, Water, water, we die of thirst! The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: Cast down your bucket where you are. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. Washington's dream pertained to the the coming into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth. Washington resigned in 1915, and the 1930s mocked his dream in double measure, sending the plague of the Depression and challenges to (his)(story) by way of Wright's depiction of how the old hell prevailed in history and Hurston's disputation with the emotional truth of history in (her)(story). Move from Washington's pre-future gloss to the contemporary paratext of Hurston's review of Uncle Tom's Children. Wright's stories are grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. And although she admits Wright's collection contains some beautiful writing, she hopes he will find in Negro life a vehicle for his talents. He had found the vehicle, but it was necessary to move the children out of Mrs. Stowe's cabin so they would not be enslaved to the long dream of the new heaven on the muck! Such is the vicious modernism of intertextuality to be given to some alien Other who asks about the intimacy of Black South literature. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Songs for the People was published in 1895; Harper's poem is echoed thematically and given specification in Margaret Walker's iconic For My The way out of the kettle and of dealing with essential Black South tensions (Washington /Du Bois and Wright/Hurston) is to turn to the legacy of Margaret Walker's vision. My People. New Haven: Yale UP, 1942. Asserting directly the desire Toomer hinted at in Cane (1923), Margaret Walker's first published poem Want to Write (Crisis May 1934) begins: I want to write I want to write the songs of my people. I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark. I want to catch the List floathing strains from their sob-torn throats. Eight years later, Walker proved how genuine her intent was with the publication of the award-winning volume My People. From the beginning, as Eleanor Traylor has written, Walker mine[d] the depth of heritage: music (melos), memory (ethos), and community (epos). Shortly after the publication of Margaret Walker's first book, Louis Untermeyer wrote in the Yale Review (Winter 1943): Margaret Walker's For My People has a double distinction: it is this year's selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and it is the first volume by a Negro to win the competitive honor. …

Models of History in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children

Models of History in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children

The Role of Water Imagery in Uncle Tom's Children

The Role of Water Imagery in Uncle Tom's Children