Richard Wright Writing America at Home and from Abroad

Virginia Whatley Smith

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781496807229
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Robert J. Butler, Ginevra Geraci, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Floyd W. Hayes III, Joseph Keith, Toru Kiuchi, John Lowe, Sachi Nakachi, Virginia Whatley Smith, and John Zheng Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and understandings of the particular America that became Wright's focus at the beginning of his career and was still prominent in his mind at the end. Virginia Whatley Smith's edited collection examines Wright's fixation with America at home and from abroad: his oppression by, rejection of, conflict with, revolts against, and flight from America. Other people have written on Wright's revolutionary heroes, his difficulties with the FBI, and his works as a postcolonial provocateur; but none have focused singly on his treatment of America. Wherever Wright traveled, he always positioned himself as an African American as he compared his experiences to those at hand. However, as his domestic settlements changed to international residences, Wright's craftsmanship changed as well. To convey his cultural message, Wright created characters, themes, and plots that would expose arbitrary and whimsical American policies, oppressive rules which would invariably ensnare Wright's protagonists and sink them more deeply into the quagmire of racial subjugation as they grasped for a fleeting moment of freedom. Smith's collection brings to the fore new ways of looking at Wright, particularly his post- Native Son international writings. Indeed, no critical interrogations have considered the full significance of Wright's masterful crime fictions. In addition, the author's haiku poetry complements the fictional pieces addressed here, reflecting Wright's attitude toward America as he, near the end of his life, searched for nirvana—his antidote to American racism.

Part 1

Writing America at Home, 1930–1947

Life and Death of a Black Man(n) in
Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside”

—GINEVRA GERACI—

Two basic forces shape language and imagery in “Down by the Riverside,” the second of Richard Wright’s five short stories that comprise Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). The first concerns the naturalistic representation of the general conditions and inescapable circumstances of life and death for blacks living in the American South. The other specifically concerns the African American hero Brother Mann. He tries to rescue his family during a period of martial law because of the massive flooding of the Mississippi River; however, he is forced into conscription and then shot by white soldiers for killing a white man. During the series of mishaps complicating Brother Mann’s rescue operations, the reader senses the modernist presence of his voice and thoughts as well as the interiority of his being and selfhood. Wright captures the hero’s subjectivity by employing the modernist techniques of vernacular interior monologues as well as using a symbolic mythic framework that reflects the biblical deluge.

Wright places the hero’s predictable failure within a system of hard facts that will defeat him according to race, milieu, and epoch. Brother Mann perceives the white-dominated American social structure as a solid, impenetrable wall and feels compelled to obey orders and give himself up to white authority.¹ He lives in the Deep South where racial conditions have changed very little since slavery. To illustrate, Wright insinuates the contradictory social conditions that frustrate Mann’s attempts to act as a man. He also uses opposite pairings throughout the text to balance the fluid transition between the external, third-person narrator’s voice and Mann’s personal, desperate, and alienated voice.

Critics have repeatedly highlighted Wright’s ability to fuse different elements and techniques into his writings, including those that focus on American culture. With regard to “Down by the Riverside,” Michel Fabre mentions the author’s ability to “blend and fuse elements and techniques borrowed from Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Conrad, and even James”—all being white European and American writers. Fabre also stresses that, in his depictions of natural disasters, individual loneliness, and existential numbness complicating the lives of his African American characters, Wright chooses to utilize philosophical theories as an alternative mode to writing protest fiction (Fabre, World 68). In his introduction to the HarperPerennial edition of Uncle Tom’s Children, Richard Yarborough also considers the different disciplines and influences occurring in Wright’s collection, and especially notes the literary influences ranging from American naturalism to modernism to African American folklore (xiii–xxii). Similarly, Yoshinobu Hakutani places Wright in the African American modernist tradition by stressing its affinity with Anglo-American modernism in terms of their shared interest in traditions, myths, and legends (Hakutani, Cross-Cultural 8).

Yet, in assessing Wright’s American-based short story, it is also possible not to consider naturalism as an expression of social commitment and modernism as a concern with form and craft, and, therefore, as naturally contrasting principles. In “Culture and Finance Capital” from The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson proposes a dialectical theory of “realism as modernism, or a realism which is so fundamentally a part of modernity that it demands description in some of the ways we have traditionally reserved for modernism itself—the break, the Novum, the emergence of new perceptions” (148).² On the other hand, in reviewing Marxist theories of literature, Terry Eagleton defines naturalism as a distortion of realism. Choosing Lukács’s interpretation of realism as a starting point, Eagleton considers the passage from realism to naturalism as a process of deterioration; in fact, “the great realist writers arise from a history which is visibly in the making. . . . For the successors of the realists . . . history is already an inert object, an externally given fact no longer imaginable as men’s dynamic product. Realism, deprived of the historical conditions which gave it birth, splinters and declines into ‘naturalism’ on the one hand and ‘formalism’ on the other” (28).

By combining these two notions of naturalism and modernism, they can be considered as deeply related perspectives on the world, and even as a means to gain a tentative renewed alliance between man and history in the writer’s conscience after the reification of historical perception as mentioned by Eagleton. Thus, naturalism and modernism are not opposing forces: the former provides the theoretical background against which the social and economic analysis implied in Wright’s short story can be assessed; the latter supplies a range of technical tools that make the character’s subjectivity come to life while stressing the artistry of the writer’s effort. Wright himself had acknowledged naturalism’s inability to delve into the characters’ psychology as one major flaw. In Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright seems willing to balance that inability through “the complexities of the narrative line, the twists and turns of the plot [that] are essential for an understanding of the characters’ feelings and the nuances of their emotions” (Margolies, “Wright’s Craft” 76).

“Down by the Riverside” is set in American culture, the Deep South, and the racial and cultural conditions existing in the 1920s and 1930s. It provides an example of such interplay between naturalism and modernism that is further processed through solid imagery on the one hand, and fluid tropes on the other. External reality, which is consistent with the naturalistic and protest fiction angles that take into account the hard life of vanquished African Americans, is depicted as a solid, impenetrable wall erected by violent nature, hard unfriendly whites, and iron-like American racist authority.³ This solidity, metaphorically representing the deterministic nature of social and historical conditions, has a balancing principle in the liquidity of both sounds and images. The modernist elements thus include water imagery, thematic representations of individual isolation, and stylistic techniques that capture the qualitative levels of the African American hero’s voice.

Wright portrays, and Mann perceives, white people and white authority as a solid barrier that symbolizes “the inflexibility of the Southern status quo” (Howard 60). His perception of whites is no different from that of Bigger Thomas in Native Son. This solid inalterability of the social system is also expressed in the “unrelieved bleakness symbolized by the endless waters of the flood or the silt-draped landscape left after it” (Howard 48).⁴ Nature, too, is unrelenting and resistant to Mann’s endeavors.

Throughout the narrative, the African American character’s psyche remains detached and even subordinated to external reality because, as Eagleton writes about naturalism, “the dialectical relations between men and their world give way to an environment of dead, contingent objects disconnected from characters” (28). An example of such estrangement is the frequent juxtaposition of Mann’s thoughts with white people’s orders. Social reality in general in the form of white authority coincides with the specific moment that dominates the external reality in Mann’s consciousness. After being sidetracked from acquiring a boat to take his pregnant wife Lulu to a hospital, Mann’s thoughts are still on his personal mission at hand: “Lawd, Lulu down there somewhere, Mann thought. Dead! She gonna be left there in the flood . . .” (Wright, “Down” 103). The suspension dots at the end make it evident that Mann is not fully allowed to indulge in his train of thought because a soldier’s voice interrupts it to urge him to get back to work.⁵

Wright depicts American whites as being similar to rock-hard surfaces reflecting, according to circumstances, fear, hatred, or disgust. When Mann approaches the white man Heartfield and asks him for help with his sick wife, even nature seems hard-edged as the surrounding darkness is disrupted by solid light: “A pencil of light shot out in the darkness, a spot of yellow caught the boat. He blinked, blinded” (79). To Mann, an enraged Heartfield appears heartless: “He watched a white man with a hard, red face come out onto a narrow second-story porch and stand framed in a light-flooded doorway” (80). Darkness is intercut by lightness or whiteness. White authority is also metonymically represented by white soldiers, whose faces seem to Mann to be “like square blocks of red and he could see the dull glint of steel on the tips of their rifles” (83). Here the impenetrable wall of racial prejudice is portrayed as being made of square blocks and steel rifles. Later in the concluding scene, Mann will perceive the pressure of pursuing whites as being equivalent to physical weight: “Mann knew they were behind him. He felt them all over his body, and especially like something hard and cold weighing on top of his head, weighing so heavily that it seemed to blot out everything but one hard, tight thought: They got me now” (113).

Wright’s imagery in this short story recalls similar tropes in Native Son (1940) with its setting being in the American North, and specifically urban Chicago, Illinois, and its segregated South Side. The African American hero Bigger Thomas, another product of the South but now having grown up in the North, registers his disappointment with his oppressive environmental and economic conditions. Bigger feels as if the snow covering the city is weighing down on him and is symbolically like another white mass crushing him: “White people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead” (Wright, 1987 Native Son [NS] 129). Mann’s external environment in the South shares the same menacing quality, as it is clear in this scene shortly preceding his arrest: “The landscape lay before his eyes with a surprising and faithful solidity. It was like a picture that might break. He walked on in blind faith, he reached level ground and went on past white people who stared sullenly. He wanted to look around, but could not turn his head. His body seemed encased in a tight vise, in a narrow black coffin that moved with him as he moved” (“Down” 114). Mann feels that his own mortality is imminent.

Ironically, Mann contributes to his own ending from the very beginning of his desperate mission to transport his pregnant wife to a hospital. First, he signs a note to be repaid for a boat that he steals and that will later be used against him as evidence of his theft. Second, he is indicted by means of another note carrying Heartfield’s address that compels him to rescue the family of the man he has just killed in self-defense.⁶ These notes predate symbolically the derisive one inscribed by Dr. Bledsoe that Ellison’s Invisible Man carries in his briefcase to white patrons in the North and that reads: “Keep this nigger boy running.”⁷

The text also refers to the problem of inaction by the larger community—the black sector that Wright does not fail to represent in its shortcomings. Mann feels more at ease when he is with “his people”; yet, no help comes from them during his travails and tribulations. In fact, when he is arrested and members of the black community are present, he notes that “the black faces he passed were blurred one into the other” (117). He despairingly wonders: “Why dont they hep me?” (117). They, too, are subjugated victims of white oppression and powerless to save themselves against white authority. Mann turns out to be a typical, powerless black man, a condition Wright continually presents as a contradiction to the claims of equality written in the Declaration of Independence and freedom guaranteed to blacks according to the Emancipation Proclamation. In the South, however, Mann is not a “man”; he is still a “boy” to whites, no matter at what age because he is black.

In essence, Mann is an aspect of Wright’s other typical, black male heroes who become thwarted by white society from achieving their ambitions. His story gains additional parabolic force by Mann’s efforts to save his pregnant black wife who will never be delivered of her child (Brigano 18). This African American adult male is also a painfully isolated hero, a desperate and lonely modernist character wobbling in an American sea of white and some black faces staring indifferently at him. The passage concerning Mann’s puzzlement over his black community’s inaction has been interpreted as a hint of Wright’s pessimism regarding black culture’s failure to live up to the nationalistic ideals it often extols (Kent 46).

The proof of a modernist intention is evinced by Wright’s incorporation of its stylistic techniques. Extending his analysis to Uncle Tom’s Children as a whole, Richard Yarborough equates Wright’s use of the “stream of consciousness,” especially in “Long Black Song,” to Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” included in Three Lives.⁸ The modernist frame of reference in “Down by the Riverside” is further suggested by Wright’s use of the flood metaphor as a variant of the biblical deluge. He repeats this water imagery in his other short story, “The Man Who Saw the Flood,” also included in Eight Men. As modernist literary echoes, they resonate the water imagery enveloping the symbolic elements in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). In addition, Mann’s desperate effort to fight the current additionally recalls the equally hopeless confrontation with nature that the Bundren family in Mississippi experience in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). During one scene, Cash and the family’s wagon are swept away while crossing a river similarly as forceful and powerful as the one impeding Mann’s efforts.

Edward Margolies also notes that there is “a certain epic quality to the piece—man steadily pursuing his course against a malevolent nature only to be cut down later by the ingratitude of his fellow men: “The scenario is suggestive of Mark Twain or Faulkner. And Mann’s long-suffering perseverance and stubborn will to survive endow him with a rare mythic Biblical quality” (Margolies, “Wright’s Craft” 80). Michel Fabre has also included Faulkner into Wright’s sources of inspiration (Fabre 1973 Unfinished Quest [UQ] 17, 112–36). Yet, the experimental nature of a text like that of As I Lay Dying, which powerfully relies on fragmentation and disorder as a gnosiological method and as a metanarrative meditation on the nature of the authorial process, may appear unparalleled in comparison to Wright’s reworking of a modernist perspective (Rubeo, “Fragments” 209–12).

However, Wright’s short story and Faulkner’s novel do have a few elements in common. As already mentioned, while evoking a hopeless confrontation between man and nature, Wright endeavors to follow the character’s mobile, flowing train of thought as it is being pitted against a stone-like background that seems to mock him. Consistently, the reader has to deal with a “confused rush and whirl of events and is swept along, like Mann, as if in the flood itself. Wright’s main means of engaging the reader in this way is his rapid and frequent shifts in point of view from third person to first person and back” (Kinnamon, Emergence 89). Nature consistently undercuts human efforts.

Faulkner’s novel, too, displays a complex combination of naturalistic and modernist elements. In fact, the naturalistic setting of Mississippi in which man struggles with indifferent nature, and the material and spiritual ruin of the Bundrens have their modernist counterpart in ways similarly represented in Wright’s short story. There is the challenging fragmentation of characters’ thoughts, scenes, or events in the text over several sections. The different points of view and narrative voices for each section in Faulkner’s longer work tentatively outline or provide an overall picture of persons living under chaotic conditions. Faulkner questions the very nature of literary creation by opposing two essential linguistic modes against each other. For example, there is the strictly referential, even dreary language used by Anse as opposed to the creative but incoherent “imagist” language used by Darl and Vardaman. They “speak with a freedom that allows them to get directly to the essence of things, and thus expose, quite unintentionally, the hypocritical redundancy, the labyrinthical course of what is commonly accepted as ‘normal speech’” (Rubeo, “Fragments” 208). Their fragmentary and/or incoherent expressions are modernistic.

Wright, too, embeds the motifs of fragmentary and/or incoherent references in his modernist short story “Down by the Riverside.” The work suggests an analogous contrast: the matter-of-fact language of authority of white men, such as the case of Mann being given orders by the soldiers, as well as the more extensively naturalistic language clashes with the strongly emotional or at times broken language of the main character. Wright portrays Mann as someone who is much more verbal when talking to himself than he can ever be when talking to others, especially white people. The story is a multifaceted combination of discursive levels unceasingly shifting from pure third-person narration to first-person vernacular interior monologue to direct speech. The liquid transition between these levels adds force to the figures of fluidity, to the water imagery that Tracy Webb has extensively discussed as a predominant feature not just in “Down by the Riverside,” but also throughout Uncle Tom’s Children (5–16).

From the very first pages, the third-person narrator’s voice and the character’s interior monologue alternate constantly to bring the reader back and forth between the world outside and the world inside. This alternating combination becomes at times intricate, as in the following quotation that shows an alternation of direct speech, interior monologue, third-person internally focalized narration, and nonfocalized third-person narration, all in the space of a few lines:

“Ah sent Bob wid the mule t try t git a boat,” he said . . . he swallowed with effort. . . . No boat. No money. No doctah. Nothing t eat. N Bob ain back here yit. Lulu could not last much longer this way. If Bob came with a boat he would pile Lulu in and row over to that Red Cross Hospital, no matter what. The white folks would . . . have to take her in. They would not let a woman die just because she was black. . . . He grew rigid, looking out of the window, straining to listen. (“Down” 65–66)

The sentence “Lulu could not last much longer this way,” in particular, seems an example of imperfect free indirect discourse. While it is a statement that can only belong to Mann in terms of subjective knowledge and especially because of the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Writing America at Home, 1930–1947
• Part 2: Writing America from Abroad, 1947–1960
• Works Cited
• About the Contributors
• Index