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1、HOW BIGGER WAS BORNRichard WrightI AM NOT so pretentious as to imagine that it is possible for me to account completely for my own book, Native Son. But I am going to try to account for as much of it as I can, the sources of it, the material that went into it, and my own years long changing attitude
2、 toward that material.In a fundamental sense, an imaginative novel represents the merging of two extremes; it is an intensely intimate expression on the part of a consciousness couched in terms of the most objective and commonly known events. It is at once something private and public by its very na
3、ture and texture. Confounding the author who is trying to lay his cards on the table is the dogging knowledge that his imagination is a kind of community medium of exchange: what he has read, felt, thought, seen, and remembered is translated into extensions as impersonal as a worn dollar bill.The mo
4、re closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Always there is something that is just beyond the tip of the tongue th
5、at could explain it all. Usually, he ends up by discussing something far afield, an act which incites skepticism and suspicion in those anxious for a straight-out explanation.Yet the author is eager to explain. But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by
6、the inexplicable array of his own emotions. Emotions are subjective and he can communicate them only when he clothes them in objective guise; and how can he ever be so arrogant as to know when he is dressing up the right emotion in the right Sunday suit? He is always left with the uneasy notion that
7、 maybe any objective drapery is as good as any other for any emotion.And the moment he does dress up an emotion, his mind is confronted with the riddle of that dressed up emotion, and he is left peering with eager dismay back into the dim reaches of his own incommunicable life. Reluctantly, he comes
8、 to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life, and he knows that that is impossible. Yet, some curious, wayward motive urges him to supply the answer, for there is the feeling that his dignity as a living being is challenged by something within him that is not understood
9、.So, at the outset, I say frankly that there are phases of Native Son which I shall make no attempt to account for. There are meanings in my book of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper. I shall sketch the outline of how I consciously came into possession of the mate
10、rials that went into Native Son, but there will be many things I shall omit, not because I want to, but simply because I dont know them.The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect. But le
11、t me start with the first Bigger, whom I shall call Bigger No. I.When I was a bareheaded, barefoot kid in Jackson, Mississippi, there was a boy who terrorized me and all of the boys I played with. If we were playing games, he would saunter up and snatch from us our balls, bats, spinning tops, and ma
12、rbles. We would stand around pouting, sniffling, trying to keep back our tears, begging for our playthings. But Bigger would refuse. We never demanded that he give them back; we were afraid, and Bigger was bad. We had seen him clout boys when he was angry and we did not want to run that risk. We nev
13、er recovered our toys unless we flattered him and made him feel that he was superior to us. Then, perhaps, if he felt like it, he condescended, threw them at us and then gave each of us a swift kick in the bargain, just to make us feel his utter contempt.That was the way Bigger No. I lived. His life
14、 was a continuous challenge to others. At all times he took his way, right or wrong, and those who contradicted him had him to fight. And never was he happier than when he had someone cornered and at his mercy; it seemed that the deepest meaning of his squalid life was in him at such times.I dont kn
15、ow what the fate of Bigger No. I was. His swaggering personality is swallowed up somewhere in the amnesia of my childhood. But I suspect that his end was violent. Anyway, he left a marked impression upon me; maybe it was because I longed secretly to be like him and was afraid. I dont know.If I had k
16、nown only one Bigger I would not have written Native Son. Let me call the neat one Bigger No. 2; he was about seventeen and tougher than the first Bigger. Since I, too, had grown older, I was a little less afraid of him. And the hardness of this Bigger No. 2 was not directed toward me or the other N
17、egroes, but toward the whites who ruled the South. He bought clothes and food on credit and would not pay for them. He lived in the dingy shacks of the white landlords and refused to pay rent. Of course, he had no money, but neither did we. We did without the necessities of life and starved ourselve
18、s, but he never would. When we asked him why he acted as he did, he would tell us (as though we were little children in a kindergarten) that the white folks had everything and he had nothing. Further, he would tell us that we were fools not to get what we wanted while we were alive in this world. We
19、 would listen and silently agree. We longed to believe and act as he did, but we were afraid. We were Southern Negroes and we were hungry and we wanted to live, but we were more willing to tighten our belts than risk conflict. Bigger No. 2 wanted to live and he did; he was in prison the last time I
20、heard from him.There was Bigger No. 3, whom the white folks called a bad nigger. He carried his life in his hands in a literal fashion. I once worked as a ticket-taker in a Negro movie house (all movie houses in Dixie are Jim Crow; there are movies for whites and movies for blacks), and many times B
21、igger No. 3 came to the door and gave my arm a hard pinch and walked into the theater. Resentfully and silently, Id nurse my bruised arm. Presently, the proprietor would come over and ask how things were going. Id point into the darkened theater and say: Biggers in there. Did he pay? the proprietor
22、would ask. No, sir, Id answer. The proprietor would pull down the corners of his lips and speak through his teeth: Well kill that goddamn nigger one of these days. And the episode would end right there. But later on Bigger No. 3 was killed during the days of Prohibition: while delivering liquor to a
23、 customer he was shot through the back by a white cop.And then there was Bigger No. 4, whose only law was death. The Jim Crow laws of the South were not for him. But as he laughed and cursed and broke them, he knew that some day hed have to pay for his freedom. His rebellious spirit made him violate
24、 all the taboos and consequently he always oscillated between moods of intense elation and depression. He was never happier than when he had outwitted some foolish custom, and he was never more melancholy than when brooding over the impossibility of his ever being free. He had no job, for he regarde
25、d digging ditches for fifty cents a day as slavery. I cant live on that, he would say. Ofttimes Id find him reading a book; he would stop and in a joking, wistful, and cynical manner ape the antics of the white folks. Generally, hed end his mimicry in a depressed state and say: The white folks wont
26、let us do nothing. Bigger No. 4 was sent to the asylum for the insane.Then there was Bigger No. 5, who always rode the Jim Crow streetcars without paying and sat wherever he pleased. I remember one morning his getting into a streetcar (all streetcars in Dixie are divided into two sections: one secti
27、on is for whites and is labeled-FOR WHITES; the other section is for Negroes and is labeled-FOR COLORED) and sitting in the white section. The conductor went to him and said: Come on, nigger. Move over where you belong. Cant you read? Bigger answered: Naw, I cant read. The conductor flared up: Get o
28、ut of that seat! Bigger took out his knife, opened it, held it nonchalantly in his hand, and replied: Make me. The conductor turned red, blinked, clenched his fists, and walked away, stammering: The goddamn scum of the earth! A small angry conference of white men took place in the front of the car a
29、nd the Negroes sitting in the Jim Crow section overheard: Thats that Bigger Thomas nigger and youd better leave im alone. The Negroes experienced an intense flash of pride and the streetcar moved on its journey without incident. I dont know what happened to Bigger No. 5. But I can guess.The Bigger T
30、homases were the only Negroes I know of who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away with it, at least for a sweet brief spell. Eventually, the whites who restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price. They were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded un
31、til they were either dead or their spirits broken.There were many variations to this behavioristic pattern. Later on I encountered other Bigger Thomases who did not react to the locked-in Black Belts with this same extremity and violence. But before I use Bigger Thomas as a springboard for the exami
32、nation of milder types, Id better indicate more precisely the nature of the environment that produced these men, or the reader will be left with the impression that they were essentially and organically bad.In Dixie there are two worlds, the white world and the black world, and they are physically s
33、eparated. There are white schools and black schools, white churches and black churches, white businesses and black businesses, white graveyards and black graveyards, and, for all I know, a white God and a black God . . . .This separation was accomplished after the Civil War by the terror of the Klu
34、Klux Klan, which swept the newly freed Negro through arson, pillage, and death out of the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the many state legislatures, and out of the public, social, and economic life of the South. The motive for this assault was simple and urgent. The imperialist
35、ic tug of history had torn the Negro from his African home and had placed him ironically upon the most fertile plantation areas of the South; and, when the Negro was freed, he outnumbered the whites in many of these fertile areas. Hence, a fierce and bitter struggle took place to keep the ballot fro
36、m the Negro, for had he had a chance to vote, he would have automatically controlled the richest lands of the South and with them the social, political, and economic destiny of a third of the Republic. Though the South is politically a part of America, the problem that faced her was peculiar and the
37、 struggle between the whites and the blacks after the Civil War was in essence a struggle for power, ranging over thirteen states and involving the lives of tens of millions of people.But keeping the ballot from the Negro was not enough to hold him in check; disfranchisement had to be supplemented b
38、y a whole panoply of rules, taboos, and penalties designed not only to insure peace (complete submission), but to guarantee that no real threat would ever arise. Had the Negro lived upon a common territory, separate from the bulk of the white population, this program of oppression might not have ass
39、umed such a brutal and violent form. But this war took place between people who were neighbors, whose homes adjoined, whose farms had common boundaries. Guns and disfranchisement, therefore, were not enough to make the black neighbor keep his distance. The white neighbor decided to limit the amount
40、of education his black neighbor could receive; decided to keep him off the police force and out of the local national guards; to segregate him residentially; to Jim Crow him in public places; to restrict his participation in the professions and jobs; and to build up a vast, dense ideology of racial
41、superiority that would justify any act of violence taken against him to defend white dominance; and further, to condition him to hope for little and to receive that little without rebelling.But, because the blacks were so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out, because they cou
42、ld not help but react in some way to its incentives and prizes, and because the very tissue of their consciousness received its tone and timbre from the strivings of that dominant civilization, oppression spawned among them a myriad variety of reactions, reaching from outright blind rebellion to a s
43、weet, other-worldly submissiveness.In the main, this delicately balanced state of affairs has not greatly altered since the Civil War, save in those parts of the South which have been industrialized or urbanized. So volatile and tense are these relations that if a Negro rebels against rule and taboo
44、, he is lynched and the reason for the lynching is usually called rape, that catchword which has garnered such vile connotations that it can raise a mob anywhere in the South pretty quickly, even today.Now for the variations in the Bigger Thomas pattern. Some of the Negroes living under these condit
45、ions got religion, felt that Jesus would redeem the void of living, felt that the more bitter life was in the present the happier it would be in the hereafter. Others, clinging still to that brief glimpse of post-Civil War freedom, employed a thousand ruses and stratagems of struggle to win their ri
46、ghts. Still others projected their hurts and longings into more naive and mundane forms - blues, jazz, swing - and, without intellectual guidance, tried to build up a compensatory nourishment for themselves. Many labored under hot suns and then killed the restless ache with alcohol. Then there were
47、those who strove for an education, and when they got it, enjoyed the financial fruits of it in the style of their bourgeois oppressors. Usually they went hand in hand with the powerful whites and helped to keep their groaning brothers in line, for that was the safest course of action. Those who did
48、this called themselves leaders. To give you an idea of how completely these leaders worked with those who oppressed, I can tell you that I lived the first seventeen years of my life in the South without so much as hearing of or seeing one act of rebellion from any Negro, save the Bigger Thomases.But
49、 why did Bigger revolt? No explanation based upon a hard and fast rule of conduct can be given. But there were always two factors psychologically dominant in his personality. First, through some quirk of circumstance, he had become estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race. Second, he was trying to react to and answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter came to him through the newspapers, magazines, radios, mov
