Paying a Posthumous Debt
Richard Wright

Richard Wright : Early Works : Lawd Today! / Uncle Tom's Children / Native Son (Library of America) (Hardcover) by Richard Wright (Author)

By Noah W. Griffin
Freelance Writer/San Francisco, CA

RICHARD WRIGHT:
EARLY WORKS
Edited by Arnold Rampersad
Price: $35.00
Pages: 960

RICHARD WRIGHT: LATER WORKS
Edited By Arnold Rampersad
Pages: 928

RICHARD WRIGHT: WORKS
Two-Volume Set Containing EARLY AND LATER WORKS
Edited by Arnold Rampersad

Every black writer owes a debt to Richard Wright. All America can now understand why. The Library of America, in an effort to publish "an authoritative and comprehen­sive collection of America's greatest writers, " has chosen key works of Wright. Born into poverty in black Mississippi, Richard Wright died an ex­patriate in Paris in 1960. The brutal power and force of his masterpiece, Native Son, which was published to critical and popular acclaim in 1940, has now been released in its original, unex­purgated version, along with Lawd To­day, Uncle Tom's Children, Black Boy and The Outsider.

The writings of Wright are important because, in his words: he "accidentally blundered into the secret black, hidden core of race relations in the United States. That core is this: nobody is ever expected to speak honestly about the problem." They don't now nor did they then. When Native Son was first published by Harper Brothers in 1940 it was offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club as one of two main selections. In just three weeks it sold 215,000 copies. In order to make the book palatable to the white public it was purged of its prurience and much of its power by deletion of several passages.

The intersection of race and sex has always been avoided by most Americans. The detour is the scenic route which skirts the dangers of honestly confronting the fear which lies at the cold heart of "the problem." Native Son confronted that fear in all its ugliness in the personage of Wright's protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Thomas, a black teen from the slums of the Chicago Southside, worked as a chauffeur for a rich white family. Bigger's mistress is blind. Her husband owns the slum property where Bigger and his family live. Accidentally stumbled upon by the mistress while making love to her intoxicated daughter, Bigger kills the girl and brutally decapitates her. He stuffs her torso into the furnace. An equal opportunity murderer, he later kills his black girlfriend.

America now as in the 1940's is accepting of blacks as violent-even when that violence is intertwined with sex and directed at white women-just so long as the outcome is violence. If the interracial contact is violence driven but ends in sex, there is a problem. Violence is "expected" from black men. It's a part of their "nature," but their interracial lust has to be denied at all costs. It's just too threatening. So the passages in which Wright describes the scene where Bigger and a friend masturbate in a movie theater to a "suggestive" newsreel of the daughter of Bigger's employer were cut. Also deleted were the scene where Bigger has rear-view mirror fantasies of his mistress's daughter as she makes love to her boyfriend in the back of the car Big­ger is driving.

Richard Wright : Later Works: Black Boy [American Hunger], The Outsider (Library of America) (Hardcover) by Richard Wright (Author)

None of the restored versions of Wright's passages serve to humanize Bigger anymore than is done in the original release. Indeed he is an anti-hero whose actions in no way can be ratIonalized by racial oppression as pointed out by Alfred Kazin in his New York TImes review of December 29, 1991. But one can identify with Thomas in the universal world of rage in which we all live but struggle daily to control some more successfully than others.

Lawd Today! is also published by the Library of America along with Native Son. Published two years after Wright died in 1963, Lawd Today! recounts a day in the life of a Chicago postal worker and his friends. Wright himself for a time worked as a postal worker. He no doubt relies on that experience as he draws on the James Joyce stream of consciousness style in this novel which was rejected eight times during Wright's life. The date Wright chose was Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1936; His writing technique in this offering was to mix songs, newsflashes and wordplay in a melange of artistry which reflects the experimental daring of Wright's early work.

Wright was part of the Federal Writer's Project in the late 1930s. In 1938 he published a prize-winning collection of novels which fIrst brought the author to fame. The common thread in the stories is survival with dignity in the face of Southern racial oppression. Wright asks through his characters:
What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?" Also included is Wright's satirical essay, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," written in the late 30s which was discovered at the Beinecke rare books Library at Yale.

Never before published in its entirety, the Library of America also offers Richard Wright's Black Boy. Originally entitled American Hunger, this is a two­part autobiography. It looks inside the poverty stricken world of ignorance, horror and dread which characterized Wright's childhood in rural Mississippi where he was born in 1908. His escape to Chicago in 1927 was recounted in The Horror and the Glory. This Part II was never published according to Wright because of pressure put on the publisher by the Communists of which Wright was associated in his early years. This part tracks Wright's arrival in Chicago, his early years as a writer, and his association with the Communist Party. The price for this work's selection again as a Book­of-the Month Club choice was deletion of Part II. The entire text did appear in magazines of the 1940's, but it wasn't until1977 when Harper and Row published it separately as American Hunger.

The Outsider was fIrst published in 1953. It recounts the life of a black man whom it is believed died in a subway accident and his effort to re-establish a new life by taking on a new identity. Somewhat akin to Humphrey Bogart's Dark Passage, the novel takes on existential themes of freedom, responsibility and connections with the past.

The task of editing both volumes which include all of the aforementioned work fell to Arnold Rampersad, Ph.d. pro­fessor of English and director of the Pro­gram in American Studies at Princeton University. Rampersad was awarded a 1991 MacArthur Fellowship and is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated biography of Langston Hughes.

In a San Francisco panel of the Modem Language Association which met in San Francisco in January of this year, Rampersad admitted once more certain passages had to be deleted to make the 1992 release of Wright's work marketable to a broader audience. But this time with the integrity intact, the trade off is worth it for the broader distribution to the wider audience.

For those of you acquainted with Wright this work is a wonderful opportunity to re-acquaint yourself. For those of you who have not met Richard Wright, buy the two volumes.

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