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Chapter One Lord, It Just Won’t Stop!: Work and Blues in the Industrial Delta
- University of Illinois Press
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chapter One Lord, It Just Won’t Stop! Work and Blues in the Industrial Delta In the opening scene of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, the Thomas family wakes to find that a hungry rat has invaded their dingy one-room apartment. Mother and sister pick up their skirts, screaming, while eldest son Bigger grabs a skillet and takes aim at the beast. The rat is ultimately bested, but the battle leads to a heated dispute about money troubles and Bigger’s ability to support his family. The rent’s due, jobs are scarce, and the Relief’s about to cut them all off. Mother tells her son, “We wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you.” Hot and complex feelings trouble the characters long after the argument ends, causing them to retreat to separate corners of their cramped living space. Wright’s interest here lies not only in the economic conditions that produce these emotions, but also in the often scanty personal means by which they are addressed. First, he describes Bigger’s response, which—in its restless incoherence—drives the entire tragic arc of the novel: He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, and toward himself he was ever more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough. Comentale_Text.indd 29 2/19/13 4:11 PM 30 chapter one Bigger’s response consists of both an excess of emotion and a refusal to acknowledge that emotion. His identity is troubled on both ends: feeling is experienced not as an expression of selfhood, but as a loss of control, while its suppression becomes a deadly pose, fatal to self and others. In contrast, Bigger’s mother retreats behind one of the flimsy curtains that partition the apartment and begins to cook breakfast. We can hear her voice, and she is singing: Life is like a mountain railroad With an engineer that’s brave We must make the run successful From the cradle to the grave1 The mother’s response is also oddly doubled, caught between the personal and the impersonal. Intense feelings are juxtaposed against the formalism of both chore and song. But, here, emotion finds a certain shape, a comforting groove in the nearly mechanical work of hand and voice. Neither activity seems particularly expressive. The details of the song—a spiritual scrap with a modern locomotive twist—only dimly relate to her immediate context and need. But the act of singing joins the practical and the purposeless, bringing together feeling and form in a single, moving whole, granting her a certain presence and, we’ll find, agency. If Bigger shows his emotions too easily, but cannot control them, his mother falls into a satisfying sonic pattern and so regains control of her small world—her blues is the one we want to hear. As some readers might know, Wright’s Native Son ultimately indicts not just the blues, but all popular song, as a kind of ruse or cultural opiate. As Bigger heroically maintains, even in the face of arrest and probable death, popular music is nothing more than a form of “surrender, resignation,” a sonic palliative for “whipped folks” (254, 356). But even if Wright’s leftist commitments led him to reject song as a distraction from more direct political action, we should not ignore its power to accompany, and even transform, the troubled lives of his era. In typically modernist fashion, Bigger can only ironically assert the possibility of community as he heads toward the electric chair. Meanwhile, his mother proves both survivor and provider, and it is precisely the cheap music of the age, rather than its avant-garde fiction, that offered something like a satisfying presence for the black lower classes. As I show throughout this book, the most engaging songs of the day fused everyday feeling and form, and so provided listeners with a viable stance or attitude, a stylish manner, for...