Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

1: At the Point of No Return: A Native Son and His Gorgon Muse

1 / At the Point of No Return: A Native Son and His Gorgon Muse “This is not a novel with a ‘feminist’ theme!” he insisted. —hazel rowley, richard wright: the life and times To “see” nouns in quotation marks is to question their straightforward, direct meaning—to highlight through a specific ironic staging a queer multiplicity or polymorphous perversity. —jennifer devere brody, punctuation: art, politics, and play In the essay “How Bigger Was Born” (1940), Richard Wright first discusses the impetus behind his best-selling first novel, Native Son (1940), then divulges his intentions to complete a new, unnamed work theorizing the distinct grievances of black women. Wright credits his northern migration and participation in the labor movement for engendering Native Son’s black male protagonist as a universal signifier for the politically disenfranchised and disinherited. Throughout his southern maturation , the writer knew personally several “Bigger Thomases” whose bullying swagger, intraracial violence, defiance of Jim Crow laws, social restlessness, and recurring melancholy fated their broken spirits, imprisonment , and death. The southern migrant also came to understand that there were numerous white “Biggers” around the world who shared black men’s economic oppression as well as their potential for fascism or communism . Despite these revelations, Wright admits in his exegesis that he felt fear and shame while writing Native Son. He questioned what white people would think and how middle-class blacks would respond to his work. These doubts made Native Son’s social commentary necessary as much as they made it possible. Although he grapples with the various influences shaping his work in “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright acknowledges that “reluctantly, [the writer] comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life, and he knows that is impossible.”1 Wright, however, concedes Native Son’s flaws, including his privileging of morality over the plausibility of certain plot points and his overall investment in character destiny. “With what I’ve learned in 26 / WRITING THROUGH JANE CROW the writing of this book, with all of its blemishes, imperfections, with all of its unrealized potentialities,” he discloses, “I am launching out upon another novel, this time about the status of women in modern American society.”2 Just as the new text is informed by his experience writing Native Son, Wright reveals that this female-centered work “goes back to my childhood just as Bigger went, for, while I was storing away impressions of Bigger, I was storing away impressions of many other things that made me think and wonder.” The fascination—and amity—with which Wright briefly gestures toward the double jeopardy of racism and sexism in “How Bigger Was Born” is in stark contrast to Native Son’s dismal representations of black women, who emasculate Bigger or are violated by his machismo exertions. “I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book,” Wright confesses. “And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody.” After delineating Native Son’s preoccupations , the black male writer intimates his plans to retire the novel’s critically and commercially successful blueprint in his next revisionary work. The resulting manuscript, “Black Hope,” is Wright’s first novelistic attempt to conceptualize a complex black female protagonist, yet the work is neither actualized nor recognized fully as a turning point in the writer’s oeuvre and critical legacy.3 Critiques of Wright’s failure to address black women’s multiple oppressions and his understood oppositional stance in relation to contemporaneous black female writers who effectively take up this project are due, in part, to the anonymity and neglect of the unfinished manuscript. While “Black Hope” remains unpublished, its explicit consideration of Jane Crow politics is not prioritized or resolved in his previous or subsequent fiction. Native Son exposes the systematic segregation and Jim Crow practices that sentence the benighted Bigger to death, and the novel initiates a series of disenfranchised black male protagonists defining Wright’s later work. In contrast , “Black Hope” presents a socially aware, articulate, and yet flawed agent in Maud Hampton, who shuns true love and stunts her political consciousness by passing for white. Maud’s willingness to ingest arsenic to escape racism, poverty, and the circumscriptions of domesticity illustrates the hierarchical power dynamics...