-
Chapter 5: “What I Killed for, I Am” : Domestic Terror in Richard Wright’s America
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
5 “What I Killed for, I Am” Domestic Terror in Richard Wright’s America Natural Disasters In 1937, as Richard Wright was undertaking what would become his first published novel, a highly polemical fiction about a black boy driven to murder by the profoundly oppressive social conditions in the slums of Chicago, the international community was coming to terms with a new menace. Following the assassination of Yugoslavian King Alexander I and a French foreign minister by Croatian separatists in 1934, the League of Nations initiated the “the most significant early modern attempt to define terrorism” in the context of international law (Saul 79). While the word “terrorism” had, to that point, been in use for nearly a century and a half—referring, in the first instance, to Saint-Just’s “Reign of Terror” and violence committed by the state, before abruptly shifting direction to describe all manner of violence directed against the state—there remained considerable dissent between nations on the meaning of “terrorism” as a genre of crime. However, given the increasing prominence of politically motivated violence, and in particular the ongoing string of assassinations, which extended back to include the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the League of Nations sought to clarify the nature of the threat with the 1937 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism. This initial attempt to define terrorism in a global context, in the words of one legal scholar, “prefigured many of the legal , political, ideological and rhetorical disputes which plagued the international community’s attempts to define terrorism in the 50 years after the Second World War” (Saul 78). The legal invention and institutionalization of “terrorism,” then, coincided with Richard Wright’s invention of Bigger Thomas, perhaps the most terrify- 128 Chapter 5 ing figure in twentieth-century American literature. This was not merely an accident of history. Wright was a keen observer of international affairs, and he certainly understood his protagonist to be trafficking in the same chaotic political energies that were sweeping through 1930s Europe. More disturbing , today, are the prophetic flashes of terroristic violence that punctuate the text, nightmarish scenes that seem to speak directly to our own so-called age of terror. Consider the words of Boris Max, Bigger’s Communist defense lawyer , when he warns the judge that his client is merely a single representative among armies of the disaffected. “There are others,” he tells the court, “millions of others, Negro and white, and that is what makes the future seem a looming image of violence.” Max’s prophesy suddenly assumes an apocalyptic complexion: “The consciousness of Bigger Thomas, and millions of others more or less like him, white and black, according to the weight of the pressure we have put upon them, form the quicksands upon which the foundations of our civilization rest. Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?” (Native Son 402). In wondering when some shock will send our skyscrapers toppling, Max anticipates what has become, for many, the defining image of terror in America. In Wright’s prophesy, however , the towers are not brought down by some outward, external violence, but by a compromised foundation. Wright imagines this terrifying event as a kind of social earthquake—a “natural” disaster—in which our celebrated symbols of modernity are flattened by a force that is simultaneously beyond our control and somehow self-induced. Many of Wright’s contemporaries were plainly shocked by Native Son (1940). They were appalled by the text’s matter-of-fact portrayal of brutal violence , daunted by a protagonist whose behavior and motivation seemed beyond comprehension, and offended by the suggestion that American society was to blame for the pathological nihilism bodied forth in Bigger Thomas. Much scholarly writing on the novel has sought to contextualize and reckon with the kinds of collective fear engendered by the work. But to speak of the “fear” produced by Native Son is to stop somewhere short of the truth. At the bloody crossroads of violence and politics is not fear alone but also “terror,” that elusive political entity that, in the late-1930s, suddenly called out for definition on a global scale. Today, in light of the text’s prophetic tremors— its predictions of urban apocalypse, its visions of looming violence and toppling skyscrapers, to say nothing of the horrors wrought at the hands of Bigger himself—it is clear that Native Son...