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159 chapter four Richard Wright’s Parables of Pain Uncle Tom’s Children and the Making and Unmaking of a Southern Black World Some of the stories I found physically painful to read, even though I admired them. —Malcolm Cowley It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery, nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make man can unmake. —Frederick Douglass A century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois took the historical, cultural, and ontological predicament of African American sorrow and made it the basis of a theory of black soul. This theory, which drew in roughly equal parts on the worldhistorical geist of Hegelian idealism and the animistic emphasis of West African spiritual systems, posited blackness as a distinct culture and consciousness formed by the accumulated weight of human misery across generations of diaspora, enslavement, rape, lynching, disfranchisement, economic exploitation, and institutionalized inequality, and by the collaborative expressive response to that legacy of alienation and suffering. Nowhere was that response, with its elements of mourning, commemoration, resistance, resilience , and the double-voiced discourse now recognized as signifyin(g), better exemplified for Du Bois than in the antebellum spirituals sung by African American slaves and their descendants. In the sorrow songs, as Du Bois called them, the souls of black folk achieved paradigmatic expressive form. In his first published book, the story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, Richard Wright revises Du Bois’s account of sorrow as the ground of black being, reformulating it into an exhaustive, excruciating analysis of physical pain, sheer bodily distress and trauma, as the defining condition of African American existence in the U.S. South. Wright’s sorrow songs, or what Ralph Ellison would later call Wright’s blues, are above all fables of embodi- 160 Chapter Four ment, of southern black bodies in pain. Paul Gilroy has observed of diasporic cultures on both sides of the black Atlantic that the experience of being propelled into modernity creates an “ontological state” that Gilroy terms “the condition of being in pain,” a condition accompanied by unique “enregistration[s]” of time, language, and reality (203). Like Wright’s work generally but in an even more explicit and literal way, Uncle Tom’s Children is at once an anatomy of and a guidebook to the black condition of being in pain, pursuing the equivalent in fiction and memoir of what Elaine Scarry would achieve a half-century later in her monumental philosophical study, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. As I hope to demonstrate, Wright’s work anticipates, almost uncannily at times, all of Scarry’s central insights into pain and human embodiment: the fundamental structure of pain in its terrible privacy, ineffability, and aversiveness; the destructive or, more precisely, deconstructive impact of pain on thought, voice, and world; the relation between embodiment and power as revealed in the limit cases of torture, war, and commodity fetishism; the functional antagonism of tool and weapon as material artifacts; the fundamental relationship linking pain, imagination, and material culture; and the heuristic value of Judeo-Christian scripture and the writings of Karl Marx as allegories of this relationship and ethical commentaries on its deformation and abuse. Wright, however, ultimately goes further than Scarry. The embeddedness —I am tempted to say the entrapment—of his characters in the specific histories and cultures of the Jim Crow South, an embeddedness Wright never attempts to elevate into the predicament of a universalized philosophical subject, allows him to challenge and complicate Scarry’s account of the primordial human energies she calls making and unmaking, along with the ethical calculus she develops in linking them. Specifically, what is in Scarry “the” body in pain, a raceless, genderless, theoretical construct, is in Wright always an African American body. This is not to say that white bodies are absent from the textual world of Uncle Tom’s Children, or that they fare at all well there. Indeed, so harsh and violent is the Jim Crow landscape of Wright’s collection that numerous whites endure hunger, beatings, and shootings right alongside their unacknowledged black brethren. But their pain, the affective , sentient dimension of their injury and trauma, rarely if ever surfaces to achieve textual representation. Instead, pain remains almost entirely the province of black subjects, at once a devastating burden and, paradoxically, a gateway to emancipatory possibilities of personal and collective...

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