"The Reds Are in the Bible Room": Political Activism and The Bible in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children

"THE REDS ARE IN THE BIBLE ROOM": POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND THE BIBLE IN RICHARD WRIGHT'S UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN Timothy P. Caron Biola University When Israel was in Egyptland, Let my people go. Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go. Go down, Moses . . . Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go. Despite Ralph Ellison's proclamation that Richard Wright "found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms ofAmerican Negro humanity,"1 Richard Wright could not help but "discover" the various forms of his own African-American heritage. As Ellison has also said, quoting Heraclitus, "geography is fate."2 While the first volume ofWright's autobiography, BlackBoy, does claim "the strange absence ofreal kindness in Negroes" and the "cultural barrenness of black life,"3 it also catalogues many of thejoys and strengths ofthat same "black life": the Thomas Wolfe-like lists ofbeautiful sights, sounds, smells, and sensations ofSouthern black rural life; the lyrical catalogues of black folk beliefs that, like Zora Neale Hurston, he recognized as being vital to African-American survival in the racially hostile South; the indomitable will that Wright inherited from his mother; and, perhaps most importantly for Wright as an artist, his imaginative quest through literature for insight into his own lived experience.4 It is important to remember that Wright's "geographic destiny" also included a thorough indoctrination into the black South's religiosity, a fact also documented inBlackBoy, but often overlooked. His initiation into the symbology of biblical stories and the power of verbally constructed images as taught to him in the black church formed a vital part of his literary apprenticeship. And while Wright did not embrace the 46Timothy P. Carón black church, as an African American from the violently Jim Crow state ofMississippi, he certainly didrecognize the vital role the church played as a bulwark against the tide of white racism in the lives of Southern blacks; he recognized that African-American religiosity provided psychic health for blacks by assuring them that they would not always be oppressed in the "Egyptland" ofthe Jim Crow South; and, moreover, he came to recognize the radical potential ofthe black church and its ability to equip Southern blacks with an indigenous beliefsystem forhastening and contributing to their own liberation.5 The political, revolutionary lessons Wright learned during his affiliation with the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in Chicago allowed him to recognize the revolutionary potential within the Bible lessons he learned from the black church. The lessons from these seemingly conflicting sources entered into what he once called the "community medium ofexchange"6 ofhis imagination and were transmuted into the fictive works ofUncle Tom's Children. Each of the collection's stories demonstrates either the tragic consequences of life without a church committed to revolutionary politics , or the victorious results of a Christian praxis driven by a Marxist demand for socialjustice. As Abdul JanMohamed has noted, the cohesion of Uncle Tom's Children derives from its incremental repetition ofthemes,7 withWright's concerns progressing outward from individual survival toward community solidarity and eventual political activism. Wright revised the collection for its subsequent 1940 publication by adding an introductory essay, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," and a fifth and concluding story, "Bright and Morning Star," which make this outward expansion even more explicit. Wright explained his decision to revise the collection in "How 'Bigger' Was Born," the introduction to his next work, Native Son. He says, "I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom's Cabin [in 1938]. When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about."8 Wright deprived his readers of the consolation of tears and challenged them with a more unmistakably political work in the revised Uncle Tom 's Children. Southern whites were stripped of their stereotypical views of blacks as contented workers and were faced with the unsettling specter ofincreased CPUSA activity in their region, while Southern blacks...