Aunt Sue's Children: Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright's Radicalism

In American Hunger, Richard Wright recounts the attempt by Chicago's Federal Negro Theatre to stage agitprop drama about chain gang conditions in the South, which met resistance from the Theatre's African American actors. Wright, the Theatre's publicity agent, was enthralled by the idea of creating a "genuine Negro theatre" that would "lead [the actors] toward serious dramatics." ¹ The actors, however, wanted "a play that will make the public love us"—a vaudeville, according to Wright, filled with "stereotypes of clowns, mammies, razors, dice, watermelon, and cotton fields" (AH, 114, 115). The actors indicted the social drama as "indecent" and untruthful. "I lived in the South," one actor claimed, "and I never saw any chain gangs" (AH, 114). Frustrated with their myopia, Wright "felt—but only temporarily—that perhaps the whites were right, that Negroes were children and would never grow up" (AH, 115). When Wright sided with the Jewish director, the "children" threatened him; a black girl publicly denounced him as an "Uncle Tom"; and "a huge, fat, black woman, a blues singer, found an excuse to pass [him] as often as possible and she hissed under her breath in a menacing sing-song: ‘Lawd, Ah sho hates a white man's nigger'" (AH, 116).

Wright's account portrays the political conflicts that the Federal Theatre Project—one of Roosevelt's social relief programs for cultural workers—faced in creating art for the people. The tensions that wracked the Chicago Project are illuminated by Mark Naison's discussion of its Harlem counterpart: theater that best appealed to an audience of Southern migrants was "bawdy, funky, and humorous entertainment" drawing on "the existing folk culture of the black urban masses." ² Many Communists involved with the Project, however, objected to the stereotypes of African Americans that vaudeville perpetuated. In promoting social drama of African American life, the Communists hoped to educate and politicize while bringing serious art to the people. But class-conscious art and African American folk culture, as seen in Wright's account of the Project, were frequently polarized.

Moreover, for Wright, the opposition was gendered. In American Hunger, he channels his resentment toward the actors into a misogynist, paternalist gaze under which they are reduced to rebellious, ignorant "children"; meanwhile, the folk culture that he repudiates in favor of social realism is embodied in the "huge, fat" female blues singer. This moment in American Hunger shores up dominant narratives of Wright that frequently yoke his denigration of folk culture, his misogyny (especially toward African American women), and his Marxist perspective, which he retained long after leaving the Communist Party in 1937.

Wright's public antifolk, antiwoman dogmatism stems from his exchange with Zora Neale Hurston in their reviews of each other's books. In New Masses, the leftist journal of culture and politics, Wright lambasted the folk romanticism of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. When the first edition of Wright's collection of novellas, Uncle Tom's Children, appeared (1938), Hurston returned the favor in a review for the Saturday Review. She linked the overwhelming violence in the novellas with their hypermasculine perspective: "There is lavish killing here, perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers." She also mocked Wright's "tone-deaf" rendition of African American Southern dialect and decried his Communist didacticism, which she paraphrased as "state responsibility for everything and individual responsibility for nothing, not even feeding oneself. And march!" ³

Hurston's critique has been amplified by recent feminist criticism that analyzes the painful limitations of Wright's representations of African American women, which continue to be associated with his Marxism. In her analysis of Native Son, for example, Trudier Harris claims that Wright's adherence to Communism is partly to blame for his inability to conceive of Bessie's agency. ⁴ This argument resonates with Sherley Anne Williams's assertion that Wright's representations of...