Native Son Novel kh - Native Son Richard Wright With an...

Native Son
Richard Wright
With an Introduction by Arnold Rampersad
The Restored Text Established by the Library of America

TO
My Mother
who, when I was a child at her knee, taught me to revere
the fanciful and the imaginative

Even today is my complaint rebellious ,
My stroke is heavier than my groaning .
—J
OB

Contents
Epigraph
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
How “Bigger” Was Born
Note on the Text
About the Author
Other Books by Richard Wright
Copyright
About the Publisher

Introduction
The sound of the alarm that opens Native Son was Richard Wright’s urgent call in 1940 to
America to awaken from its self-induced slumber about the reality of race relations in the
nation. As proud, rich, and powerful as America was, Wright insisted, the nation was facing a
grave danger, one that would ultimately destroy the United States if its dimensions and devious
complexity were not recognized. Native Son was intended to be America’s guide in
confronting this danger.
Wright believed that few Americans, black or white, were prepared to face squarely and
honestly the most profound consequences of more than two centuries of the enslavement and
segregation of blacks in North America. The dehumanization of African Americans during
slavery had been followed in the long aftermath of the Civil War by their often brutal
repression in the South and by conditions of life in many respects equally severe in the
nominally integrated North. Nevertheless, Wright knew, blacks and whites alike continued to
cling to a range of fantasies about the true nature of the relationship between the races even
as the nation lurched inexorably toward a possible collapse over the fundamental question of
justice for the despised African American minority.
Among blacks, the centuries of abuse and exploitation had created ways of life marked by
patterns of duplicity, including self-deception, as well as something far more forbidding and
lethal. Slavery and neo-slavery had led not simply to the development of a psychology of
timidity, passivity, and even cowardice among the African American masses, Wright suggests in
Native Son , but also to an ominous emerging element of which Bigger Thomas, the central
character of the novel, is a reliable if particularly forbidding example. Although this new
element was itself susceptible to fantasy and self-deception, what set its members apart from
other blacks was the depth of their estrangement from both black and white culture, their
hatred of both groups, and their sometimes unconscious but powerful identification of violence
against other human beings as the most appropriate response to the disastrous conditions of
their lives. Within the confines of the black world, this violence was easily directed at fellow
blacks; but increasingly, Wright warned his readers, this violence would be aimed at whites.