Abraham lincoln that casts a further pall over the

Abraham Lincoln that casts a further pall over the aimless lives of these men.
Lawd Today! was rejected by at least a half-dozen major American publishers. When Wright’s
first book, Uncle Tom’s Children , finally appeared, it comprised four stories or novellas; a
revised edition in 1940 added a fifth story, “Bright and Morning Star.” In these tales, all set in
the South, Wright showed his skill in writing not only Communist-style narrations but also far
less didactic fictions. The pieces “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star” are stories
about radical political activity that feature a strong endorsement of the revolutionary potential
of the masses; they both also touch on the uneasy interplay between communism and

elements of black cultural nationalism. The other stories, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” “Long Black
Song,” and “Down by the Riverside,” are far less didactic. All of the five stories implicitly protest
against racism and segregation, but the second group offers no program that would show the
way out of the morass of racial discrimination.
By the time Uncle Tom’s Children appeared in 1938, Wright was already questioning the
authority of the Communist party where it mattered most to him, that is, where his autonomy
as an artist was concerned. Clearly for him the revolutionary confidence of “Bright and Morning
Star” and the prize-winning “Fire and Cloud,” which ends with blacks and whites marching
together in the South, obscured the truth about the two major races in America. His non-
Communist stories, too, with their country Southern settings and their emphasis on youth,
womanhood, or a struggle with the elements, later seemed to Wright curiously curtailed
expositions, indeed, almost local color. Most disturbing to Wright even as he enjoyed the
accolades that came to him as a result of Uncle Tom’s Children was the quality of lyric idealism
that suffused the entire collection and allowed the final effect of the book to be mainly, at least
as Wright saw it in his uncompromising way, a good cry.
Wright understood that neither his employment of a radical socialist esthetic, which preferred
simple stories of revolutionary activity, nor his more subjective attempts to depict and
comment on race relations in the South, had succeeded in doing what he had established as the
major goal of his writing—the exposure of the starkest realities of American life where race was
concerned. Wright knew that much of that life was quite beyond hope, that racism and
segregation were not forces to be eradicated easily by programs, much less by slogans, and that
even the most graphic evocations of suffering would not be enough to move readers to see
racism for what it was. As he himself put it, Wright discovered that in Uncle Tom’s Children he
had written “a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and feel good about.” He then
swore that the one that followed would be different. He would make sure that “no one would
weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the
consolation of tears.”