Black wrriters

Review: Native Son

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Native Son, Richard Wright. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989 (first published in 1940).

Summary: The story of Bigger Thomas, whose unpremeditated murder of Mary Dalton and second murder covering up the first, fires rage and fear in Chicago, and in a strange way gives meaning to a young man who felt himself imprisoned in Chicago’s Black Belt.

This is an uncomfortable book to read from the moment Bigger Thomas wakes up until the last pages. It is uncomfortable to view the rat-infested tenement room a family of four share, where Bigger’s first act is to kill a giant rat with a pan.

It is uncomfortable to hear Bigger’s mother nag him about going to the job set up by the relief program. He already has a record for theft, some of which he’s involved his girlfriend Bessie in.

It’s uncomfortable to hear him plot to rob a white jeweler with his three friends. Then when one doesn’t show up on time, he nearly slits his throat in anger.

It’s uncomfortable to go to the Daltons and be treated so well by the family and other household staff. Mr. Dalton has an interest in the companies operating the tenement housing Bigger lives in, confining Blacks to one area of south Chicago known as the Black Belt. He also gives lots of money to charities for the uplift of Blacks and employs people recommended by the relief agency who sent Bigger–an uncomfortable tension of interests that emerges as the story unfolds.

It’s uncomfortable to see Bigger on his first chauffeuring job, supposedly taking Mary Dalton, the Dalton’s only daughter to a lecture, but in reality to a rendezvous with a Communist lover, Jan. We sense Bigger’s discomfort as he takes them to a south side restaurant to eat “his kind of food,” and invited to socialize with them while proselytized into the Communist cause. We sense his discomfort as Jan drives with all of them in the front seat, then as they drink while he drives.

It’s uncomfortable to see Bigger having to help the drunken Mary into the house, and up to her room, getting her to bed, only to have her blind mother come in to this incriminating scene. We sense his discomfort as he tries to silence her so her mother won’t discover his presence and think Mary asleep in a drunken stupor, and when Mrs. Dalton leaves, to find he has asphyxiated her and she is dead.

It’s uncomfortable to witness Bigger’s desperation which leads him to stuff her in the trunk she’s taking to Detroit, to haul it to the basement and stuff her body into the coal furnace, hacking off her head so it would all fit, and then feeding the fire but fearing to remove the ashes for what he might find.

It’s uncomfortable as Mary’s disappearance becomes known to watch Bigger deflect suspicions toward Jan while involving his girlfriend in a ransom plot, ultimately telling her what he’s done, and then as Mary’s bones are found in the furnace ashes, fleeing with Bessie to an abandoned building where he has sex with her then kills her with a brick and throws her down an airshaft, where she did not immediately die.

It’s uncomfortable to see the police cordon close around him, then the final futile efforts to elude capture. It’s uncomfortable to hear the racist vitriol, of crowds who would lynch him and a prosecutor who charges him with rape as well as murder.

It’s uncomfortable to hear him tell his communist attorney, Mr. Max, how, for a brief moment, when he killed, he felt his most free and alive, how in these moments, he found meaning, a momentary escape from the destiny to which his birth and race, in his own mind, had imprisoned him.

His relationship with his attorney, who made an impassioned plea before the court for his life, is the one shining moment. Someone who asked him questions, and listened, and treated him as a man. No one understands more of his life than this man. But he is not a confessor. While Bigger tells the truth of what he had done, there was no remorse, no repentance.

We want to argue that Bigger could have made different choices. Yet the sense is of a human being trapped–in a tenement, into reliance on white charity, in an awkward social situation with two people with no clue who “mean well,” in Mary Dalton’s bedroom where no good explanation could be made for his presence. We’re rightly horrified by the murders, but also at the logic by which Bigger finds meaning in them.

We’re left uncomfortable with social structures that the execution of this young killer will not change. We’re left uncomfortable with the thought of how many other Biggers lurk in such structures–also wanting to do things with their lives, also questing for meaning, perhaps in distorted ways that will end badly for them and others. And this is as it should be. A minister friend of mine once remarked that he believed the gospel not only offered comfort to the disturbed but also disturbed the comfortable. This book does the latter. Don’t read it if you want to remain in comfort.

Review: Reading Black Books

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Reading Black Books, Claude Atcho. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022.

Summary: Theological reflections on ten key pieces of Black literature.

A number of books have been written about reading diverse literature, for example, the literature of the Black community, to gain understanding and empathy for that experience. Reading Black Books does that and more. Claude Atcho considers a variety of key works of Black literature from a theological perspective, focusing on one major theme for each work. He considers this not only edifying, but also offering insights into our theological “blind spots” and deficiencies. Particularly, he believes this reading can lead to a more whole and just faith. He also warns that such reading may not be easy. Black literature reflects the trauma of the Black experience, often in all of its rawness.

The collection opens with considering the theme of the image of God in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. He then moves to the nature of sin in Richard Wright’s Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, who begins by killing a rat and ends up committing multiple murders. Wright’s work explores both the personal and systemic aspects of sin. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain considers God and Gabriel’s toxic faith lacking in God’s redemptive love. Countee Cullen, in his poems “Christ Recrucified” and “The Black Christ” draws the connection later drawn by James Cone between the cross and the lynching tree, and the powerful connection that Christ’s cross has for many Blacks. Salvation is the theme of his consideration of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. For Atcho, it presents a stifled liberation, more dependent on Moses than the liberating work of God.

Nella Larsen’s Passing, serves as a lens for considering racism through the phenomenon of “passing” and Clare’s decision to “pass” to attain an upper class lifestyle. In Beloved, by Toni Morrison, Atcho considers the healing and memory, the issue of racial trauma through the story of the very unfriendly ghost of Beloved. W. E. B DuBois’s, “The Litany of Atlanta” considers something alien to much of white experience–lament–the sense of loss, the absence of God, confronting God, being formed in lament, and dealing with pain through the cross. A second Richard Wright story, The Man Who Lived Underground serves as a reflection on justice as we encounter the injustices faced by model Black citizen Fred Daniels who is unjustly arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, escapes custody and hides in the sewer system. Finally, Margaret Walker’s “For My People” reflects on the meaning of hope in a communal setting.

Each chapter combines critical consideration and theological reflection. Having not read a number of the works commended by Atcho, I can say his treatment whetted my appetite for reading these works. This book serves both as a basic reading list for seminal works of Black literature and a rich theological reflection on those works. Ideally, one would read this work in conjunction with the books and verse that serve as the focus of each chapter, perhaps for a course like “Reading Black Books with the Eyes of Faith” or a book group of Christians eager to grow in theologically-informed reading of Black works. To aid in this, the book includes discussion questions for each chapter/work. Now to go and buy/borrow the books in this book!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program.

Review: The Word

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The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing, Edited by Marita Golden. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2011.

Summary: Interviews with notable Black writers about formative influences on their reading and writing, significant books and their particular writing callings.

This is a wonderful gateway book into the world of Black authors. Marita Golden engages in interviews with some of the foremost black authors filled with discussion of books that influenced their lives and of the books they have written. Each interview concludes with the interviewed author’s recommended books.

As if this were not enough, this is a work on reading and writing and the integral relation between the two. In many cases, parents were a significant influence in fostering a love of reading through reading aloud, through having books in the home and encouraging regular trips to the library. Columbus native Wil Haygood said, “I read my way into opportunity. The more I read, the more I realized the world was big and I could find a place in it.”

That was not always the case. Nathan McCall did not read until he went to prison and discovered Richard Wright on the prison book cart. He said:

“I had never been pulled into a book like that before. It just made me cry. I remember I finished it at about three o’clock in the morning and I was just weeping. After I read [Native Son] it was like, damn, I didn’t know somebody had written something like this” (p. 114).

He went on to read Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson among others and started thinking about his own life and began writing down his thoughts in a notebook, the beginning of his life as a writer.

In the case of Edwidge Danticat, it was reading Ludwig Bemelmans Madeline that opened her eyes to the possibility of telling stories by writing them down. For Chimamanda N. Adichie, it was the experience of reading Chinua Achebe that opened her mind to the possibility of being a Nigerian writer. In fact, for so many, it was the model of another Black writer, of many Black writers that gave them the courage to write as well as expanding their cultural literacy and vision of the world.

For some, a book set them directly on their own writing career as was the case with David Levering Lewis, who has written Pulitzer Prize winning works on W. E. B. DuBois. Reading The Souls of Black Folk was transformative for him. J. California Cooper, the playwright, spoke of how Isaac Bashevis Singer taught him how to “take life and make it a great story.” We also learn about the journeys of these writers in becoming writers and some of their process, such as young Wil Haygood working for a pittance at the Columbus Call and Post and discovering how much he loved journalistic writing.

What all seem to agree upon is the importance of reading and books to enriching one’s writing life and that the two are inextricably bound together. This leads to a discussion in the book about the purported decline in reading, which Golden asks about in her interviews. While some decry this, some question whether younger readers are reading in different ways or simply have yet to find the books that answer to them. Nikki Giovanni presents the counterfactual that kids wanted to read the Harry Potter books (and at one point her own) so badly that they stole them if they couldn’t afford to buy them.

Book lovers love talking about or even overhearing conversations about books and how writers come to write the books we love. Reading this book is to overhear thirteen rich conversations that speak of the transformative power of both reading and writing. I will conclude by leaving you with this gem from Edwidge Danticat:

“Reading is important–although we can so easily go into platitudes here–because it expands your mind, your life. It extends your world. It’s traveling without a passport. I feel like there are people in my life I will never know as well as the people in the books that I’ve read. I believe that it’s the duty of every truly free citizen to read, especially to read beyond your borders, to read and read extensively. Writing is our footmark in the world. We’re still looking at cave writings of centuries ago and are asking, what are they saying? It’s one of the most important gifts we leave the world” (p. 72)