Listy post - for the short review

A flawed, but incredibly powerful collection of stories.

It serves as a commentary on the Jim Crowe South…and also oddly on (the awkwardness of?) Communist idealism. It also has some beautiful use of idiomatic language, terrific characters, and insane dramatic tension.

Etchings are by John Wilson for the story Down by the Riverside.

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Yo mamma don wear no drawers...

This provocative collection on the Jim Crowe South was immediate success, with praise coming from, among other, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, pushing up sales. Opening with autobiographic sketches on Wright's actual Jim Crowe experience, it then follows with five longer short stories (maybe novellas) all within this same world. It put Richard Wright on the literary map and it's easy to see why.

Pulling from a variety of influences, including idiomatic writing by Gertrude Stein, aggressive writing by H. L Melnkin & social science studies, partially coming out of the University of Chicago, Wright also had read the classics and the genres and understood plot and situation. And he uses that to effect.

What comes out is idiomatically beautiful, oddly simple and incredibly powerful. Wright uses the Jim Crowe world in a variety of complex ways, creating wild dramatic situations, with an assortment of wonderful characters. These are intense situations - one character hides in a tiny hole in the night waiting, with snakes, while a worked-up murderous white crowd with dogs searches for him to lynch. And Wright leaves us there, joyfully (my take) meditating on his running thoughts, tormenting the reader. Another tries to take care of his family isolated in a flood reminiscent of the 1927 Mississippi flood where men with darker skin were forced to work on levees, and in cases were still working on them as they broke. This man, named Mann, navigates a boat stolen from a white owner in town, against the current, without landmarks, back into town to reach a hospital. Part of what makes this story interesting, other than his name and the biblical implications, is how he's treated by apparently northern white soldiers verse white southern town folk. Neither is good, but it's different. There is a rape, and man kidnapped and strapped to a tree and told to pray as he is whipped waiting to die; he's shirtless, but his suit pants are still on. There is a clear implication that your skin color meant your life was cheap and expendable.

One thing I couldn't quite put my finger one was why this felt to me like I felt when reading classics high school, like 1984, or Farhenheit 451, or Call of the Wild. There is some simplistic aspect to the story telling, always cleanly 3rd person and maybe that is it. Novels today often confront us with voices, almost always unreliable and often uncomfortable. Here we are always safely in the narrator's hands, even if we focus on uncertain characters.

The work has some serious flaws. The Communist idealism in some stories is awkward at best. (but these stories won awards before they were collected here). The work is very sexist and manly, if you like. But the harshest criticism came from Wright, who was later wrote, "When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about." In the introduction [[Richard Yarborough]] says "Wright was reacting less to particular flaws in [Uncle Tom's Children] and more to mainstream American culture's capacity to defuse the potency of harsh critique through the very act of commercial consumption and subsequent emotional release." That is to say, the cathartic nature of the work undermined its purpose, and also drove Wright to take a different approach with [Native Son], his next and most famous novel.

I can safely recommend this classic to anyone.

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2. Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
editing: introduction by Richard Yarborough (1993), notes by Arnold Rampersad
published: 1938, expanded 1940
format: 333-page paperback - Harper Perennial Olive Edition
acquired: November read: Jan 13-15 time reading: 8:12, 1.5 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Classic Short Stories theme: Richard Wright
locations: 1920’s Jim Crowe South
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation in 1908

originally published in 1938 with four stories
- Big Boy Leaves Home
- Down by the Riverside
- Long Black Song
- Fire and Cloud

Expanded edition in 1940 added two entries:
- The Ethics of Jim Crowe - autobiographical short takes - the opening entry
- Bright and Morning Star - the closing story

2023:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/347061#8038300 ( )

This book comprises four novellas by Richard Wright, with a short sketch of some of the author's experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South. The stories are candid and dark expressions of what it is like for Blacks to live under White oppression where their lives are totally controlled by the Whites. Two of the stories focus specifically on the relationship between Blacks and White communists as they join hand in the struggle to gain freedom and basic human rights. Very sobering material. ( )