Native Son

A tragédia de um negro americano, num clássico da literatura moderna
Ser negro, principalmente em certas regiões dos Estados Unidos, ainda hoje significa viver constrangido por limitações que podem levar ao desajustamento social.

black boy murders white woman and flees

A man who feels the world against him gets a lucky break and proceeds to throw it all away. An interesting look at the racial differences from inner city to the upper class. The lawyers statements still hold true today in how some people feel about the racial divide and what separates the races. Richard Wright's writing is as true today as when this book was written, 1940. ( )

This novel tells a powerful and unsparing tale of a young Black man who, in the grips of hopelessness, poverty, and panic, kills a young white woman. Wright highlights how main character Bigger Thomas, like many other Black men, had the odds of jail time stacked against him from the start. “This novel transformed my perspective more than any other novel I've read,” Fierro says, “shattering the ignorant preconceptions I had about race and class, and rearranging my perspective so I had the beginning of a new understanding of the immense challenges people of color experience.”

Historically, this work was written before the Civil Rights era (1940) and shed light on the terrible social circumstances that pervaded African-American life in the North. Set in Chicago shortly after the Great Migration, it portrays what we now would characterize as systemic racism – the realities of a dysfunctional society. A black everyman has his life cast away by a lack of opportunity to make his life count for something. It can remind today’s readers of the progress that has been made and the progress which still must be made.

In this tale, Bigger Thomas at first seems headed to jail for only petty theft; then soon, he is in trouble for murder. Ironically, committing murder for Thomas was the most enlivening act of his life, for it was an act in which he took full responsibility of making a decision. With only an eighth-grade education and the wrong color of skin, Thomas did not have much opportunity, and the opportunities presented him were still less than that presented to most white folk.

In the author’s telling, Thomas’ actions seemed reasonable but simultaneously immoral. That quandary and contradiction creates tension and sympathy in the reader. In the final chapter, I read the case for and against the protagonist, and I could not help but agree with both accounts. It thus vividly portrayed what happens to oppressed people in seemingly intractable situations. The main remedy or next step, it seems, was awareness.

The original text, now preserved in my edition of the book, was too vivid for original readers in the 1940s, so Wright revised it so that it would reach a wide audience of a specific book club. The publisher thought that it would turn off pre-World-War-II American housewives who populated the book club. Fortunately, the book sold well and was eventually deemed a classic. Also fortunately, the original text was later re-discovered and disseminated to the reading public.

In an era when America’s systemic racism is regularly discussed in the news, this text provides an interesting and relevant historical nugget. It’s one of the first vivid portrayals of post-slavery African-American life. It reminds us that undoing America’s “original sin” of slavery requires more than just Constitutional amendments. Though this work might prove too seedy for grade-school students, it should not be neglected by the curious reader. Its seediness is not sensationalism but instead meaningful. We are not so far off Wright’s 1940-era Chicago that these type of situations do not remain. Rather, the setting’s similarity to the present day needs to be contemplated still. Few better resources for this task exist in America’s literary past than Native Son. ( )