Discomfort

I felt relieved after finishing James Wright’s essay about the old Jim Crow days—Thank god those days are mostly behind us, and we are now in a place where a black person might become this country’s next president. Wright presented his story in a series of anecdote that draw the reader into the narrative with their familiar tone. The criticism is muted, even when some of the images that a reader confronts are horrible and insidious—such as the girl who is raped by a white man and forced to marry a black man to save the white perpetrator. The anecdotes piled on one on another, but they never managed to reach an arc or an “aha” moment when the narrative coalesces for the reader.

I expected that narrative arc until the very end. And as the essay wound toward a conclusion, and especially after reading that the narrator had a yearning for books, I was convinced that the narrator would migrate to the North and find success. But instead I got the last scene of him as a delivery boy, still in the South, who seems to have internalized the cruelty that he faces.

When I finished the essay I felt dismayed and bothered. I wasn’t quite prepared for its suggestion that, over time, Jim Crow laws could insinuate themselves so deeply into the lives of those they affected and find a certain degree of acceptance without much protest. I wanted to see rage and a call to rise up and not take it anymore but I got only a sigh of resignation. I didn’t like the passivity and questioned if the narrator too had learned the Jim Crow lessons well and had resigned himself to silence and an acceptance (okay, maybe tacit acceptance) of what he had learned. I don't want to sound unduly harsh and must acknowledge the Wright did bring the Jim Crow experience to the forefront and that it was a useful way to begin a dialog on that issue. Perhaps in the time that he wrote that is all that he could do without sounding radical and incurring the wrath of the majority.

Despite my disappointment about the essay’s conclusion, I found Wright’s use of language in the essay clever and interesting. I noted how Wright reverses the hierarchy of language and roles so that his white characters speak in dialect rather than the black characters. His narrator is erudite and speaks in measured tones, as do most of other black characters. Only one black character slips into dialect is—the elevator operator at the end, who says is I am sure Wright had some reason for doing this, but I’m not sure what it was. Maybe he intended to send some sort of a message that a person can’t be judged on appearance alone.

Later, thinking about my reaction to Wright, I recalled that James Baldwin, who respected and looked up to Wright, had had a falling out with him in the same issue. Baldwin railed against the simplicity of Wright’s portrayal of black life and criticized him for not writing more forcefully about the problems that confronted blacks. The two men never reconciled and Baldwin’s bitterness about Wright’s lack of responsibility as a writer is evident even in his essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” written as (sort of) memorial after the latter’s death. Baldwin first lauds Wright's achievements but soon excoriates his shortcomings and proclaims that Wright’s work (especially Native Son) can “no longer be read as it had been read in 1940, as a militant racial manifesto.” He proclaims his love and respect for Wright but is unable to forgive Wright’s failure at never becoming “the social and polemical writer he took himself to be.” Maybe Baldwin went a bit far, but I couldn't help but agree with him.