Ladi Kwali , OON , MBE (c.1925-1984) was a Nigerian potter . Lady Kwali was born in the village of Kwali in the Gwari region of Northern Nigeria , where pottery was an indigenous female tradition. She learned to make pottery as a child by her aunt using the traditional method of coiling . She made large pots for use as water jars, cooking pots, bowls, and flasks from coils of clay, beaten from the inside with a flat wooden paddle. They were decorated with incised geometric and stylised figurative patterns, including scorpions, lizards, crocodiles, chameleons, snakes, birds, and fish. She would impress patterns on top of the figures by rolling small roulettes of twisted string or notched wood over the surface of the clay, sometimes as horizontal banding and sometimes in vertical panels. The wooden roulettes consisted of small cylinders of hard wood, two or three inches long and a half-inch in diameter, notched with straight, oblique, or parallel patterns. The earthenware vessels and decorative techniques have been dated back to neolithic period. Following the region's traditional method, they were fired in a bonfire of dry vegetation. Her pots were noted for their beauty of form and decoration, and she was recognized regionally as a gifted and eminent potter. Several were acquired by the Emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau ,in whose home they were seen by Michael Cardew in 1950.

Ogun or Ogoun ( Yoruba : Ògún, Portuguese : Ogum , Gu ; also spelled Oggun or Ogou ; known as Ogún in Latin America ) is an Orisha , Loa , and Vodun . He is a warrior and a powerful spirit of metal work, as well as rum and rum-making ... Yoruba religion Statue of Ogun, Sacred Grove Of Oshun, Osogbo, Nigeria In Yoruba religion , Ogun is a primordial Orisha who first appeared as a hunter named Tobe Ode . He was the husband of Oya. He is said to be the first Orisha to descend to the realm of Ile Aiye (" Earth"), to find suitable place for future human life. In some traditions he is said to have cleared a path for the other gods to enter Earth using a metal ax and with the assistance of a dog. To commemorate this, one of his praise names , or oriki , is Osin Imole or the "first of the primordial Orisha to come to Earth". He is the god of war and metals. In his earthly life Ogun is said to be the first king of Ife . When some of his subjects failed to show respect, Ogun killed them and ultimately himself with his own sword. He disappeared into the earth at a place called Ire-Ekiti, with the promise to help those who call on his name. His followers believe him to have wo ile sun , to have disappeared into the earth's surface instead of dying. Throughout his earthly life, he is thought to have fought for the people of Ire, thus is known also as Onire. He is now celebrated in Ekiti , Oyo , and Ondo States.

OGBOMOSHO was generated from ‘Ogbori Elemọshọ’ when Sọun Ogunlọla, a great hunter, who later became the first Sọun of Ogbomọshọ, helped the old Ọyọ Empire to kill Elemọshọ and brought his head to Alaafin. People began to refer to the settlement of Sọun Ogunlọla as ’Ibi ti wọn ti gbe Ori Elemọshọ’. Like any history of a people that began before the invention of writing and printing, history was passed from generation by word of mouth. Such history was bound to have some contradictions. Ogbomoso’s history is not peculiar. The name Ogbomoso itself is a contraction of the valiant act performed by a brave and young hunter named Shoun. So any attempt to narrate the history of Ogbomoso would always refer the birth of a baby boy named Shoun. This always raised so many eyebrows among the Chiefs in Ogbomoso. Up until today, it is always a touchy issue. This is so because people have sojourned in what we call Ogbomoso today before Shoun came. For instance, many chiefs accredited Onpetu of Ijeru to have first settled in Ogbomoso. Aresa Olugbon, Onikoyi and other War-Chiefs have settled in Ogbomoso long before Shoun came. At this point, it is necessary to understand the circumstances that surrounded Shoun’s birth and events that made him a paramount ruler of Ogbomosoland. Shoun’s father was a hunter and he was an Ibariba man. He came to Iresa on a hunting expedition. There he met Aresa’s daughter whom he married. They then moved to Igbo-Igbale the current Oja-Igbo in Ogbomoso. Here they had a baby boy. Messages were sent to Aresa that the new boy would be brought to Iresa for naming and blessing. The Odu Ifa that surfaced was “Iwori Meji”, Ifa predicted that the new baby would be great and famous and would become a mighty king whose name and power would surpass that of Aresa and other chiefs in the Aresa’s kingdom. Ifa went further that the special sacrifice should be made because the child would incur so many enemies that could thwart his destiny. Aresa was pleased with the news; nevertheless he could not contain the fact that his grandson, fathered by an Ibariba, would become more powerful than him and his descendants. Aresa then concluded that it was not necessary to bring such child to Iresa for naming. Aresa then sent his envoy to Igbo-Igbale with the message “Ile gbogbo Ile owo. Awa o ma shin, Ki eyin o ma Shoun”. Aresa instructed the envoy to make sure that the sacrifice was performed under the Iroko tree. The envoy gave the name Shoun to the new baby. Shoun grew up to become a brave and valiant hunter. He has special magic to become invisible. Such prowess made it possible to hunt dangerous animals such as lions, elephants, leopards, etc. During this time Alafin was at loggerheads with the head of Eso. The Eso resided in the palace and they were the king’s guards. The disagreement escalated and the chief of the Eso was dismissed from the palace. The chief of the Eso sometimes called Elemoso did not take Alafin’s action slightly, he decided to fight back. Elemoso organized Guerilla Warfare on market days or on special occasions. Elemoso would strike and kill market women and children at random. This created an uproar and fear in the minds of Oyo citizens. The Alafin ordered his new Chief of the Eso’s to arrest Elemoso and bring him to Afin dead or alive. This search went on for months; neither the Chief of the Eso’s nor other warlords were able to capture Elemoso. Alafin’ looking for somebody who could bring Elemoso to justice, therefore sent his emissary to all the provinces as far as Benin, Dahomey, Egba, Owu and Ife. All these were of no avail. Finally, somebody hinted Alafin about a young hunter named Shoun who resided in Igbo Igbale. Immediately Alafin sent for Shoun. When Shoun arrived at the Alafin’s palace, Alafin doubted whether Shoun could capture Elemoso. Shoun urged Alafin to entrust him with the assignment. Alafin finally yielded and Shoun with his invisible juju embarked on the campaign to capture Elemoso. After several weeks, Shoun discovered Elemoso’s tactics. During the day Elemoso would perch on the trees and descend during the night. On one of the market days’ Elemoso climbed a tall palm tree very close to Oja Akesan. He was ready to strike as usual. Shoun spotted Elemoso and before Elemoso struck innocent citizens, Shoun struck first with an arrow. Elemoso fell and Shoun rushed to him, pulled out his sword and beheaded Elemoso. Shoun took Elemoso’s head to the palace. The news spread to all the Yoruba country about Shoun’s valor. Immediately Alafin gave him clothes, beads, and a staff of office as War Chief and Bale. So people came from far and near to see this young hunter who beheaded Elemoso. As people came they nicknamed Shoun as “Ogbori Elemoso” This was contracted to Ogbelemoso, later to Ogbemoso and finally to Ogbomoso. Warriors and brave men and women populated Ogbomoso. To be continued

Summary:

Chapter one

A man said to be a visitor was drowning in the sea and people gathered at the shore watching and shouting and expressing their wish that the man gets out alive. They expect that the sea patrol is prompt enough to save this dying man. Sam stood the tallest among the watchers, about six inches taller than the others. He said things that those around him did not understand or rather feel that he was a pessimist. He said, not to anyone exactly, that the man is soon going to die because he cannot fight with the waves. He should have stayed still and let the wave take him away until he gets to a place where the water is calm then he could swim to the shore. But as it is, the man struggles until he lost his strength and finally went bellow the water before the rescue team could find him. The man’s two children were in a small boat and Sam said they will not die. The watchers were sad that the man did not survive, some cried. Sam went down to buy some food stuff when he met this crowed. When it was sure that the man was dead, he went home.

On his way home, Sam rested and then continued again until he got home. He entered his house, spoke to his fridge about the gas he has to fill for fridge to continue working. He also spoke to his kitchen. He thought about how he would go out to work for other people to help his mother in the house before she had stroke, fell there in the kitchen and died before anyone could come around to help. It rained at night and Sam had night mares as he slept that made him to sit up with a start and shout “What’s this then? What’s this?

Isobel was also in the crowd. She just came into town and joined the crowd to watch the dying man. When the crowd were dispersing she proceeded to find a hotel where she would lodge for moment. She sees a shop and stops to ask the boy tending it if it was a book shop before it was changed. The boy responded unkindly feeling that it was absurd for her to be looking for book when someone is struggling for live in the sea. Isobel helped to sell books in the shop years ago before she left town. Now she wishes she would go in and read a book. She remembers a book she had read in the shop many years ago about Heloise, about how one has to respond to the desires of his heart like a slave.

She stayed in the hotel and thought he mother and her father, about when she had an argument with her mother before she left only to come back after ten years. While she was away, she sent and received letters from her mother.

Chapter Two

Sam was woken up by a cat the cried at the window. He wondered whether to go out and build a wall for a farmer were he could get paid. Sam spoke to the kitchen about his bad night and said that the cat should have come when it rained at night. He made breakfast for the two of them and they ate as always. His father died years ago when he was four, before his mother. It was in the sea where his father went to save some people who got trapped in the middle of the see and the wave was rising. The wave was so strong that it hit the lifeboat and threw Sam’s father off into the sea where he died.

When Sam was young, he stopped schooling and would always go out to get some job at building sites to do for money. And sometimes, he had to walk for miles to get one. He likes to sometimes sleep at the beach to hear the rustle of the crabs and the sound of the surf.

Isobel stayed a bit at the hotel when it was morning, thinking about the love story she had read Abelard and Heloise who were teacher and students. Abelard was castrated and Heloise was sent to the nunnery but the two always still love each other and were buried side by side when they died.

Sam climbed a rock to look out to the sea and later decided to go down and walk by the sea. From a distance he saw what looked like a seal, something he usually saw at the beach. This time, it was a little girl. He turned her over, pumped her chest as he has seen it down to revive dying people. He was about to give up, when she breathed and spat out water. He helped her up and she smiled

Chapter three

Sam smiled back at the little girl wearing a black dress. She was wet but as they walked towards Sam’s house, she became dry. She looked healthy and smart within minutes. The little girl did not feel strange it seemed she is conversant with a lot of things as they walked. She let go of Sam’s hand to look into cracks in the rocks to see crabs, seaweed and anemones. He would not play with children just like adults because he had no friends but here he is with the little girl that is gradually becoming a part of his existence.

Sam asks the rocks where the girl came from wondering that except there is a sunken boat or something, a girl would not just appear on the beach. The girl was still playing on the sand, she was dancing and when Sam approached her, she made him dance with her. Sam excitedly wonders how a little girl got him dancing on the beach.

Sam and the little girl got home, he cooked for the two of them and they ate. He observed that the girl does not talk. She never said anything but she understands when Sam speaks. That did not bother Sam as he said; he talked all the time to his house, kitchen, cat, bench, rock etc. which never respond. The little girl fed the remaining of Sam’s porridge to the seagulls. The girl latter slept. Sam searched through the box where his mother had kept his shoes when he was small and got one for the little girl to wear. The girl later woke up and helped Sam tidy up the environment.

Isabel sat in the porch of her mother’s house before she went back to sit in front of the hotel eating as she thought about the tourist that died in the sea the previous day. She wondered what his plan for that day could have been before everything ended meaninglessly in the sea; what little action could have occurred to save him from dying. She thought about how Abelard would have assessed the situation in a debate using a theological approach. Isabel is a yes or no person whose view of life was always different from other peoples such that her mother would ask her ‘can’t you see what’s right, what’s wrong? Why can’t you see?” and it made her hesitant about expressing her views. But then, Isobel is a good person. She cared for people and always offers to help them.

Isobel left the house with a boy she admired so much, though her mother called him ne’er-do-well. They went and lived with some friends before the boy left her. She did things randomly.

Chapter four

Isobel still thinks of the poor man’s final day which looks like a film to her. She decided to walk to see the village. She found a bench and sat looking down at the bay. While she sat, she thought about how she had made love with several men only as doing them some favour and wondered how her mother would view it if she knew, she her mother would have scolded her that life is not about enjoyment but duty.

Isobel remembered the discussion she had with a doctor at the hospital where she worked, how the doctor had advised her to think of something better to do with her life. He advised her to reconcile with her mother but three days after, she got the news about her mother’s death which made her to go back to the village after ten years. She tuned to her right and saw a huge man and a little girl (Sam and the little girl) advancing and recognized the man as the one who said some odd things at the beach where they all watched the dying man. She though the little girl might be his granddaughter. She lay in the sun at the beach before she went into the cold water to swim for a while. From the water she looked at the cliff and saw a house (Sam’s house) where a long time ago an old woman who worked for her mother lived. The old woman had invited Isobel to tea sometimes. Isobel stopped visiting the woman because she tried to make the woman narrate her childhood experience without success.

Sam and the little girl walked round the village in case someone might see and recognize her. He bought a newspaper to see if there is any news about a missing little girl, but there was none. A man saw the two of them and said he did not know that Sam had any relative. Sam heard him but did not say a word to explain the situation. He asked the bench what he should do now that there was no sign of any missing girl in the village.

Sam felt bad about his fruitless trip to the village while he arranged his kitchen. He felt exposed because he did not like to have to do with people. He loves to be left to himself alone where he has learned to live his world talking with his kitchen and other things around him. The arrival of the child has altered his live. The last person he had cared about was his mother before she had a stroke and died. He lived enclosed in himself before the cat suddenly appeared and later became part of him and now the little girl. He did not what the silence in his life broken, but that is what seems to be happening which Sam feared. He looked around and did not see the girl. When he went to the yard, he saw her sitting on the floor untangling his fishing net craftily just the way he would have done it. She finished untangling the net and they went back into the room through the kitchen do Sam laughing and shaking his head.

Chapter five

Isobel in her mother’s house read postcards as she thought about her mother who died from cancer. Her mother when in the hospital refused to let anyone contact her, Isobel should not be disturbed wherever she was. She observed that a few things have changed in the house. There was a new carpet. She looked at the wedding picture of her parents on the wall and thought why they could not live happily together. Her parents never agreed on a thing. When Isobel was planning on leaving, her father had said that he would also leave if she leaves. She did not take him seriously, but after her, he left to join his sister in Australia where he lived for two years before he died. The love between her father and mother were not the same as of Heloise and Abelard. She was sad that her parents lived a life of pettiness and unhappiness.

Isobel’s father depended on her and shared his worries with her, how he could not get her mother agree with him. When he left, he tried to meet with her but she refused. Now she is sad that despite her willingness to help other people, she could not help her father when he needed her. She searched thought her father’s box and found her old school books and other books and other things. Tired, she slept and woke up after an hour then she went downstairs where she found whisky in the cupboard. She pour some and drank then moved out down toward the noisy beach that was busy with tourist moving around, children playing and other people busy in their own way. It was evening; she walked drunkenly as if dancing.

While the little girl slept in his mother’s bed, Sam thought about how the arrival of the girl has changed the earlier silence he enjoyed alone but he is enjoying her company even though she does not talk which he found comforting. She assisted well in everything like arranging the kitchen and washing of dishes. He made his complain to the bench on which he was sitting, outside the house.

Chapter six

Birds, different kind flew in the sky along the beach and Sam and the girl watched with interest. The beach was full of activity this morning with tourists going about the activities, newspaper sellers and fishers and surfers were busy. Sam and the girl excitedly hunted crab in the rocks near the bay. They got three crabs which they later prepared at the house and ate. Although the girl did not speak, he enjoyed her attention when he explained things to her, and he loved to see the way her little black eyes expressed so vividly her fear or her pleasure or her excitement.

Sam took the little girl out to shop. He bought some food stuff, and a pair of pink sandals for her. He spoke to the counting machine because it gave the wrong figure. The woman that operated the machine was angry because he would not talk to her but to the machine. She also knew him to be a wired man calling him bloody nutter (a person not mentally sound), and wondered who should have given him the little girl. The supervisor came and corrected the error on the machine and apologized to Sam. He paid for the items and left without talking to anyone except the machine and the little girl.

Isobel was at the supermarket. She finished up quickly and hurried after Sam and the girl. After she had called for a number of times, Sam stopped and turned round. She asked him what he meant at the scene of the dying man, about things not being right. Sam stared at something behind her without saying a word. Smiling, he turned round and urged the little girl that they must go now.

Chapter seven

Isobel in her mother’s house speaks with Marion her old school friend. Marion asks Isobel why she stayed away for so long with no one knowing where she went. On invitation to supper, Isobel visited Marion and her husband Michael. They sat in the garden and talked about Isobel’s mother’s last moments, how she kept the house clean all alone, polite and kind to kids.

Isobel asked to know about Sam whom she described to Marion and Michael adding that she was intrigued by the little girl stared at her. They explain that Sam is a loner who has no relative and were surprised to hear that he was seen walking with a little girl, they felt that was strange. They explained where Sam lived which Isobel realised was the same house she always visited an old woman (Sam’s mother) when she was young. Isobel thanked Marion and Michael for the lunch when it was time for her to leave.

Chapter eight

Sam’s mother was called Bethany. After the death of her husband she would look round for Sam only to finally find him playing in the sand down at the bottom of the steps. He always went down there where he considered was the country of his mother’s birth. Sam remembers this as they went down the steps with the girl in front, they were going out to fish. At the bottom of the steps they met Isobel who had been waiting at the beach for over an hour if she could see Sam and the girl immerge.

Isobel said her name and continued that she knew Sam’s mum. She told him how she always came round to take tea and how often Sam’s mother talked about him. Sam finds himself talking with Isobel and thought it strange. Sam and Isobel talked about his mother’s brevity, hard work and how she lived alone when Sam was away. He talked about how he missed her. His mother taught him everything he learnt. They talked as they walked along the beach to the boat.

Before she left, Isobel asked Sam if she could come to see the house again after so many years. They agreed she could come at four o’clock when Sam is back from his fishing already and the same time Isobel used to come.

Sam and the girl went fishing, the girl actively involved by putting the baited hook in the sea. It was an exciting outing for the two. Sam thought about the change occurring in his life. He now spoke less to his kitchen, fridge, the house and cooker which were the components of his life. The girl did not speak but he found his words always now directed to her, after all she understood him well, and he enjoyed telling her about everything. While the girl slept in the boat, Sam thought Isobel could help get dress for her. Sam liked the way Isobel spoke about his mother.

Chapter nine

Isobel sat at the dining table going through old notes and letters she found in her mother’s box. She read letters her father wrote to her mother, how he expressed his love for her. She looked at photos her parents had together, her father in his army uniform; and she wondered what brought disintegration between her parents. When her father left the Army, they went to the village and started a postal service where the two of the worked.

Isobel remembers her father telling her how he had tried to keep the love between him and her mother. Her mother never told her anything about the situation, and she thought her mother might have been jealous of the way her father gave her a lot of attention. She also read the letter her wrote to her when he was leaving to stay with his sister and her husband in Australia. Her mother that was once a pretty woman who enjoyed going to dance with her husband is now fierce, rigid and silent.

At four o’clock, Isobel, Sam and the girl sat to eat lunch at Sam’s house. She listened to Sam narrating how the girl killed the fish by snapping its neck after unhooking it. The black cat was there too, eating what it was given. She looked at the house and felt it was clean, everything well-arranged and it was okay for Sam. Sam thanked her for coming to have tea with his mother, happy that his mother had someone to talk to.

When Isobel asked, Sam said he did not know the girls name. She never talked since he found her by the beach. He explained that he had tried to find anyone that knew her but there was none. Isobel confirmed that there had been no news anywhere about a missing girl. He told her how he pressed her chest and she spat water, suddenly rose and how she made him dance on the beach. Sam said he did not need to alert the police, the girl did not do any wrong. She could stay with him as long as she wanted. Moreover, she is happy. After some time of talking, Isobel left.

Chapter ten

Isobel paid the charge for her mother’s death certificate which she took home. She assumed that the certificate was her mother brought home. She felt like to write to someone and get a reply to tell her where she should go from here. She did not know what to do next.

Sam and the little girl had worked hard on the farm. The girl passed bricks to Sam and also played with the cats and chickens in the yard excitedly. She always played freely with any animal available. Sam prepared to go fishing for the next day’s lunch advised her to get some sleep after eating. Sam picked his fishing items and walked down to the beach, the sun still bright. The first fish he caught was a dog fish which threw back in the water because he did not like it. After a little more try, he cut a bass which was what he wanted.

Now it was dark he could not see a think in a distance. He heard the voice of lady and when he called out Isobel responded. She had left the house to look at Sam’s house. Sam wondered what she was doing out on the beach at that strange time. He noticed she was cold and gave his coat to cover her while he asked her what she why she was there. She could not say much before she fainted. Sam quickly carried her to his house and laid her on his bed, covered her well and went to make some tea to warm her.

She had been at the beach before dark looking at the stones and liking the way she felt about everything. Suddenly she saw Sam coming down. She hid away and watched him. She kept admiring him not minding the covering darkness. When she fainted and Sam carried her, she regained consciousness in arms and remained silent because she liked it.

Chapter eleven

Quiet on the bed, Isobel listened to Sam’s movement in the kitchen. She lifted her body and looked round the house which was almost empty and peaceful. Sam talked to the cooker about what was happening in his life. He wondered how he now have two females in his house all found on the beach. His life has been far away from people but now he is changing. He did not have problem with the appearance of Isobel in his life because of what she made him realize about his mother’s lonely days. He was concerned with how to revive her.

Sam made some tea which he took to her. He sat at the edge of the bed to offer her the tea. She drank some resting on and elbow before she pleaded with Sam to let her stay through the night. he asked her again what she was doing at the beach at that time. She answered that she was watching him but she could not tell why. They both slept on the same bed till morning.

Chapter twelve

It was morning and the little girl left the house before anyone else was up. She went down to the beach to play in sand. She threw flat stones that skimmed across the surface of the sea and she laughed in pleasure. She looked at the birds in the sky, looked for morning worms, sometimes try to sound like the birds and it amused her. When she came back, tea was ready and Sam asked her to have some with some bread and butter. That is when she sees Isobel who asked if the little girl remembers her. Isobel speaks more with the girl, feeling like a family already. “he looks after us”, she says to the little girl “ I think he is the last good man on earth… and you and I are the only people in the world who know it

Sam tells isobel he would like her to take the girl out to get some befitting dress as he does not think he can do it well as a man. He tells Isobel that she is the only woman they know and Isobel was very happy to hear that and she laughed. “Oh God, I can’t tell you how I like that. You really have no idea how much I like being the only woman you know.” She offered to use her own money to buy dress for the little girl.

Not long after the talk, Isobel and the girl were prepared to out to shop. She said to sam on her way out, “I love you”. Sam goes out to do his work at the yard where he mixed sand and cement for building. As he works, he thinks about how a lot of things have changed about him with the coming of the two women into his life and he laughs “oh, this is a new Sam” he says to the mixer. He likes the change. He never thought of having a family but now that he feels like having one, he feels really happy. He laughs more and louder; also happy that he would no longer have night mares of his father appearing to him. To him, this is what his father wants for him.

Chapter thirteen

Isobel should probably not have gone to her mother’s house to write her story and about Abelard and Heloise. She just felt her story was building up gradually with her experiences and thought to put something down. She takes the little girl to her friend, Marion, so she could play with Marion’s children instead sitting alone while Isobel writes. Isobel introduces the girl to Marion as Sam’s child. She enjoys her writing and does not hear the knock on the door until she finished writing.

When she opens the door, she sees Marion, the little girl, a police woman and some others. She is taken in a police car back to Sam’s house. She has not done her shopping yet and it bothered her while they should be taking her back.

Sam finishes his work for the day and walks happily back up the lane from the valley down behind him talking to the plants and animals along the way. He thinks about Isobel coming back soon with the girl and how he would build an additional room so the girl can have her own room.

As they came close, Sam appears by the road. The girl leaps out of the car and runs to Sam who picks her up to sit on his arm. The police woman walks up and asks Sam to identify the little girl. Sam avoids all the questions and walks toward the house. He got furious when he is blocked and bolts angrily, “get out of my way”. He runs up the cliff with the girl as the woman follows him asking him to give the girl up. Back home Sam is worried and angry. He picks his short rusted gun that had no cartridges in it, and threatens to shoot. The police woman and everyone around run back.

Chapter fourteen

The little girl says she has to go soon even though she loves living with Sam. She likes making everything tidy for Sam who tells her lots of things. She feels really bad about what is about to happen to Sam. A man shouts through a loudhailer and the noise disturbs Sam.

The little girl says that Isobel who has escaped from the police car is standing at the lighthouse where she will jump and land on the rocks, about seventy miles down. Sam repositions himself as if to shoot the rusted shotgun. “a bullet is fired by one of the policemen,” and more bullets are fired towards Sam. The girl is up in the sky and can see everything below; Sam lying on the concrete by the wall. The growing joy in Sam’s life all suddenly disappears.

Major events

1. The death of the tourist in the sea.
2. The rescue of the little girl at the sea.
3. Isobel’s return and meeting with Sam.

Characters

Old Sam

Isobel

Little girl

Marion

Michael

Bethany

Themes

In discoursing theme, you need to answer certain questions associated with the theme.

1. Poverty – Who are those in whose lives we can see poverty? How can you say they are poor, what are the evidences? How has the poverty of the identified people affected their lives and lives of other people around them?
2. Loneliness – Who are the lonely people? What are the evidences of their loneliness? How has loneliness affected their lives and the lives of others around them?
3. Death – Who are those that died? What possibly caused their death? How has their death affected other people? What is significant about death in the novel?
4. Unhappiness – Who are the unhappy people? How can you say that they are unhappy?
5. The discomfort of rural experience – How can you say that they live in a rural environment? How has it affected the lives of the people?

Plot Overview

Bigger Thomas, a poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old black man in 1930s Chicago, wakes up one morning in his family’s cramped apartment on the South Side of the city. He sees a huge rat scamper across the room, which he corners and kills with a skillet. Having grown up under the climate of harsh racial prejudice in 1930s America, Bigger is burdened with a powerful conviction that he has no control over his life and that he cannot aspire to anything other than menial, low-wage labor. His mother pesters him to take a job with a rich white man named Mr. Dalton, but Bigger instead chooses to meet up with his friends to plan the robbery of a white man’s store.

Anger, fear, and frustration define Bigger’s daily existence, as he is forced to hide behind a façade of toughness or risk succumbing to despair. While Bigger and his gang have robbed many black-owned businesses, they have never attempted to rob a white man. Bigger sees whites not as individuals, but as a natural, oppressive force—a great looming “whiteness” pressing down upon him. Bigger’s fear of confronting this force overwhelms him, but rather than admit his fear, he violently attacks a member of his gang to sabotage the robbery. Left with no other options, Bigger takes a job as a chauffeur for the Daltons.

Coincidentally, Mr. Dalton is also Bigger’s landlord, as he owns a controlling share of the company that manages the apartment building where Bigger’s family lives. Mr. Dalton and other wealthy real estate barons are effectively robbing the poor, black tenants on Chicago’s South Side—they refuse to allow blacks to rent apartments in predominantly white neighborhoods, thus leading to overpopulation and artificially high rents in the predominantly black South Side. Mr. Dalton sees himself as a benevolent philanthropist, however, as he donates money to black schools and offers jobs to “poor, timid black boys” like Bigger. However, Mr. Dalton practices this token philanthropy mainly to alleviate his guilty conscience for exploiting poor blacks.

Mary, Mr. Dalton’s daughter, frightens and angers Bigger by ignoring the social taboos that govern the relations between white women and black men. On his first day of work, Bigger drives Mary to meet her communist boyfriend, Jan. Eager to prove their progressive ideals and racial tolerance, Mary and Jan force Bigger to take them to a restaurant in the South Side. Despite Bigger’s embarrassment, they order drinks, and as the evening passes, all three of them get drunk. Bigger then drives around the city while Mary and Jan make out in the back seat. Afterward, Mary is too drunk to make it to her bedroom on her own, so Bigger helps her up the stairs. Drunk and aroused by his unprecedented proximity to a young white woman, Bigger begins to kiss Mary.

Just as Bigger places Mary on her bed, Mary’s blind mother, Mrs. Dalton, enters the bedroom. Though Mrs. Dalton cannot see him, her ghostlike presence terrifies him. Bigger worries that Mary, in her drunken condition, will reveal his presence. He covers her face with a pillow and accidentally smothers her to death. Unaware that Mary has been killed, Mrs. Dalton prays over her daughter and returns to bed. Bigger tries to conceal his crime by burning Mary’s body in the Daltons’ furnace. He decides to try to use the Daltons’ prejudice against communists to frame Jan for Mary’s disappearance. Bigger believes that the Daltons will assume Jan is dangerous and that he may have kidnapped their daughter for political purposes. Additionally, Bigger takes advantage of the Daltons’ racial prejudices to avoid suspicion, continuing to play the role of a timid, ignorant black servant who would be unable to commit such an act.

Mary’s murder gives Bigger a sense of power and identity he has never known. Bigger’s girlfriend, Bessie, makes an offhand comment that inspires him to try to collect ransom money from the Daltons. They know only that Mary has vanished, not that she is dead. Bigger writes a ransom letter, playing upon the Daltons’ hatred of communists by signing his name “Red.” He then bullies Bessie to take part in the ransom scheme. However, Mary’s bones are found in the furnace, and Bigger flees with Bessie to an empty building. Bigger rapes Bessie and, frightened that she will give him away, bludgeons her to death with a brick after she falls asleep.

Bigger eludes the massive manhunt for as long as he can, but he is eventually captured after a dramatic shoot-out. The press and the public determine his guilt and his punishment before his trial even begins. The furious populace assumes that he raped Mary before killing her and burned her body to hide the evidence of the rape. Moreover, the white authorities and the white mob use Bigger’s crime as an excuse to terrorize the entire South Side .

Jan visits Bigger in jail. He says that he understands how he terrified, angered, and shamed Bigger through his violation of the social taboos that govern tense race relations. Jan enlists his friend, Boris A. Max, to defend Bigger free of charge. Jan and Max speak with Bigger as a human being, and Bigger begins to see whites as individuals and himself as their equal.

Max tries to save Bigger from the death penalty, arguing that while his client is responsible for his crime, it is vital to recognize that he is a product of his environment. Part of the blame for Bigger’s crimes belongs to the fearful, hopeless existence that he has experienced in a racist society since birth. Max warns that there will be more men like Bigger if America does not put an end to the vicious cycle of hatred and vengeance. Despite Max’s arguments, Bigger is sentenced to death.

Bigger is not a traditional hero by any means. However, Wright forces us to enter into Bigger’s mind and to understand the devastating effects of the social conditions in which he was raised. Bigger was not born a violent criminal. He is a “native son”: a product of American culture and the violence and racism that suffuse it.

Character List

Bigger Thomas -  The protagonist of Native Son. A poor, uneducated black man, Bigger comes from the lowest rung on the American social and economic ladder. As his lack of education has left him no option other than menial labor, he has felt trapped his whole life, resenting, hating, and fearing the whites who define the narrow confines of his existence. Bigger views white people as a collective, overwhelming force that tells him where to live, where to work, and what to do.

Read an in-depth analysis of Bigger Thomas.

Mary Dalton -  The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, Bigger’s wealthy employers. Mary identifies herself as a progressive, dates an admitted communist, and interacts with Bigger with little regard for the strict boundary society imposes between black men and white women. Mary’s transgression of this boundary leads to her death and the resulting development of Bigger’s character.

Read an in-depth analysis of Mary Dalton.

Mr. and Mrs. Dalton -  A white millionaire couple living in Chicago. Mrs. Dalton is blind; Mr. Dalton has earned a fortune in real estate. Although he profits from charging high rents to poor black tenants—including Bigger’s family—on Chicago’s South Side, he nonetheless claims to be a generous philanthropist and supporter of black Americans.

Jan Erlone -  A member of the Communist Party and Mary Dalton’s boyfriend—a relationship that upsets Mary’s parents. Jan, like Mary, wants to treat Bigger as an equal, but such untraditional behavior only frightens and angers Bigger. Jan later recognizes his mistake in trying to treat Bigger this way and becomes sympathetic toward his plight. Jan becomes especially aware of the social divisions that prevent Bigger from relating normally with white society.

Boris A. Max -  A Jewish lawyer who works for the Labor Defenders, an organization affiliated with the Communist Party. Max argues, based on a sociological analysis of American society, that institutionalized racism and prejudice—not inherent ethnic qualities—create conditions for violence in urban ghettos.

Read an in-depth analysis of Boris A. Max.

Bessie Mears -  Bigger’s girlfriend. Their relationship remains quite distant and is largely based upon mutual convenience rather than romantic love.

Mrs. Thomas -  Bigger’s devoutly religious mother. Mrs. Thomas has accepted her precarious, impoverished position in life and warns Bigger at the beginning of the novel that he will meet a bad end if he fails to change his ways.

Buddy Thomas -  Bigger’s younger brother. Buddy, unlike his brother, does not rebel against his low position on the social ladder. In fact, he envies Bigger’s job as a chauffeur for a rich white family. As the novel progresses, however, Buddy begins to take on a more antagonistic attitude toward racial prejudice.

Vera Thomas -  Bigger’s younger sister. Vera, like Bigger, lives her life in constant fear.

G. H., Gus, and Jack -  Bigger’s friends, who often plan and execute robberies together. G. H., Gus, and Jack hatch a tentative plan to rob a white shopkeeper, Mr. Blum, but they are afraid of the consequences if they should be caught robbing a white man. At the beginning of the novel, Bigger taunts his friends about their fear, even though he is just as terrified himself.

Mr. Blum -  A white man who owns a delicatessen on the South Side of Chicago. Mr. Blum represents an inviting robbery target for Bigger and his friends, but their fear of the consequences of robbing a white man initially prevents them from following through on their plan.

Britten -  A racist, anticommunist private investigator who helps Mr. Dalton investigate Mary’s disappearance.

Buckley -  The incumbent State’s Attorney who is running for reelection. Buckley is viciously racist and anticommunist.

Peggy -  An Irish immigrant who has worked as the Daltons’ cook for years. Peggy considers the Daltons to be marvelous benefactors to black Americans. Though she is actively kind to Bigger, she is also extremely patronizing.

Doc -  The black owner of a pool hall on the South Side of Chicago that serves as a hangout for Bigger and his friends.

Reverend Hammond -  The pastor of Mrs. Thomas’s church who urges Bigger to turn toward religion in times of trouble.

Book One (part one)

From the opening through Bigger’s argument with Gus at the pool hall

Summary

An alarm clock rings in a dark Chicago apartment. Bigger Thomas, a young black man, shares the apartment with his mother, his sister Vera, and his brother Buddy. The apartment has only one room, which forces Bigger and Buddy to turn their backs to avoid the shame of seeing Vera and their mother dress.

A huge black rat runs across the floor. Vera cowers and Mrs. Thomas jumps on the bed while Bigger and Buddy frantically try to kill the rat. The rat attacks Bigger, biting a hole in his pant leg before it is cornered. Bigger smashes the rat with a skillet and then crushes its head with a shoe, cursing hysterically. Before disposing of the rat, Bigger holds it up by the tail in front of Vera, taking pleasure in her fear until she faints.

With the immediate danger gone, Mrs. Thomas turns all her attention on Bigger, first asking him why he has frightened his sister, then blaming him for the family’s poverty and accusing him of thinking only of himself. She warns him that if he does not change his ways and stop associating with his “gang,” he will end up in the gallows. Bigger tries to shout his mother down, but his voice is filled with nervousness and irritation, and he longs for silence.

Bigger hates his family because of their poverty and suffering and because he feels there is nothing he can do to help them. He believes that he cannot afford to let himself feel their shame and misery too strongly without also feeling the urge to kill himself or someone else. He has cultivated a façade of outer toughness to protect himself from the unbearable pressure he feels as a result of his family’s social position.

Bigger’s mother sings a spiritual while preparing breakfast—a song that annoys Bigger. She begins to prod Bigger about a job he has been offered with a man named Mr. Dalton. She tells him that if he takes the job, the family will be able to move to a nicer apartment. If he does not, he will lose his relief money and the family will starve. Resentment builds in Bigger, as he feels that his family is tricking him into giving up. Frustrated by his narrow range of choices, he storms out of the room and into the building’s vestibule, where he broods while watching the traffic through the window.

Across the street, men are putting up campaign posters for the State’s Attorney, a man named Buckley. Bigger imagines the millions of dollars Buckley makes through corruption, and longs to be him for a day. The words “If You Break The Law, You Can’t Win!” adorn the top of the campaign posters. Bigger knows, however, that a man can win if he can afford to pay Buckley off. Bigger checks his pocket and finds he has only twenty-six cents.

Bigger and his friends have a tentative plan to rob a delicatessen owned by a white man named Mr. Blum. The gang has committed other robberies, but never one against a white man, partly because Bigger knows that white policemen are largely unconcerned with black-against-black crimes. Robbing a white man would mean entering new territory, “a symbolic challenge” to white rule.

Bigger’s friend Gus meets him on the street and they watch an airplane write out an advertisement in white smoke. Bigger states that he could fly a plane if he were given the chance. Gus agrees that Bigger could, but only if he had some money and were not black. Bigger complains that whites will not let blacks do anything, and he feels as though he is living in prison.

Gus and Bigger playact at being white, alternately portraying a military general, the fantastically wealthy white businessman J. P. Morgan, and the president of the United States. Gus and Bigger act out a skit in which the president wants to keep the “niggers” under control. After the playacting, Bigger tells Gus he is certain that something bad is going to happen to him. Gus agrees when Bigger says that he can feel the presence of whites inside himself. Whenever he thinks of white people, he has the sensation that a fire is burning in his stomach and feels that he might do something uncontrollable and rash.

Gus and Bigger go to Doc’s pool hall to meet their friends Jack and G. H. Bigger asks them to join a game for which Gus is paying, and they all laugh. Bigger laughs along, but because he is broke he worries that the joke is on him. He brings up the plan to rob Mr. Blum and accuses his friends of being too fearful to carry out the plan. Jack and G. H. agree to do the job, but Gus keeps quiet. Bigger accuses Gus of being afraid to rob a white man and hates Gus for that fear. Inside, however, Bigger feels this fear himself. Gus remains silent until Bigger snaps, shouting and swearing at Gus. Gus blames Bigger’s bad temper for causing most of the gang’s troubles and accuses Bigger of being afraid himself. Bigger becomes furious and threatens to hit Gus. Finally, Gus agrees to the plan to rob Blum. While Bigger struggles to control his impulse to fight Gus, the four agree to meet at Doc’s at three o’clock to carry out the robbery. G. H. takes Gus away from the pool hall.

Analysis

Native Son opens with the ringing bell of an alarm clock—a wake-up call not only for Bigger and his family, but also a warning to America as a whole about the dangerous state of race relations in the country in the 1930s. Wright sees a black population that, though freed from outright slavery, still lives under terrible conditions, is unable to vote, and is terrorized by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The North is somewhat more integrated, but many blacks there still live in desperate poverty. Wright believes these conditions have created individuals who are isolated not only from the white world but also from their own religion and culture—people whose only release is through violence. Bigger is the epitome of such individual: he is alienated from his family and friends, annoyed by his mother’s religious songs, and kept poor and impotent through the oppressiveness of white society.

The title of Book One is “Fear,” and that fear appears in the first pages of this section with the appearance of a large black rat. The rat is just as afraid of Bigger as Bigger is of the rat, and their reactions to these fears are the same: defiance and violence. This first book might just as easily have been called “Shame,” as Bigger also feels that emotion acutely. The suffering his family endures while living in such terrible conditions constantly reminds Bigger how powerless he is to help them. The knowledge of his family’s situation is more than he can bear, so he attempts to keep a cold and reserved attitude toward his family and himself. Bigger’s need to hide behind such a wall of toughness is one of the many ways in which we see him trapped by his circumstances. He is caught in a tiny apartment with failure, inadequacy, shame, and fear pervading his life. He has access only to menial jobs and feels he lacks any control over his existence or direction. He also feels trapped inside himself, unable to acknowledge the misery he feels without risking his own destruction. Throughout the novel, we see that when Bigger is cornered, like the rat, he is overwhelmed by shame and fear and lashes out with violence, the only weapon at his disposal.

Here, Wright begins to develop Bigger’s view of whites as an overwhelming force that sweeps him toward doom. Native Son is written in the style of urban naturalism, much like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The characters in these works are urban residents whose fates are determined by forces almost completely beyond their control. Like the main character of The Jungle, a poor Lithuanian immigrant in Chicago, Bigger perceives that the narrow boundaries of his life were already determined before his birth. A long-standing unequal division of power between white and black, rich and poor has trapped him within a disadvantaged race and a disadvantaged class. He feels watched and controlled even when white people are not present, as if white people invade his very insides. He feels like a man condemned to a degraded existence and certain doom. This sense of doom is heightened by Buckley’s campaign slogan: “If You Break The Law, You Can’t Win!” The State’s Attorney is a powerful member of the institution of white justice, and his poster foreshadows Bigger’s losing battle with white authority.

Book One (part two)

From the movie theater through Bigger’s fight with Gus

Summary

Was what he had heard about rich white people really true? Was he going to work for people like you saw in the movies . . . ?

Bigger decides to spend twenty cents on a movie to help dispel his growing fear of robbing Blum. He and Jack go to a movie theater, and they masturbate while watching it and thinking about their girlfriends. Afterward, they discuss Bigger’s upcoming job interview with Mr. Dalton. Bigger says that he would rather go to jail than take a job through the relief agency. A newsreel begins, showing the young daughters of wealthy families playing on the beach in Florida. The camera focuses on Mary Dalton as she kisses a handsome man, identified only as a “well-known radical.” A commentator reports that Mary has shocked her family by becoming romantically linked to this man and that her parents have tried to put an end to the relationship. Bigger realizes that the scandalous young woman is the daughter of his prospective employer, Mr. Dalton.

The movie Trader Hornbegins. Watching  scenes of black men and women dancing wildly to the beat of drums, Bigger imagines a party at a rich, white home. For the first time, he contemplates the job with the Daltons with great interest. Mary Dalton, he thinks, might be a “hot kind of girl” who would like to come see his side of town, and who might bribe him to keep her secrets from her parents. Bigger also remembers his mother’s constant advice that wealthy white people treat black people better than they treat poor whites. Bigger thinks that perhaps the Dalton family would be easy to get along with because they are so wealthy. His thoughts return to the robbery of Mr. Blum. Now that he is more interested in a real job, he berates himself for taking a “fool’s chance” with the law.

When Jack and Bigger return to Doc’s at three o’clock, Bigger is secretly glad that Gus is not there yet, as they cannot carry out the robbery without him. As the group anxiously awaits Gus, nervous tension gathers in the pit of Bigger’s stomach, as he has convinced himself that he no longer wants to follow through with the robbery. When Gus finally shows up, the anxious Bigger attacks and beats him violently without provocation or warning. He then pulls a knife on Gus and forces him to lick the blade. Bigger accuses Gus of ruining the plan by being late, although Jack insists there is still enough time. Gus flees the premises, and G. H. hints that Bigger had wanted to spoil the plan all along. Bigger threatens G. H. and Doc draws a gun. Bigger slashes the cloth on the pool table before slipping out the door and heading home. Though he does not know it consciously, he feels “instinctively” that it was his fear of robbing a white man that drove him to attack Gus. Bigger’s survival depends on how well he can bury this knowledge deep inside himself.

Analysis

In this section, we see that popular culture serves as a release for Bigger—a way to help him forget his misery—but that it also serves as a form of indoctrination. As Bigger has limited contact with white people, his understanding of the white world comes primarily through the popular culture of movies, magazines, and hearsay. The movies focus on the gleaming, opulent world of fabulously wealthy white Americans like the Daltons. Blacks, if they appear in the movies at all, are consistently depicted as one of two stereotypes: either the dangerous, radically foreign, and inferior savage; or the clownish, humble, and ignorant black servant. The white society that produces this popular culture, then, has control over the social dialogue that determines the meaning of the color of Bigger’s skin and hence his identity.

Ultimately, white America controls Bigger’s relationship with his own community. He is too afraid to challenge white authority, so his own community becomes the target and outlet for his relentless terror and frustration. He has an intense desire to test the boundaries of the subservience white America has assigned him, but he is ultimately too afraid to carry out the robbery of a white merchant. Instead, he transfers his hatred and fear of whites onto his friend Gus. Gus is a safer target, just as the black merchants are safer targets for the gang’s robberies. This violence against members of their own community, however, ruins blacks’ chances of becoming a real community and keeps them alienated and weak.

The wall of isolation behind which Bigger hides alienates him not only from his friends, family, and community, but also from himself. His fear, rage, and conflicting and unexamined desires torture him. He instinctively understands that it is better to fight Gus than to rob a white man, but he must keep this understanding buried beneath his consciousness. There exists, then, a gulf between what Bigger feels and what he knows. Unable to face the reality of his life as a black man, Bigger is forced to keep his thoughts and his feelings separate. His consciousness is divided, just as the members of his own community are divided and unable to come together into a cohesive and productive whole.

Book One (part three)

From Bigger’s arrival at the Daltons’ to meeting Mary with the car

Summary

Bigger watches the sunset from his apartment window as he waits for his appointment with Mr. Dalton. He feels his gun inside his shirt and considers leaving it at the apartment, but ultimately decides to bring it with him. Bigger does not fear the Daltons, but he knows that blacks are often harassed in white neighborhoods and believes the gun will help make him equal to the whites.

Upon arriving at the Daltons’, Bigger is unsure whether he should enter at the front or the back of the house. He stands outside the imposing iron fence of the Daltons’ mansion and is filled with a mixture of fear and hate, feeling foolish for having thought he might like this job. He summons the courage to go to the front door, which the Daltons’ white maid, Peggy, answers. Though Peggy is polite to Bigger, he senses that she is looking down on him even though she, like him, is only hired help. While Bigger waits for Mr. Dalton, he gawks at the splendor of the home, with its elegant furnishings and paintings. He feels intimidated by the vast difference between this world and his own. Assailed by insecurity, tension, and fear, he becomes awkward and clumsy.

Mr. Dalton, a tall, white-haired man, appears and leads Bigger toward his office. Mr. Dalton is the owner of the real estate company that owns the building in which Bigger and his family live. In a hallway, they pass Mrs. Dalton, whose face and hair are so white she seems like a ghost to Bigger. From the way Mrs. Dalton touches the walls as she passes, Bigger can see that she is blind. Once inside the office, Mr. Dalton interviews Bigger. Bigger answers the questions timidly, with few words apart from “yessuh” and “nawsuh.” He hates himself for acting in such a subservient manner, but he cannot control himself and becomes extremely uncomfortable.

As Mr. Dalton continues to question Bigger, Mary Dalton—Mr. Dalton’s daughter and the girl from the newsreel—breezes into the room. The two are introduced, and Mary immediately asks Bigger if he belongs to a union. Bigger knows nothing about unions except that they are supposed to be bad, and he begins to hate Mary for endangering his chance at the job. Mary asks Mr. Dalton if she can be driven to the university for a lecture that evening. She then leaves the room. Despite Bigger’s worries, Mr. Dalton hires him as a chauffeur. Mr. Dalton tells Bigger that he is a great supporter of the NAACP—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—and that he is hiring Bigger because of this support for blacks. Bigger’s first assignment, Mr. Dalton says, is to drive Mary to the university that evening.

Peggy cooks dinner for Bigger, but he is suspicious of her kindness and thinks she may be trying to pass off some of her work onto him. Peggy tells Bigger how nice the Daltons are and how much they do for “your people,” meaning blacks. Peggy also tells Bigger that the last chauffeur, a black man named Green, was with the Daltons for ten years. Green attended night school at Mrs. Dalton’s urging and went on to a government job. After Bigger finishes dinner, Peggy instructs him in the operation of the furnace, then shows him to his room. Bigger excitedly contemplates the luxuries he will enjoy with the Daltons. Nonetheless, Mary still worries him. Every rich white woman he has met in the past has treated him in a cold and reserved manner, but Mary does not. Bigger therefore does not know what to make of her.

Before driving Mary out to the university, Bigger enters the kitchen and finds Mrs. Dalton sitting there alone. She asks him several questions about his education. Bigger feels that Mrs. Dalton judges him in the same way his mother does. However, Bigger does note a difference between the manners in which the two women treat him: whereas Bigger’s mother tries to impose her own desires on him, Mrs. Dalton wants him to do “the things she felt that he should have wanted to do.” Bigger thinks to himself that he does not want to go to school. He feels he has “other plans,” but he is unable to articulate them, even to himself. He pulls the Daltons’ car out of the garage and picks Mary up at the side door.

Analysis

In Bigger’s first visit to the Daltons’, we see the extreme discomfort he experiences when he is surrounded by white society. Bigger sees white people not as individuals, but rather as an undifferentiated “whiteness,” a powerful, threatening, and hateful authority that denies him control over his own life and identity. The structure of American society and Bigger’s own limited, restricted experiences prevent him from relating to white people in any other way. Though Bigger feels that wrong is being done to him, he has so deeply internalized the rules of race relations that he finds himself acting out the role he has always seen blacks assume around rich, powerful whites.

The Daltons demonstrate similarly conflicting racial attitudes. As a real estate baron, Mr. Dalton is a major player in the production of the “whiteness” that terrifies, oppresses, and enrages Bigger. Despite Bigger’s criminal record, Mr. Dalton gives him a job because he thinks that blacks deserve a chance. Nonetheless, there is condescension in Mr. Dalton’s manner and charity. He simultaneously profits from keeping blacks like Bigger’s family in terrible housing, and expresses alleged benevolence by giving Bigger a menial job. We sense similar condescension in Mrs. Dalton’s charity as well. Her charity is not unconditional, as she wants Bigger to do what she thinks he should want to do. The Daltons may give money to black schools, but they do not acknowledge that Bigger ultimately should have the freedom and opportunity to determine the course of his own life, without their interference.

Mrs. Dalton’s blindness is important symbolically. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Native Son includes many metaphors for race relations that relate to the concepts of vision and sight. Mrs. Dalton is literally blind, but also metaphorically blind: she and her husband are blind to Bigger’s social reality. Bigger himself is similarly blinded by his hatred and fear. This blindness erects a dense wall of racial stereotypes between Bigger and the Daltons that prevents them from seeing each other as individual human beings. In Bigger’s eyes, the Daltons represent “whiteness”—the overwhelming, hostile, and controlling force that imprisons him in a world of few choices, none of which appeals to him. To the Daltons, Bigger represents the mass of needy black Americans who can be exploited but can also be used as convenient targets of charitable giving. Though Mr. Dalton effectively robs Bigger and his family through artificially high rents, he alleviates any conscious or unconscious guilt about such robbery by making charitable donations toward black causes.

Indeed, the social divisions in Native Son are more clearly delineated along such lines of race than along lines of class. Though Peggy is a servant—and thus ostensibly Bigger’s equal in terms of social class—she is just as patronizing to him as the Daltons are. Peggy’s remark about “your people” demonstrates her belief that black Americans are foreigners or outsiders of some sort. Conversely, when Peggy refers to the Dalton household, she says “us.” Though she is of a lower class than the Daltons, she clearly includes herself as one of “us,” whereas she does not include Bigger and the previous black chauffeur. Although Peggy seems kind, she still considers herself superior to Bigger because she is white.

Bigger feels extremely uncomfortable when racial boundaries are crossed, as such situations represent unfamiliar territory. He reacts to Mary with hostility because she crosses the tense social boundary between white women and black men. In Bigger’s limited experience, white women speak to him only from afar, with coldness and reserve. Mary, however, speaks to Bigger directly, which greatly confuses him. He thinks perhaps Mary might be trying to keep him from getting the job with the Daltons, as he is unable to comprehend the possibility that she might genuinely be interested in what he has to say. Complicating the situation is the fact that white women are utterly forbidden to black men. Though Mary is reaching out to Bigger, and not vice versa, Bigger knows that he would be the one to bear the blame should something go wrong. Mary thus terrifies and shames Bigger on many levels. He does not know how to behave in her presence because she breaks the only social rules he knows.

Book One (part four)

From driving Mary to meet Jan through Mary’s death and the end of Book One

Summary

He saw a hatchet. Yes! That would do it.

Stepping into the car, Mary informs Bigger that she is not going to the university, but instead has other plans that she does not want to reveal to her parents. Bigger agrees to keep Mary’s activities a secret and guesses correctly that she plans to meet with some communists. Bigger grows increasingly anxious. He senses that Mary speaks to him as a human, an attitude he has never before encountered from a white person. Despite the freedom he feels with her, Bigger cannot forget that she is part of the world of people who tell him what he can and cannot do.

Jan insists on driving. Mary squeezes into the front seat beside Bigger, who feels surrounded by “two vast white looming walls.” Bigger also intensely feels his physical proximity to a rich white girl, the smell of her hair, and the pressure of her thigh against his. Jan looks out at the city skyline and declares that “we” will own everything one day and that eventually there will be no black or white. Mary and Jan insist on eating at a black restaurant on the South Side. When pressed for a suggestion, Bigger offers Ernie’s Kitchen Shack. As they drive to the restaurant, Mary looks at the apartment buildings in the black district and wistfully tells Bigger that she wants to know how black people live. She has never been inside a black household, but thinks their lives must not be so different—after all, “[t]hey’re human. . . . They live in our country . . . [i]n the same city with us. . . .”

Mary and Jan insist that Bigger eat with them—a gesture that horrifies Bigger. They persist, however, so he angrily agrees. Mary begins to cry, sensing that she and Jan have made Bigger feel bad. Bigger feels trapped. He tries to think of what he would say to Mr. Dalton or the welfare agency if he were to walk off the job, but knows he cannot explain it. Jan comforts Mary and her tears are quickly forgotten as they go into the restaurant. Inside, Bigger encounters his girlfriend, Bessie, and his friend, Jack. When Bessie tries to talk to him, Bigger responds gruffly.

Jan, Mary, and Bigger eat dinner and then drink rum together. After a few drinks, Jan and Mary question Bigger about his history. He tells them that he grew up in Mississippi and that his father died in a riot. When Jan asks how he feels about his father’s death, Bigger tells him that he does not know. Jan tells Bigger that the communists are fighting against this kind of injustice. Mary insists that she and Jan want to be Bigger’s friends, and that he will get used to them. Bigger does not reply. Before they leave the restaurant, Mary tells Bigger she is going to Detroit at nine o’clock the next morning and that he should bring her small trunk to the station at eight-thirty.

Bigger drives Jan and Mary around the park while they make out in the back seat. The two have become thoroughly drunk by the time Bigger drops Jan off. Before he leaves, Jan gives Bigger some communist pamphlets to read. Mary, riding in the front seat next to Bigger, tries to engage in a conversation with him. She leans her head on his shoulder and asks him if he does not mind. She laughs, and again Bigger feels she is making fun of him. He again feels overcome by fear and hatred.Mary introduces Bigger to her friend and lover, Jan Erlone, whom Bigger also recognizes from the newsreel. Jan confounds Bigger by shaking his hand and insisting that Bigger call him by his first name. Bigger thinks Mary and Jan are secretly making fun of him. He becomes infuriated because Mary and Jan make him intensely aware of his black skin—something he feels is a “badge of shame.” Their attention makes him feel naked and ashamed, and he feels a “dumb, cold, and inarticulate hate” for them.

When Mary and Bigger arrive back at the Daltons’, Mary is too drunk to walk unaided. Terrified, Bigger helps her into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom, leaving the car in the driveway. In the bedroom, Bigger becomes sexually aroused and kisses Mary. He lays Mary down on the bed and is groping her breasts when Mrs. Dalton suddenly enters the room. Bigger is seized by hysterical terror. He knows that Mrs. Dalton is blind, but he worries that Mary may say something that unwittingly reveals his presence. Mary starts to rise in response to her mother’s voice, so Bigger places a pillow over Mary’s face to prevent her from speaking. In his panic, he accidentally smothers Mary to death. Mrs. Dalton kneels by the bed and smells the alcohol on her daughter. She prays and returns to her bedroom.

Bigger realizes that Mary is dead and tries frantically to devise a plan. He stuffs her body into her trunk and carries it down to the basement. He stops in front of the furnace and decides to burn the body. He forces her body through the door, but her head will not fit, so he cuts it off with a hatchet and stuffs the rest of her remains into the furnace. Bigger decides that he will act as though nothing has happened and that he will take Mary’s trunk to the station in the morning. When the Daltons realize their daughter is missing, Bigger will tell them that he accompanied her and Jan to her room to get her trunk. Bigger knows that the Daltons see Jan as a dangerous communist, and hopes that they will thus hold him responsible for Mary’s disappearance. Bigger takes Mary’s purse, which contains a wad of money, and hurries to his family’s apartment on the South Side.

Analysis

In this section we see that Mary Dalton is dangerously oblivious to the social codes that draw a strict boundary between white women and black men. She behaves as if social codes are merely silly prejudices to ignore, and does not realize that her actions could have serious consequences for Bigger. Jan likewise ignores these social codes, and inadvertently provokes terror, anger, and shame in Bigger. On the whole, Mary and Jan’s attempts to treat Bigger as an equal only make him more conscious and ashamed of his black skin. Although Mary and Jan have good intentions in ignoring rules of conduct that they see as racist, Bigger nonetheless has good reason to fear and distrust their gestures. Though Jan requests that Bigger shake his hand and call him by his first name, Bigger knows that such actions would anger most white people, who would see them as disrespectful. Likewise, he knows that most other white people would be furious to see Bigger sitting in the front seat with Mary. Thus, as Mary and Jan treat Bigger as an equal, they confuse him and unconsciously expose him to a frenzy.
Mary uses the same language as Peggy to describe black Americans. When talking to Bigger, she uses the phrase “your people.” She refers to black Americans as “they” and “them,” implying that blacks constitute a separate, essentially different class of human beings. Her phrase “our country” indicates that she views America as a nation dominated by white people. When Mary exclaims, “They’re human,” she implies that a psychological division exists between white and black Americans. She does not have the sensitivity to say “we’re human” because she cannot include blacks and whites in the same collective. To her, the idea of being “human” means living like the white “us.” We see, then, that though Mary has the best intentions and considers herself socially progressive, on an unconscious level she still sees blacks as separate or different.
Indeed, we see that Mary and Jan prove just as condescending as Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, even though they ascribe to radical political and social views and make a genuine effort to understand racial problems in America. Mary and Jan enjoy an odd yet titillating satisfaction from the act of eating at a black restaurant with Bigger. We get the sense that breaking social barriers is a sort of game to them. Though Mary and Jan want to experience black life, they do not even come close to an understanding of its most horrific aspects—the frustration and hopelessness Bigger feels every day. Like the Daltons, Mary and Jan remain blind to the social reality of what it means to be black. For a moment, it seems that Mary may recognize her blindness to Bigger’s feelings. She weeps because she is ashamed that she has pushed Bigger against his will. Jan, however, lacks the sensitivity to recognize that he and Mary have placed Bigger in an awkward position, so this small window of understanding is quickly closed.
When Bigger finds himself in Mary’s room, he knows he has breached the most explosive racial rule—the sexual separation between black men and white women. As Bigger puts Mary to bed, he becomes excited and aroused. This excitement comes not so much from the fact that Mary is physically attractive, but from his knowledge that she is forbidden to him. When Bigger feels Mrs. Dalton’s ghostly presence in the room, he is reminded of the whiteness that controls his life, and is overcome by the magnitude of his transgression. Should Mrs. Dalton discover him, the horrible fate he has always expected for himself would surely be sealed forever. Bigger once again finds his skin color trapping him in a situation in which the only option proves to be fatal.
Bigger’s disposal of Mary’s body is brutal, and Wright spares none of the gruesome details. Wright does not want Bigger to be seen as a traditional hero, but instead wants to emphasize the extreme pain and rage Bigger feels, which make him capable of such a terrible act. By explicitly describing Bigger’s act of decapitating Mary’s body, Wright shows that his protagonist is not a moral innocent. Racism has destroyed Bigger’s innocence, awakening within him the capability to murder.

Book Two (part one)

From the opening of Book Two through Bigger leaving Mary’s money with Bessie

Summary

Bigger wakes up earlier than the rest of his family, and he is in a panic. He realizes he must get rid of Mary’s purse as well as his own knife, which still has blood on the blade. Bigger finds the communist pamphlets Jan gave him and plans to use them as evidence against Jan if the police come around asking questions. When his mother wakes and asks why he did not get home until four o’clock in the morning, Bigger insists that he returned at two, because that time fits better with the story he has constructed. Bigger stares silently around him, infuriated and bewildered that his family has to live in such griminess. Vera accuses Bigger of staring at her and begins to sob as he tries to keep his composure.

Bigger contemplates his crime and becomes filled with a sense of invincibility. In murdering Mary, he feels he has created a new life for himself. He convinces himself that Mary’s death is not accidental, but is actually something to which his whole life has been leading. Bigger feels a kind of pride in thinking that one day he will publicly accept what he has done. He decides that Jan, Mary, and the Daltons are blind, and, staring at his family, he realizes that they too are blind. Buddy longs to have a job like Bigger’s, and Vera already shows the beginnings of the same weariness that marks his mother’s face, exhibiting a profound fear of life in her every gesture.

As Bigger bounds down the stairs, Buddy calls after him, handing him a large wad of bills that has fallen out of Bigger’s pocket. Bigger tells Buddy not to tell anyone about the money. Bigger then showily purchases cigarettes for Jack, G. H., and Gus before getting on a streetcar to go to the Daltons’ home. Bigger begins to see that the white people around him are all blind. They see him as one who might steal, get drunk, or even rape, but they would never guess that he could be capable of murdering a white girl. Bigger marvels that he can act just as others expect him to, yet still do what he wants.

Bigger thinks of Mary and begins to believe that her murder is justified by the shame and fear that whites have caused him. White people, he thinks, are not really people, but a “great natural force.” He wishes he could have a sense of solidarity with other black people to battle against this white force, but he knows such solidarity would only be achieved if blacks were forced into it out of desperation. Bigger thinks of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, and wishes for some black leader to come along and whip black people into a group that would act together to “end fear and shame.”

Bigger arrives at the Daltons’ and finds Peggy peering into the furnace. For a moment he fears he may have to kill her, as the furnace is where he hid the body, but she sees nothing suspicious. Bigger adds coal to the furnace and leaves the unread communist pamphlets that Jan gave him in his room. Peggy sees that the car has been left outside all night, and Bigger tells her that Mary instructed him to leave it in the driveway. Peggy is skeptical, but Bigger mentions that a “gentleman” came to the Daltons’ house the night before, and Peggy does not question him further. Bigger feigns surprise when Mary does not come down from her room, and Peggy suggests that perhaps Mary has already gone to the train station. Bigger delivers Mary’s trunk to the station at 8:30. When Bigger returns, Jan calls looking for Mary.

Bigger is eager to watch the drama unfold. He eavesdrops on Peggy and Mrs. Dalton’s worried conversation. Peggy mentions that Jan called to speak to Mary, and believes that Mary might have asked Jan to make the call in an attempt to cover something up. Mrs. Dalton becomes worried when Peggy says that it looks like Mary did not pack all her things. Bigger realizes that he did not think of this detail, and for the first time he feels nervous. Mrs. Dalton questions him, and he repeats his story, adding that Jan accompanied him to Mary’s room. Mrs. Dalton gives Bigger the rest of the day off.

Bigger berates himself for somehow failing to acquire more money during the murder and cover-up, feeling that he should have planned things more carefully. He visits Bessie and shows her the money. Bessie tells Bigger that his employers live in the same section of town as the Loeb family. They discuss a recent case in which Richard Loeb and his friend Nathan Leopold kidnapped a neighborhood boy, killed him, and tried to collect ransom money from the family. Bigger remembers the case and begins to concoct his own ransom plan.

Bigger sees that Bessie is as blind as his family, as she uses liquor to blot out the pain of her life. He struggles over whether or not to trust her, but tells her that he has a big plan to obtain more money. Bigger tells Bessie that the Daltons’ daughter ran away with a “Red,” and that he took the money from Mary’s room after she disappeared. He says he wants to write a ransom note and collect more. He assures Bessie that Mary has disappeared for good, but Bessie is suspicious of how he knows for certain. When Bessie asks Bigger if he is involved with Mary’s disappearance, he threatens to beat her. He tells Bessie to retrieve the ransom money at a planned drop-off site, assuring her that he will be able to warn her if the money is marked or if the police are watching, as he works for the Daltons and will be privy to their plans. Bessie hesitantly agrees to help, so he gives her Mary’s money for safekeeping.

Analysis

Structurally, the opening of Book Two inaugurates a new phase of Native Son that corresponds with a turn in the novel’s events. Mary’s death represents a key turning point in the plot, both in terms of the narrative and in terms of Bigger’s development as a character. In Book One, “Fear,” Bigger is unable to analyze his behavior, aside from a few instances when he rationalizes his actions enough to forget them. In Book Two, “Flight,” he begins to actively contemplate his identity and consciousness. At the beginning of the novel, Bigger writhes under the yoke of white authority, resentful of the line drawn between himself and white America. However, he does not cross this line until terror drives him to kill Mary by accident. Though this action threatens Bigger’s life, it also, ironically, gives him a tangible goal: to get away with the murder. Bigger now feels the sense of clear purpose he lacks prior to killing Mary.

Bigger clearly still suffers from self-deception. Mary’s death is an accident, but he convinces himself that it was a deliberate action on his part. To Bigger, the deliberate murder of a white woman represents the ultimate rebellion against the crushing authority of “whiteness.” While he has in fact killed a white girl, Bigger convinces himself that he did not do so accidentally, but rather he consciously challenged and defeated the unfair social order imposed upon him. Given that Bigger does not have the ability to determine life and death, he feels that he now possesses a power that white America has used against him since his birth. In Bigger’s fantasy, his alleged victory is an act of creation: he believes that killing Mary gives him a new life, one that he himself controls. Bigger sees framing Jan as merely the first step in constructing and protecting his new life. Through these actions, Bigger claims equality with whites on his own terms, and feels that he has become more human because his life now holds purpose. A bitter irony pervades this entire idea of life-affirming transformation, as the transformation occurs only after a brutal, irrational act of violence.

Bigger believes that blacks who simply accept the social order defined by white America are blinding themselves to the truth. His mother is blind because she depends on religion to cope with her disadvantaged position in life, and because she accepts the role she has been assigned despite the suffering it causes. Buddy views Bigger’s menial job as an honorable position. In Bigger’s eyes, Buddy’s attitude means that Buddy accepts the subservient role white America has assigned him. Vera spends every minute of her life in fear, but accepts this fear as an inevitable part of her existence as a poor black girl. Additionally, Bigger sees Mary, Jan, and the Daltons as blind because he senses that they arrogantly assume that their knowledge of “blackness” can protect them.

Bigger’s longing for a leader who can bring solidarity to the black community represents a warning on Wright’s part. When Bigger looks to the fascist leaders of Italy and Germany, he finds much that he admires. He does not care whether these leaders are morally right or wrong, but only that they point to a possible avenue of escape from the white force that oppresses Bigger and the black community. Through the character of Bigger, Wright shows us that the conditions in 1930s America are ripe for fascism to flourish and that millions of oppressed people are waiting to unite behind a powerful and charismatic leader, regardless of that leader’s moral character.

To disguise his identity as an unrepentant black murderer of a white woman, Bigger plays the expected role of the humble, ignorant, subservient black boy. In this sense, he is beginning to manipulate his identity to his advantage. The Daltons’ racism blinds them to Bigger’s role in Mary’s death, as they are unable to imagine Bigger taking any action beyond the role that they have already assigned him. Bigger thus subverts racial stereotypes, using them as a form of resistance and protection against white authority.

Now that Bigger has broken the ultimate social barrier by killing a white woman, he no longer feels afraid to commit robbery against whites. Bigger’s plan to collect a ransom from the Daltons is inspired by the real-life Leopold and Loeb case. In the 1920s, two bored, wealthy students from prominent Chicago families decided to commit what they considered the perfect crime. For months, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb planned to kidnap the child of a wealthy family. They killed the child to cover up their crime, and then planned to collect $10,000 in ransom money from the family. Leopold, however, accidentally dropped his glasses when disposing of the child’s body, and this evidence led to his and Loeb’s arrests, trials, convictions, and sentences to life imprisonment. Clarence Darrow, the defending attorney in the famous Scopes monkey trial, defended Leopold and Loeb. He argued that World War I had led to a cheapening of human life and that his clients had grown up in a world that learned to glorify violence. Darrow thus argued that Leopold and Loeb’s environment had influenced their callous attitude toward human life. In legal terms, Leopold and Loeb’s crime is more serious that Bigger’s, as it was completely premeditated rather than accidental. However, Wright reminds us that it is unlikely that anyone in the 1930s would accept the possibility that a black man such as Bigger accidentally killed a white woman such as Mary.

Book Two (part two)

From Bigger returning to the Daltons’ through his being questioned by the press

Summary

Bigger knew the things that white folks hated to hear Negroes ask for; and he knew that these were the things the Reds were always asking for.

As Bigger leaves Bessie, he feels confident because he has taken his life into his own hands for once. His secret knowledge that he murdered Mary wipes out his fear and relieves him from the invisible force that has been burdening him. Upon reaching the Daltons’ home, Bigger checks the furnace. Seeing nothing of Mary’s body, he adds more coal to the fire. Peggy informs him that Mr. Dalton wants him to pick up Mary’s trunk at the station because she has not claimed it. The Daltons have also discovered that Mary has not arrived in Detroit. Mr. and Mrs. Dalton question Bigger again and he repeats his story.

When Bigger returns from the station, the Daltons introduce him to Britten, a private investigator they have hired. Britten doggedly questions Bigger, who remains timid and subservient and sticks to his story. Bigger is excited that, for the first time, he is in control, getting to “draw the picture for them” in the same manner that white people have always defined the situation for him.

Bigger tells Britten that he had not driven Mary to the university. He says that he performed the job Mary instructed him to do and that he kept it a secret because Mary told him to do so. Continuing in this self-deprecating vein, Bigger describes the events at the restaurant. When Britten asks whether Jan discussed communism at dinner, Bigger plays the role of the befuddled, simpleminded black boy. Bigger says that Jan, not Mary, told him to take the trunk downstairs and leave the car in the driveway. Again, Bigger says that he has not mentioned this detail before because Mary had instructed him to keep the events a secret.

Britten produces the pamphlets Bigger left in his room and accuses him of being a communist. Bigger is surprised that he, as a black man, would be accused of being Jan’s partner. He convinces Mr. Dalton that he took the pamphlets because Jan, a white man, had insisted that he take them. Mr. Dalton tells Britten that they cannot hold Bigger responsible for Mary’s disappearance. Britten is not so sure, and Bigger can see that the investigator thinks he must be guilty simply because he is black. Bigger offers to leave his job, but Mr. Dalton apologizes and asks him to stay on. Bigger goes to his room and eavesdrops on Mr. Dalton and Britten as they discuss him. Mr. Dalton says that Bigger is not a bad boy, but Britten claims that “a nigger’s a nigger” and that they are all trouble. Bigger feels he has seen a thousand people just like Britten and believes that he knows how to deal with him.

Dalton and Britten bring Jan to the house for questioning, and he denies seeing Mary the night before. He changes his story when Britten confronts him with the pamphlets he gave Bigger. When Mr. Dalton offers him money to reveal Mary’s whereabouts, Jan stalks out of the house. Bigger checks the furnace again and then hurries to tell Bessie about the new developments. Jan confronts him in the street, but Bigger pulls out his gun and chases Jan off. Jan’s innocence fills Bigger with terrible anger, and it takes a few minutes for him to regain his composure.

Bigger chooses a building managed by Mr. Dalton’s company as the drop-off site for the ransom money. At Bessie’s, he writes a ransom note demanding $10,000. He signs it “Red” and includes a drawing of a hammer and sickle. Bessie no longer wants to assist Bigger. She accuses Bigger of killing Mary, and Bigger admits it, saying it is okay because “[t]hey done killed plenty of us.” Bessie is terrified and begs Bigger not to involve her. Bigger tells her menacingly that he will not leave her behind and allow her to turn him in. Bessie then feels resigned to her fate. Bigger shows her the drop-off site and instructs her to return to the site at midnight the following night.

Bigger slips the ransom note under the Daltons’ front door and checks the furnace again. Mr. Dalton reads the letter and calls Britten. Bigger eavesdrops while Peggy assures Britten that Bigger acts just like most “colored boys.” Britten questions Bigger again, asking questions about his feelings for white women. Bigger is careful to continue his timid and ignorant act.

The press arrives at the Daltons’. The newspapers have already printed a story about Jan’s arrest in connection with Mary’s disappearance, and the reporters snap photographs as Mr. Dalton explains that he has received a ransom note for $10,000. Mr. Dalton orders Jan to be released, but admits to the press that the ransom note is signed “Red” and that it contains the emblem of the Communist Party. Jan, meanwhile, refuses to leave jail and declares that he has witnesses to contradict Bigger’s story, so the reporters take an even greater interest in Bigger. They appear delighted to hear that Bigger did not want to eat with Jan and Mary at Ernie’s. They want to print an article using Bigger to “prove” that the “primitive Negro” does not want to be “disturbed by white civilization.”

Analysis

Bigger’s calculated manipulation of the prejudices of others reveals his cleverness and allows him a new opportunity to create something of his own. Thinking that racist whites would never consider a black man bold and intelligent enough to commit such a crime, he deliberately plays into these racial stereotypes to keep them off his tracks. The ease with which Bigger accomplishes this goal implies the severity of racial prejudices in America at the time. By merely playing the role of the ignorant black servant to a tee, Bigger fools Mr. Dalton, Britten, and even the reporters. He carefully directs suspicion at Jan by manipulating the wealthy whites’ anticommunist prejudices as well. Bigger relishes the chance to control the narrative for the whites, shaping their reality as he wants, just as they have shaped it for him all of his life.

Though the blindness of the white characters is again evident in this section, we also begin to see more clearly that Bigger is largely blind as well. While Britten clearly stereotypes Bigger, Bigger also stereotypes Britten as merely one of thousands of white authority figures he has seen in his life. Indeed, Bigger is clearly still prone to self-deception. Just as he earlier hides behind his “wall” to endure fear and shame, he now does the same to avoid his guilt. Bigger attempts to blame Mary for bringing about her own death. When he finally does admit the murder to Bessie, he tries to convince himself that the murder is justified because whites have killed so many blacks in the past. When Jan confronts him, Bigger is overwhelmed by such guilt that he nearly shoots Jan and falls into a stupor for a few minutes before getting a hold of himself.

As Bigger’s plan unfolds, morality becomes increasingly ambiguous and complex. Wright’s depiction of Bigger’s scheme suggests that, in a world complicated by racial hatred, it is not simple to identify right and wrong, even in the case of murder. Though Bigger kills Mary and then criminally plots against her family, it can be argued that neither of these events represents a moral action, as Bigger’s accidental homicide is prompted by his fear that the Daltons’ prejudice would lead them to assume that he intends to rape Mary. Considering the Daltons’ reactions to Bigger’s scheming following the murder, he may well have been right. Though Bigger has clearly committed a crime, Wright implies that he is not fully to blame for his actions following the murder. Bigger makes a conscious choice to lie and plots to injure the Daltons, but the mindset in which he makes those choices has been shaped by the social structure the Daltons and other whites help to perpetuate.

Book Two (part three)

From Peggy asking Bigger to clean the furnace through Bigger’s capture at the end of Book Two

Summary

In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him.

As the reporters stand around in the basement discussing the story, Peggy asks Bigger to clean the ashes out of the furnace. Bigger sifts some of the ashes into the lower bin and adds more coal, hoping that he will not have to take the ashes out until the reporters leave. However, the ashes still block the airflow, causing thick smoke to fill the basement. A reporter grabs a shovel and clears the ashes. When the smoke dissipates, several pieces of bone and an earring are visible on the floor. As Bigger looks at these remnants of his gruesome killing, all of his old feelings return: he is black and he has done wrong. He once again longs for a weapon so he can strike out at someone. While the reporters marvel over the glowing hatchet head in the furnace, Bigger sneaks up to his room and jumps out the window. It is snowing heavily and he lands hard, the snow filling his mouth, eyes, and ears.

Bigger rushes to Bessie’s house to keep her from going to the drop-off site for the money. When Bigger explains that he accidentally killed Mary, Bessie tells him the authorities will think he has raped Mary and has murdered her to cover up the evidence. Bigger thinks back to the shame, anger, and hatred he felt that night. He thinks that he has committed rape, but to him, “rape” means feeling as if his back is against a wall and being forced to strike out to protect himself, whether he wants to or not. Bigger thinks that he commits a form of “rape” every time he looks at a white face.

Bessie packs some clothes and blankets before she and Bigger flee to an empty building to hide. She tells Bigger that she sees her life clearly and resents how much trouble he has caused her. After they make a bed out of the blankets, Bigger rapes Bessie. He realizes he cannot take her with him but cannot leave her behind either. After she falls asleep, he kneels over her with a brick. He hesitates for a moment, but, seeing images of Mrs. Dalton, of Mary burning, of Britten, and of the law chasing him, he brings the brick down on Bessie’s skull. He realizes that Bessie, with her crying and her insistence for liquor, would only slow him down in his flight. Bigger then dumps her body down an airshaft, realizing too late that he has forgotten to remove the big wad of money from her clothing.

Bigger sleeps uneasily during the night. Though he senses his impending doom, he still feels powerful. Like Mary’s death, Bessie’s death gives Bigger a newfound vigor, and he feels a sense of wholeness he has never felt before. In the morning, he awakes to a city covered in snow. He slips out to a street corner to steal a newspaper and reads the front-page news about his escape. The press reports that Bigger probably sexually assaulted Mary before killing her. The authorities have a warrant to search any and every building on the South Side, including private homes. Not believing that a black man could have formulated such a complex plan, they are also searching for a communist accomplice. White anger is turning on blacks and there are reports of smashed windows and beatings throughout the city.

Fighting hunger and cold, Bigger looks for a vacant apartment in which to hide. Due to the overcrowding caused by an alleged housing shortage on the South Side, he has to search for a long while before he finally finds a suitable place. From a window, Bigger marvels at the dilapidated buildings where black tenants live. He thinks back on his own life as he sees three naked black children watching their parents have sex in a bed nearby. He remembers how his family was once driven out of an apartment just two days before the building collapsed. Next door, Bigger hears two people debating his situation. One man declares that he would turn Bigger in to the police, while the other argues that Bigger may not be guilty, since whites automatically view all black men with suspicion when a white girl is killed. Still, the first man blames people like Bigger for bringing white wrath down on the whole black community.

The next morning, Bigger uses his last few pennies to purchase a newspaper. The police have searched over 1,000 black homes. Only a tiny square on the map—the place Bigger is hiding—remains untouched. The police have questioned or arrested numerous communists. A siren shrieks as the police arrive. Bigger escapes to the roof just as they burst into the building. A dramatic shoot-out ensues and the authorities finally capture Bigger, who is half-frozen from the cold and snow. The men carry Bigger down as a crowd of furious whites demands that they kill “that black ape.”

[N]ever in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together. . . .

Analysis

As Bigger goes on the run, fear and guilt continue to torment him. Though Mary’s murder is an accident, Bessie’s is not. Bigger is tormented by his consciousness of how wrong this second killing is, even at the moment he is committing it. In order to go through with the terrible act, he has to imagine the white blur he feels hovering near him on the night he kills Mary. Bigger forces himself to remember the horror of Mary’s burning corpse, Britten’s racist hatred, and the police who are closing in on him. While Bigger has already allowed his previously repressed fear and anger to come to the surface, he now must contend with his repressed feelings of guilt. He cannot bear to look at Bessie’s face, fearing that she will look at him accusingly even in death, just as Jan does when confronting Bigger in the street. Bigger fears the onslaught of an unstoppable feeling of guilt that would destroy him just as fear and anger have threatened to in the past. Bigger feels such a great need to repress his guilt that he prefers to leave all his money with Bessie’s body rather than face her again.

To some degree, Bigger is able to distract himself from his guilt by concentrating on the new sense of power he feels after doing something significant for the first time in his life. The murders give Bigger a chance to “live out the consequences of his actions,” freeing him from the image of blackness that white America has imposed upon him and giving him a chance to control his own fate. Ironically, Bigger has had to murder in order to gain that control, and he only feels freedom at a time when he is trapped in the city with the police closing in on him.

Bigger’s flight from the police during the blizzard can be interpreted as a metaphor for his entire life. He is literally corralled by the relentless manhunt, as the forces of “whiteness” pursue him in an intense building-by-building search of the entire South Side. Like a cornered rat, Bigger is trapped within the ever shrinking square of space that the police have not yet searched. The snowstorm is a literal symbol of the metaphorical “whiteness” that Bigger fears. The snow encompasses and impedes Bigger, shutting down the city and preventing his escape from the white manhunt. Like the waves of white men searching for him, the snow falls relentlessly around Bigger, locking him in place. Literally and symbolically, “whiteness” falls on Bigger’s head with the power of a natural disaster.

During his flight into the black South Side, Bigger takes time to look at the conditions in which he has lived, and realizations dawn on him as if he is seeing these conditions for the first time. The image of the naked children watching as their parents have sex is a reminder of the shame Bigger felt growing up. He sees that real estate owners like Mr. Dalton have forced black tenants to crowd into one small section of the city, creating an artificial housing shortage that drives rents up. Though Bigger’s social consciousness has clearly grown throughout the novel, he is only beginning to understand the broader picture of the complex racial conflict in American society.

Book Three (part one)

From the opening of Book Three through Bigger signing his confession

Summary

In jail, Bigger lives in a world with no day, no night, and no fear or hatred, as such emotions are useless to him now. He feels gripped by a deep resolution to react to nothing, and he says and eats nothing. He longs for death, but as a black man he does not want to die “unequal, and despised.” Bigger wonders if perhaps the whites are right that being black is the same as being an animal of some sort. Nonetheless, the hope that another way of life exists, one in which he would be able to forget his racial differences, keeps coming back to him.

The authorities drag Bigger to an inquest at the morgue. He senses from the white people around him that they plan not only to put him to death, but also to make him a symbol to terrorize and control the black community. A feeling of rebellion rises in him and he begins to come out of his stupor. In the morgue, Bigger sees Jan and the Daltons. As he gradually begins to snap out of his psychological stupor, he faints, overcome by hunger and exhaustion. When Bigger awakens in his cell, he believes he has “come out into the world again” in order to save his pride and keep the authorities from “making sport of him.”

Bigger asks to see a newspaper. The headline reads, “Negro Rapist Faints at Inquest.” The story compares Bigger to a “jungle beast” who lacks the harmless charm of the “grinning southern darky.” Edward Robertson, editor of the Jackson Daily Star, advises total segregation and a curtailment of the education of the black population, which he claims will prevent men like Bigger from developing. Bigger contemplates returning to his protective stupor, but is not sure if he is still able to do so.

Reverend Hammond, the pastor of Mrs. Thomas’s church, visits Bigger in his cell. The Reverend talks to him about hope and love beyond life. Bigger feels a terrible guilt for having killed within himself the kind of world the preacher describes. He compares the murder of his faith to his murder of Mary. Hammond places a cross around Bigger’s neck just as Jan enters the cell. Jan says that he is not angry and that he wants to help Bigger. Jan says he was foolish to assume that Bigger could have related to him in a different way than he relates to other white men. Jan says that he loved Mary, but he also realizes that black families loved all the black men who have been sold into slavery or lynched by whites. As Jan speaks, Bigger notes that this moment is the first time in his life that he has seen a white person as an individual human being, rather than merely a part of the larger oppressive force of whiteness. This feeling deepens Bigger’s guilt, as he knows he has killed the woman Jan loved. Jan introduces Bigger to Boris A. Max, a lawyer for the Labor Defenders. Max wants to defend Bigger free of charge.

Buckley, the State’s Attorney, suddenly enters Bigger’s cell. Though Max argues that white power is responsible for Bigger’s actions, Bigger feels his burgeoning friendship with Max and Jan quickly evaporate when he sees the self-assured Buckley. Mr. and Mrs. Dalton enter the cell and ask that Bigger cooperate with Buckley and reveal the name of his accomplice. In response, Max asks that they not sentence Bigger to death. Dalton says that despite the crime he is not angry with all black Americans. He announces that he has even sent some Ping-Pong tables to the South Side Boys’ Club earlier in the day. Doubtful, Max questions whether Ping-Pong will prevent murder.

Bigger’s family and his friends Jack, G. H., and Gus enter the now crowded cell. Bigger looks at them and thinks they should be glad that he has “taken fully upon himself the crime of being black,” and thus washed away their shame. He knows, however, that they still feel shame, and he asks his mother to forget him. Mrs. Thomas tearfully begs the Daltons to have mercy, but they only reply that they have no control over the matter. Mrs. Thomas also tells Mr. Dalton that his real estate company has been trying to evict her family, and he promises they will not be evicted.

All the visitors leave the cell except Buckley, who warns Bigger not to gamble with his life by trusting Max and Jan. Buckley shows Bigger the mob gathered outside, which is screaming for his blood and urging him to sign a confession that also implicates Jan. Adding that the authorities know Bigger raped and killed Bessie too, Buckley pressures him to confess to other unsolved rapes and murders. Bigger realizes he could never explain why he killed Mary and Bessie because it would mean explaining his whole life. Bigger confesses to the murders but writes nothing to explain them. He signs his confession, feeling that there is no alternative. As soon as Bigger signs, Buckley starts to brag about how easy it was to extract a confession from a “scared colored boy from Mississippi.” After Buckley leaves, Bigger, feeling empty and beaten, falls to the floor and sobs.

Analysis

As Bigger retreats into himself, the white authorities and press take control over his identity once again, redefining him as a bestial Negro rapist and murderer. Wright’s influence for this treatment of Bigger’s character may have come from actual events. While writing the novel, Wright studied newspaper clippings from the 1938 Chicago murder trial of Robert Nixon,  a young black man who killed a white woman with a brick during a robbery. Wright used many details from those articles, especially the descriptions of Nixon as an animal, in his writing of Native Son.

The whites attempt to reshape Bigger’s identity with these additional gruesome details not only to demonize Bigger, but also to whip up white violence and terrorize the black community into submission. Edward Robertson’s newspaper editorial blames northern whites for giving blacks too many opportunities, but also implicitly warns the black community to behave or risk a return to the kind of oppression many of them have left behind in the South. This awareness that whites are attempting to use him as a lesson to the black world angers Bigger and prevents him from staying in his insulated, catatonic state. Sensing that his back is once again up against the wall, he feels a renewed sense of rebellion and comes to be ready—though, as always, not completely willing—to fight.

In jail, we see Bigger grapple with conflicting and often unwanted visions of hope. Alone in his cell, he has visions of a new identification with the world, a way to merge with men and women around him and become part of a community. He tries to shake this image from his mind because, given his current situation, hope only makes him feel worse. Reverend Hammond confronts Bigger with another kind of hope, the same spiritual hope that his mother’s religion promises. The reverend tells Bigger tales of the world beyond life, but Bigger knows he has killed this faith in himself long ago. He does, however, take the cross to wear and seems to take some solace in the reverend’s words. He even thinks of himself as Christlike in the presence of his family and friends. Just as Christian tradition maintains that Jesus died to wash away the sins of the world, Bigger has “taken fully upon himself the crime of being black” and will die to wash away the shame blacks have experienced.

Jan’s arrival in the cell marks an important moment in the novel. In his initial encounter with Jan, on the night of Mary’s murder, Bigger senses that Jan and Mary are trying to speak to him as a man. Nonetheless, their blindness to Bigger’s feelings makes any connection between them impossible. Now, however, Jan understands what Bigger felt the night he murdered Mary. Jan tells Bigger that he realizes he acted blindly toward Bigger that night, and thus in a way is somewhat responsible for Mary’s murder. The terrible act has allowed Jan, just like Bigger, to see things more clearly. Jan becomes the first white man Bigger sees as an individual, rather than merely a representation of the whiteness that Bigger has felt pressing down on him.

The crowd that gathers in the jail cell requires us to suspend our disbelief. It seems unlikely that so many people would be allowed, let alone actually fit, inside an accused murderer’s cell. Wright tried to deflect this criticism by explaining that he was more interested in the emotional truth of the scene than he was in its physical reality. The crowd of individual visitors represents the collective voice of society as it reacts to and judges Bigger’s case. Mrs. Thomas’s voice cries for mercy, while Buddy is ready to take revenge. The Daltons speak with the voice of condescending liberalism, intent on revenge but unable to acknowledge the role they have played in creating Bigger’s frame of mind. Finally, Buckley represents the voice of white power and racism, convinced Bigger is less than human and eager to make him a symbol for other blacks who might dare to cross the line Bigger has crossed.

Book Three (part two)

From the inquest through Bigger’s meeting with Max

Summary

The authorities lead Bigger to the courtroom for the inquest. Mrs. Dalton testifies that the earring found in her furnace is a family heirloom that she had given to Mary. She states that she and her husband have donated millions of dollars to black schools. Jan follows Mrs. Dalton to the stand. During questioning, the coroner insinuates that Jan promised Bigger sex with white women if Bigger joined the Communist Party. Max argues that these kinds of questions are sensational and designed only to inflame public opinion, but his objections are overruled.

Mr. Dalton takes the stand and Max is permitted to question him. As Max knows that Mr. Dalton owns a controlling share in the company that manages the building where Bigger’s family lives, he asks Dalton why black tenants pay higher rents than whites for the same kinds of apartments. Dalton replies that there is a housing shortage on the South Side. Max retorts that there are areas of the city without housing shortages, and Dalton replies that he thought black tenants preferred living together on the South Side. Max then succeeds in making Dalton admit that he refuses to rent to black tenants in other neighborhoods. He accuses Dalton of giving some of the real estate profits to black schools merely to alleviate his guilty conscience. Before dismissing Mr. Dalton, Max asks him if the living conditions of Bigger’s family might have contributed to the death of his daughter. Dalton cannot comprehend the question.

The coroner exhibits Bessie’s body to the jurors. Bigger knows that the authorities are using Bessie only to ensure that he will get the death penalty for killing Mary. Bigger becomes angry that they are using Bessie in death just as Bessie’s white employer used her while she was alive. He feels that the whites are using both him and Bessie as if they were mere property.

Bigger is indicted for rape and murder. When the police take him to the Dalton home and ask him to reenact the crime, he backs himself against the wall and refuses. Outside, a mob screams for his death. Bigger sees a burning cross across the street. He feels that Hammond, in giving him the cross to wear, has betrayed him: the preacher has made him feel a kind of hope, but the burning cross leaves him hopeless once again. Back in his jail cell, Bigger rips off the cross and flings it away. When Hammond tries to visit him again, Bigger furiously refuses him. He vows never to trust anyone again.

Bigger asks to see a newspaper, which reports that he is certain to receive the death penalty. A hysterical black prisoner is brought to Bigger’s cell, demanding the return of his papers. Another prisoner tells Bigger that this hysterical prisoner went crazy from studying too much at a university. The man had been trying to understand why blacks were treated so badly and had been picked up at the post office, where he was waiting to speak to the president. His screaming disturbs other prisoners, and he is taken away on a stretcher.

Max visits Bigger in his cell. Hopeless, Bigger tells Max that none of his efforts will be of use. Bigger feels destined to die to appease the public, and, therefore, has no possibly of winning the trial. Max tries to get Bigger to trust him. Despite his best efforts to avoid opening up and trusting anyone, Bigger does end up trusting Max, but still believes Max’s efforts will prove futile. Max then asks Bigger why he killed Mary. Excited at the prospect of finally feeling understood, Bigger tells Max that he did not rape Mary and hints that he killed her by accident. When Max presses him further about his feelings, Bigger states that Mary’s unorthodox behavior frightened and shamed him. When Max points out that Bigger could have avoided the murder by trying to explain himself to Mrs. Dalton, Bigger explains that he could not help himself and that it was as if someone else had stepped inside him and acted for him.

Bigger explains to Max that there has always been a line drawn in the world separating him from the people on the other side of the line, who do not care about his poverty and shame. He says that whites do not let black people do what they want, and admits that he himself does not even know what he wants. Bigger simply feels that he is forbidden from anything he might actually want. All his life, he has felt that whites were after him. Thus, even his feelings were not wholly his own, as he could only feel what whites were doing to him. Bigger once wanted to be an aviator, but he knew that black men were not allowed to go to aviation schools. He wanted to join the army, but it proved to be segregated and based upon racist laws. He saw the white boys from his school go on to college or the military when he could not. Having lost hope, he began living from day to day. Bigger says that after he killed Mary and Bessie, he ceased to be afraid for a brief while.

Bigger snorts at the idea that the Daltons think they have changed something by donating Ping-Pong tables to the South Side Boys’ Club, as he and his friends planned most of their robberies while hanging around the Club. Bigger says the church did not help him either, as it preached happiness only in the afterlife while he longed for happiness in this world. He also believes that once he is executed, there will be no afterlife. Bigger tells Max that he took a chance and lost, but that it is over now and he does not want anyone to feel sorry for him. Max decides to enter a plea of “not guilty” to buy some time to plead Bigger’s case.

Analysis

The brief appearance of a crazed inmate in Bigger’s cell gives us another example of the narrow range of choices with which Bigger has grown up. We have seen some of these limited choices already: Bigger’s mother attempts to get by with religion and the hope for a better life beyond this world; Bessie relies on alcohol and dancing to ease her pain; and Bigger retreats behind his wall, lashing out violently when pushed too far. With the mad inmate, Wright shows us the danger of another option: attempting to tackle the problems of race relations using pure reason. The former student is driven mad by looking at the race problem closely and trying to understand the situation of blacks in America. Wright implies that approaching the situation rationally is as dangerous as lashing out with a gun—and, in some ways, less effective.

Though Bigger feels the injustice of his situation intensely, he is uneducated and inarticulate, and therefore sometimes unable to convey his feelings adequately. Although his understanding becomes clearer as the novel moves on, he still struggles—even within his own thoughts—for a way to describe his world. Wright sidesteps these limitations of Bigger’s character by creating the character of the mad student, who is intelligent enough to be able to voice his own philosophical perspectives on Bigger and the world that has created him. Furthermore, at the inquest, Max is able to make explicit the hypocrisy of the Daltons and their charity, something Bigger has sensed but has not expressed outright. As a white man, Max is also able to attack Dalton directly, something a black man in Wright’s Chicago would not have done. Max mocks Dalton’s pathetic gesture of benevolence—his gift of Ping-Pong tables to the Boys’ Club—and makes clear that Dalton is a major part of a system that corrals black tenants into the ghetto, creating the social conditions that have produced Bigger. Dalton is blind to these allegations, just as he is to Max’s assertion that his role in creating these conditions makes him complicit in Mary’s murder.

It is clear that the authorities do not consider Bessie’s rape and murder to be as important as the murder of Mary Dalton. They use Bessie’s battered body merely as evidence to establish the larger crime, which, in the eyes of the public, is the outrageousness of Bigger’s act against white society. We get the impression that Bigger’s trial is only a sensational spectacle for the public, and not an attempt to serve justice. The authorities’ attempts to force Bigger to reenact his crime in Mary’s bedroom reinforce this interpretation of the trial. We see that such ostensible evidence gathering is largely pointless, as Bigger’s guilt has been decided before he is ever arrested. Instead, the reenactment serves only to provide sensational photographs to print in the next racist news article about the trial.

Max’s acknowledgement of Bigger as a human being allows Bigger to talk—and even think—about himself in ways he never has before. Throughout Native Son, Wright focuses on this idea that physical oppression leads to psychological repression. Bigger has spent his entire life trying to hide behind a wall, attempting to shut out the realities of life and his feelings about these grim realities. Such repression has left him with violence as his only outlet. Max, however, by simply recognizing Bigger’s life and feelings, allows Bigger to shed this burden of repression that he has carried for so long. Bigger can now, at least tentatively, emerge from behind his wall and start to examine his world for what it really is.

Book Three (part three)

From Bigger struggling with his feelings after his meeting with Max through the completion of the prosecution’s testimony in court

Summary

Bigger is seized with nervous energy, filled with both hope and doubt. Max’s questions have made Bigger feel that Max acknowledges his life and feelings. Bigger wonders if people on the other side of the “line” suffer from the same hatred and fear that have gripped him all of his life. He realizes that individual people, just like himself and Jan, comprise both sides of the color line. Bigger suddenly wishes to know more about life. He wants to touch the hands of people locked in other cells, both in prison and out in the world. He wants to feel the pain of others who suffer like him.

However, Bigger knows that he faces the death penalty, and therefore believes that it is too late to learn the meaning of his existence. He wishes he could retreat back into his mental stupor. He has a newfound feeling of hope for a new world and a new way of viewing himself in relation to other people, but this hope is tantalizing and torments him with uncertainty. Bigger wonders if perhaps his blind hatred is the better option anyway, since hope anguishes him more than it comforts him. The voice of hatred he has read in the newspapers seems so much louder and stronger than the voice of understanding he has heard in Max and Jan. Bigger despairs that this hatred will endure long after he is dead.

Bigger’s family, friends, and teachers are in the courtroom for the trial. He wonders why the authorities do not just shoot him instead of forcing him to go through this long, public process. Max enters a guilty plea and explains that the law allows him to enter mitigating evidence for his defendant. Buckley claims that Max wants to plead guilty and then try to prove that Bigger is insane, which is not allowed under the law. Max denies this claim and says that he merely wants to demonstrate why Bigger has committed murder. Max accuses Buckley of rushing the trial to gain political advantage for the upcoming elections and claims that Buckley is merely a stooge who is doing the bidding of the mob that has gathered outside the courtroom. Max claims that Buckley wants to avoid the matter of motive because it would mitigate Bigger’s punishment. The judge allows Max to do as he has planned, and the sentencing hearing begins.

Buckley calls Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, Peggy, and Britten to testify that Bigger behaved like a sane man. Next on the stand are the reporters who discovered Mary’s bones in the furnace, followed by a parade of people who knew Bigger in the South Side. The theater manager testifies that Bigger and other boys had masturbated in the theater. Buckley even brings the Daltons’ furnace into the courtroom. He presents his case over the course of two days.

Analysis

Native Son is filled with dramatic action—there are two murders, a police chase, a shoot-out, and a murder trial—yet the most dramatic turmoil occurs inside Bigger’s mind. In perhaps the most important moment in the novel, Bigger is suddenly able to see himself in relation to other people. Thanks to his discussion with Max, he now feels free from the tensions of his life. He no longer sees whites as just a “looming mountain of hate,” but rather as individuals. Bigger has already seen Jan in this manner, but he now reaches the important realization that even those whites who hate him are human. In fact, if Bigger were in their place, he realizes he would likely hate in the same way that they do. This revelation has required Bigger to accept two important things: not only must he realize that whites are human beings, but he must also recognize that he himself is their equal. Previously, Bigger has been afraid even to think of himself in these terms. Now, however, the burdens of fear, hate, and shame have been lifted from him, and he is able to see that the problems of his life are not his alone. He imagines everyone—white and black, rich and poor—trapped alone in his or her own jail cell, longing for connection.

Bigger finally begins to realize that he has been just as blind as everyone else. Just as racist whites are blind to his humanity, he has been blind to the fact that Jan and Mary are human beings as well. He makes the crucial realization that the hatred and fear that drive people on the other side of the “line” to make a spectacle of him and wish him dead are the same kind of hatred and fear that he has felt himself. Bigger longs to overcome his alienation and become involved in the lives of others.

Bigger’s awakening to the possibility of a connection with others represents a new source of hope. He has left religion behind because it only offers hope in the afterlife, but now he has found beliefs that enable him to see hope in this world. He imagines being able to reach out and touch the hearts of others around him. He feels that in his recognition of others, and their recognition of him, he can gain the identity and wholeness for which he has longed. Earlier, Bigger thinks that he has found this identity in his new status as a murderer, but that status leaves him tormented by guilt. This new identity brings Bigger an image of himself standing in a crowd of men in a blinding sun that has burned away all differences—not only differences of race, but of class as well.

Bigger struggles with the inner conflict produced by this new hope, and knows he must reconcile his new hope with the certainty that he will be sentenced to death. In the face of death, such hope is a torment. Bigger now longs for more time to examine and understand his relation to others. His new fear is that he will die before he has time to reach this understanding fully. He also feels defenseless in the face of ongoing hatred, despairing that the voices of hate will drown everything else out and continue long after he is dead. The mobs and the newspapers continue to call Bigger a monster, and he wonders if it is not better to hide again behind his wall of hate. Fighting this battle within himself, he realizes that to win the battle for his life on the outside he must first win it on the inside. This realization represents the end of the split consciousness from which Bigger has suffered throughout the novel. His newfound wholeness, although something he only barely understands, gives him the power to achieve victory in a sense, regardless of the outcome of his trial.

Book Three (part four)

From the beginning of Max’s speech through the end of the novel

Summary

In the courtroom, Max presents his case. He argues that Bigger is a “test symbol” who embodies and exposes the ills of American society. Max explains that his intent is not to argue whether an injustice has been committed, but to make the court understand Bigger and the conditions that have created him. Max points out that the authorities have deliberately inflamed public opinion against Bigger, using his case as an excuse to terrorize the black community, labor groups, and the Communist Party into submission.

Max goes on to say that the rage directed at Bigger stems from a mix of guilt and fear. Those who clamor for Bigger’s swift execution secretly know that their own privileges have been gained through historical wrongs committed against people like Bigger, and that their wealth has been accumulated through the oppression of others. Bigger’s options have been so limited, and his life so controlled, that he has been unable to do anything but hate those who have profited from his misery. Stunted and deformed by this oppression, Bigger was unable to view Mary and Jan as human beings. Max argues that the Daltons, despite their philanthropy, are blind to the world that has created Bigger and have themselves created the conditions that led to their daughter’s murder.

Max warns that killing Bigger quickly will not restrain others like him. Rather, these other blacks will only become angrier that the powerful, rich, white majority limits their opportunities. Popular culture dangles happiness and wealth before the oppressed, but such goals are always kept out of reach in reality. Max argues that this smoldering anger born out of restricted opportunities—though now tempered by the effects of religion, alcohol, and sex—will eventually burst forth and destroy all law and order in American society. By limiting the education of blacks, segregating them, and oppressing them, white society itself is implicated in Mary’s murder. Max claims that white society “planned the murder of Mary Dalton” but now denies it. He says that his job is to show how foolish it is to try to seek revenge on Bigger.

Max argues that Bigger murdered Mary accidentally, without a plan, but that he accepted his crime, which gave him the opportunities of choice and action, and the sense that his actions finally meant something. Bigger’s killing was thus not an act against an individual, but a defense against the world in which Bigger has lived. Mary died because she did not understand that she alone could not undo hundreds of years of oppression. Max points to the gallery, where blacks and whites are seated in separate sections. Blacks, he says, live in a separate “captive” nation within America, unable to determine the course of their own lives. He argues that such a lack of self-realization is just as smothering and stunting as physical starvation. Bigger sought a new life, Max says, and found it accidentally when he murdered Mary. Max argues that Bigger had no motive for the crimes and that the murders were “as instinctive and inevitable as breathing or blinking one’s eyes.” The hate and fear society has bred into Bigger are an inextricable part of his personality, and essentially his only way of living.

Max says that there are millions more like Bigger and that, if change does not come, these conditions could lead to another civil war. He says he knows the court does not have the power to rectify hundreds of years of wrongs in one day, but that it can at least show that it recognizes that there is a problem. Prison, he says, would be a step up for Bigger. Though Bigger would be known only as a number in prison, he would at least have an identity there. Finally, Max argues that the court cannot kill Bigger because it has never actually recognized that he exists. He urges the court to give Bigger life. Bigger does not entirely understand Max’s speech, but is proud that Max has worked so hard to save him.

After Max’s arguments, Buckley declares that Bigger does in fact have a motive for Mary’s murder. Buckley claims that since Bigger and Jack masturbated while watching a newsreel about Mary the same day she was killed, Bigger must have been sexually interested in her. Buckley tells the courtroom that Bigger was a “maddened ape” who raped Mary, killed her, and burned her body to hide the evidence. Buckley concludes his argument by saying that Bigger was sullen and resentful from the start, not even grateful when he was referred to Mr. Dalton for a job. Buckley calls Bigger a “demented savage” who deserves to die, and whose execution will prove that “jungle law” does not prevail in Chicago. The court adjourns. After a brief deliberation, the judge returns and sentences Bigger to death.

Max visits Bigger again after a failed attempt to obtain a pardon from the governor. Bigger tries to explain how much Max’s questions about his life meant to him, as these questions acknowledged Bigger’s existence as a human being, even as a murderer. Max tries to comfort Bigger, but Bigger wants understanding, not pity. He continues, saying that sometimes he wishes Max had not asked the questions, because they have made him think and this thinking has scared him. The questions have made Bigger consider himself and other people in a new way, and have caused him to realize that his motivation for hurting people was simply that they were always crowding him. He did not mean to hurt others, but it just happened. When Bigger committed the murders, he was not trying to kill anyone, but rather to make his life mean something that he could claim for himself. Bigger asks Max if this sense of meaning is the same reason that the authorities want to kill him. Max urges his client to die free, believing in himself. He tells Bigger that only his own mind stands in the way of believing in himself. The rich majority dehumanizes people like Bigger for the same reason Bigger could not see the majority as human—they each just want to justify their own lives.

Bigger tells Max he does believe in himself. He did not want to kill, but there was something in him that has made him kill and that something must be good. He tells Max that he feels all right when he looks at it this way. Max is horrified at Bigger’s words, but Bigger assures him that he is all right. Max bids him good-bye and as he leaves, Bigger asks him, “Tell . . . Tell Mister . . . Tell Jan hello.”

Analysis

In his long courtroom speech, Max articulates much of what Bigger has already seen and felt throughout the novel. He reiterates the Daltons’ blindness and Bigger’s blindness toward Mary and Jan. He tells the court how the murders gave Bigger the identity he lacked and how the hate and fear that Bigger’s living conditions bred into him made the murders almost inevitable. While much of Max’s speech simply restates what we have seen before, it does clarify the warning Wright implies with the ringing of the alarm clock at the novel’s opening. Max worries that the same doom Bigger dreads in Book One is the fate of the entire country. Max appeals to the court—as Wright appeals to his readers in 1930s America—to recognizeBigger Thomas, to understand the conditions that have created him, and to comprehend the disastrous consequences of allowing these conditions to continue.

Many critics have argued that Wright uses Max’s speech merely to expose his own communist propaganda. Others, however, have pointed out that Max, though a lawyer for the Communist Party, is never identified as a member of the Party himself. Also, Max’s argument does not follow the party line exactly. Max does make clear that blacks have been oppressed for hundreds of years, and details the conditions under which they are forced to live in 1930s Chicago. His argument does not, however, appear to be a call for revolution or an attack on capitalism. Instead, Max makes an appeal to the rich and powerful simply to understand that they are sowing the seeds for a new civil war in continuing their oppression of blacks. In the end, Max, as a representative of the Communist Party, cannot save Bigger. Bigger learns that salvation can come only from within, through his own effort.

In a novel filled with characters who are blind both literally and metaphorically, Max sees the most clearly. He is able to understand and articulate much of Bigger’s life after only one long conversation with him. Max sees that Bigger views whites not as individuals, but as a great natural force. He understands Bigger’s split consciousness and sees how Bigger was forced to retreat from reality. He also understands how Mary’s murder gave Bigger the chance to control his own life for the first time. For all his perceptiveness, however, Max is still unable to see Bigger completely. At the trial, he refers to Bigger as a symbol and talks of the millions more who are like him. In this statement, we see that Max understands Bigger, but that he cannot see Bigger beyond his own conception of who Bigger must be. When Bigger tells Max that he is pleased with what he has done, Max is unable to accept this assertion and gropes for his hat “like a blind man.” Even Max is unable, ultimately, to see Bigger fully for the individual he is.

Critics, such as James Baldwin in Everybody’s Protest Novel, have argued that Bigger goes to his death fearful and desperate, just like the rat in the first pages of the novel. Others contend that Bigger finally gives himself over to hatred. Nonetheless, it is important to note that Bigger does change in jail, accepting that the acts he has committed are part of who he is, but also that hate for one’s oppressors is a natural feeling. It is the repression of these feelings—a repression Bigger has forced upon himself in order to survive—that leads to his violent acts. By the end of the novel, he has shed his hate and fear, and longs only to understand his place in the world and his relation to other people. Bigger tells Max again and again that he is all right. Finally, as Max is leaving, Bigger asks him to “[t]ell Jan hello.” As Jan requests in the beginning of the novel, Bigger finally calls him by his first name, signifying that he finally sees whites as individuals, rather than a looming force. Even more important, Bigger sees himself as the whites’ equal. Max exhorts Bigger to believe in himself, and we have every indication at this point to believe that he already does.

Important Quotations Explained

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1. Was what he had heard about rich white people really true? Was he going to work for people like you saw in the movies . . . ? He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances . . . .

This passage from Book One appears as Bigger sits in the movie theater, thinking about the possibilities for his new job as the Daltons’ chauffeur. He has just seen the newsreel about Mary and has decided that he might find more to like about the job than he initially suspects. Here we see just how little contact Bigger has had with white people and therefore how impossible it is for him to conceive of them in realistic terms. We also see the importance of popular culture in determining societal attitudes, as Bigger is only able to imagine the Daltons’ lives by drawing upon movies that portray rich white people. The movie screen shows a scene of black savages dancing in a jungle, which Bigger covers up in his mind with an imagined scene of an elegant white cocktail party. Wright juxtaposes these sharply contrasting images to indicate the extent to which Bigger’s—and America’s—attitudes about whites and blacks are determined by popular culture. This popular culture inundates the America of Wright’s time with imagery that depicts blacks as savages and whites as cultured and sophisticated millionaires.

2.

The head hung limply on the newspapers, the curly black hair dragging about in blood. He whacked harder, but the head would not come off. . . . He saw a hatchet. Yes! That would do it. . . . 

This extremely disturbing passage from the end of Book One describes Bigger’s brutal disposal of Mary’s body after he accidentally smothers her to death. He tries to stuff the body in the furnace, but the head will not fit, so he is forced to decapitate Mary in order to fit her corpse into the fire. The grisliness of this passage is intentional, and important to the novel: Wright does not want to portray Bigger as a passive victim of a situation beyond his control. He spares no gruesome detail, depicting Bigger’s excited, racing mind and the gory work of dismembering Mary. Though there are extenuating social and personal circumstances surrounding Mary’s death, Wright does not want to portray Bigger as heroic for having killed her. Furthermore, he wants to emphasize that Bigger’s mindset is one of such pain and rage that he is more than capable of committing such brutality. Bigger is a victim of racism, and the worst part of his victimization is not that he is forced to kill Mary but that he has been transformed into a person capable of furious violence, one who even craves such violence. Showing Bigger hacking apart Mary’s corpse, Wright indelibly reminds us that Bigger is not morally pure. Rather, racism has destroyed Bigger’s innocence by awakening terrible capabilities within him—capabilities that later enable him to kill Bessie as well.

3.

“Listen, Bigger,” said Britten. “Did you see this guy [Jan] act in any way out of the ordinary? I mean, sort of nervous, say? Just what did he talk about?
“He talked about Communists. . . .”
“Did he ask you to join?”
“He gave me that stuff to read.”
“Come on. Tell us some of the things he said.”
Bigger knew the things that white folks hated to hear Negroes ask for; and he knew that these were the things the Reds were always asking for.

In this passage from Book Two, in which Britten questions Bigger about Mary’s disappearance, we see Bigger’s astute ability to deflect suspicion away from himself by playing upon white prejudice against blacks and communists. Bigger assumes a slow-witted, subservient attitude that completely conceals his sharp intellect and capability for drastic action, and then uses this attitude to cast subtle suspicion upon the innocent Jan. Bigger utterly outsmarts the whites by telling them exactly what they want to hear, saying that, on the night of Mary’s disappearance, Jan was talking about these “things the Reds were always asking for.” Bigger knows that simply associating Jan with communist rhetoric will make Jan appear guilty in the minds of his white listeners, even though they already know Jan to be an avowed communist. Bigger uses his long experience with racial prejudice shrewdly, manipulating the prejudices of his white questioners. This passage suggests that, had Mary’s bones not been discovered in the furnace, Bigger may have gotten away with his crime completely.

4.

He had done this. He had brought all this about. In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him.  

This quotation from Book Two is the first expression of an idea that Max later echoes in his courtroom defense of Bigger—that Bigger’s murders make him as exultant as they make him guilty, as they provide his life with a new sense of purpose and expression. Bigger’s possibilities have always been stunted by racism, but after these murderous acts, he is “free” to act—and to live with the consequences of these actions—for the first time. Even though these consequences ultimately mean flight and imprisonment, this feeling of self-assertion and personal control nonetheless remains liberating and intoxicating for Bigger.

5.

There was something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and something he himself had. . . . [N]ever in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness.

Early on in Native Son, Wright describes how Bigger retreats behind a “wall” to keep the reality of his situation from overwhelming him. This passage from Book Two elucidates the destructive effects of Bigger’s retreat. He is isolated not only from his friends and family, but from himself as well. The African-American author W. E. B. DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk, describes the effect of racism on the black psyche: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Indeed, though Bigger’s body is still in one piece, his mind is split in two, leaving him unable to interact with others and unable to understand himself. It is this quest for wholeness that dominates Bigger’s life. Tragically, it is not until he has murdered two women and is soon to be executed that he is able to understand and grasp this wholeness. He is exhilarated by his new realization, yet tormented by the fact that it comes too late, when he has precious little time left to live.