RICHARD WRIGHT: UNBREAKABLE NEGRO
Mayer, Milton
Richard Wright: Unbreakable Negro BLACK BOY, by Richard Wright. Harper & Brothers. $2.50. Reviewed by Milton Mayer THIS is not a gresrt book. It couldn't have been; the author, without the...
...He had as fearless and ingenious a mother as he was a son...
...True, the story tells us this, But the fact remains that it is not the story of a black boy...
...And the polemical impact is lost...
...Native Son is the story of what white men, collectively, do to black men, collectively, in America...
...Richard's really loved him, and he really loved her, and all that they suffered was not enough to convert one more black boy into one more Bigger Thomas (of Native Son...
...Wright tells us at every point how and why he felt, and we are a little embarrassed, almost giggly, at the commonness and superficiality of expression...
...But my fellow-reviewers are right when they say it is a terribly important book...
...he feels them for us...
...Wright—and I hope he is at work on a novel about a white man—might well answer me with: "What do you want in our time—Holy Writ...
...never ran into a nigger like that...
...The white man, North or South, who either actively or passively mistreats Negroes, reads this book and says: "I'm not in that book...
...Black boys and white boys do not always have such mothers...
...Black Boy approaches being literature—it never reaches it—in the delineation of Richard's mother's life...
...What Native Son doesn't try to do, it does better than Black Boy trying...
...the author, without the surpassing genius of a Proust, is writing about his own passion...
...Black Boy is the story of Richard Wright, who was born with a silver spoon (though without any bread) in his mouth...
...BLACK BOY is meant to be a polemic, and it should be...
...You ought to read it, if for no other reason than that its author is a great man and a great novelist...
...It does not figure it out...
...All the niggers I ever ran into were lazy, stupid, and crooked...
...of the Negro held by the throat by a mad racist culture...
...It displays the scabs, but it leaves us poor white lepers still afflicted...
...of the Negro born hopeless, reared wretchedly, schooled in the lowest varieties of escapism, and, finally, gone completely bad in his behavior and completely blind in his outlook...
...Only in the 3 paragraphs beginning at the bottom of Page 88—read them yourself—is the penetration real and mature at this level): Native Son—except in the last third, the weakest part of the book—tells us what happened and what was said, and moves us ourselves, as great work does, to figure out how the persons involved felt, and why...
...What is great about Native Son is exactly what isn't great about Black Boy...
...As a true polemic, it is, I am afraid, unsuccessful...
...It is history...
...The novel is the story of the Negro...
...But the book is important, away beyond its merit, and away beyond its authorship, because it points the finger to the race problem, the problem on which our civilization, what is...
...left of it, is likeliest to break...
...Compared with Native Son, the autobiography is actually naive...
...Native Son is...
...Wright does not move us to horror and anger...
...This black boy was born proud, talented, and unbreakable, and into a family which, though it starved, never dreamed of stealing...
...It points the finger to the urgency of the problem, to its desperateness...
...It is neither poetry (like Native Son) nor science (like the Reeves' commission's statistics on Negro educational opportunity...
...it is an account of singular events, befalling a given person at a given time and in a given place...
...This is the story, as well as he can tell it, of the man who wrote Native Son, and Native Son is a great novel...
...Black Boy is not, as many reviewers and even many readers may think, the story of a black boy in the South...
...If I'd ever run into a nigger like that, you can bet your life I'd have treated him well...
...It is the story of this black boy in the South...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
