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NATIVE SON

With an introductory essay, ‘How Bigger was Born*, by the author Richard Wright’s story of a Negro youth from the Chicago slums wik. kcIuuvcs through murdei the sense of puipose and identity denied him by white society has become a classic. It was written m tlie ’thirtie,?, long before the existence of any powerful Givijl Rights movements or serious legislation, yet m its concept of self-realization through violence, it brilliantly prophesies the militancy of Black Power

Bigger Thomas, living in one rat-infested room with his family, refuses to accept like his mother or his woman Bessie, the panaceas of religion or whisky. Transported suddenly into the liberal prosperity of the Dalton household, bewildered by hi.s first encounter with the politics of equality, Bigger coinniit.s accidental murder in a moment ofijanic, Tn a hostile world white with snow he beeornt's a fugitive, committing rape and anotlier, more brutal murder. Yet through these act.s of violence and the ensuing reciimlnatioiis of an enraged while mob, Bigger enjoys I'or the first time a sense of freedom in the possibility of choice. At his trial, throughout his lawyer’s passionate defence speech and the long hours as he waits for sentence, , Bigger gropes towards an understanding of himself and the life force that found strange i liberation in death.

Native Son is one of the great books in the literature of oppression. Few writers have so vividly and unforgettably portrayed the experience of being black under white supremacy.

Native Son

Richard Wright was born on a plantation (

I near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908 As a 1 I child he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives '

At the age of fifteen he left home and I returned to Memphis for two years to work 1 ‘Accidentally’, said Wright, ‘I came across l H. L Mencken’s Book of Prefaces which served as a literary Bible for me for some years. Because I was not prepared to be anything else, I decided to become a writer.’

In 1934 he went to Chicago, and in 1935 '

began to work on the Federal Writers’

Project (WPA). He won his first success with Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and the following year was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. 'Phe publication in 1940 of J^alive Son, a l)cslscller in America, established him as one of the country’s most distinctive writers. Rosamond Lehmann wrote in the Spectatot, ‘The scope and passionate sincerity of this book give it a grandeur, a moial importance at least as great as that of An American Tragedy. 'His acclaimed autobiography Black Boy appeared in 1945 and The Outsider in 1953 After the last war, Richard Wright went to live in Paris with his wife and daughters, remaining there until his death in i960.

By Richard Wright

Uncle Tom’s Children Bright and Morning Star Twelve Million Black Voices Black Bov

Black Boy (essay in The God That Failed)

The Outsider Black Power Savage Holiday

The Color Curtain; A Report on the Bandung Conference Pagan Spain White Man, Listen!

The Long Dream Eight Men Lawd Today

Richard Wright

Native Son

With an Introduction "How 'Bigger' Was Born" by the author

Jonathan Cape Thirty Bedford Square London

First published in Gieal Biituin by Vicloi Gollancz iy4o Copyright i(j40 by Richard Wiighl Reissued 1970

Jonathan Cape Ltd, 30 Bedford Square, London wci

SEN 224 61847 4

Acknowledgment is made to the Satmduv Re\ww of Liu-muin’ loi permission lo reproduce those pints of “How ‘Biggei’ Was Bom" which appeared m the issue of June isi 7940 'I he amcle was pub- lished m Its entiiety for the hist time in !()4o by lUupor & BuUheis.

Printed in Great Britain

by Lowe and Brydone (Printers) Ltd, London

bound by James Burn & Co Ltd, Esher, Surrey

CONTENTS

Introduction; How “Bigger” Was Born,

by Richard Wright

Book One	7
Book Two	93
Book Three	254

To My Mother

who, when I was a child at her knee, taught me to revere the fanciful and the imaginative

Introduction

HOW "BIGGER" WAS BORN

By Richard Wright

I am not so pretentious as to imagine that it is possible for me to account completely for my own book, Native Son. But I am going to try to account for as much of it as I can, the sources of it, the material that went into it, and my own years’ long changing attitude toward that material.

In a fundamental sense, an imaginative novel represents the merging of two extremes; it is an intensely intimate expression on the part of a consciousness couched m terms of the most objective and commonly known events. It is at once some- thing pnvate and public by its very nature and texture. Con- founding the author who is trying to lay his cards on the table is the dogging knowledge that his imagination is a kind of community medium of exchange: what he has read, felt, thought, seen, and remembered is translated into extensions as impersonal as a worn dollar bill.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self- generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emo- tions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Always there is something that is just beyond the tip of the tongue that could explain it all. Usually, he ends up by dis- cussing something far afield, an act which incites skepticism

HOW “bigger” was born

and suspicion in those anxious for a straight-out explanation,

Yet the author is eager to explain. But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of his own emotions. Emo- tions are subjective and he can communicate thena only when he clothes them in objective guise; and how can he ever be so arrogant as to know when he is dressing up the right emotion in the right Sunday suit? He is always left with the uneasy notion that maybe any objective drapery is as good as any other for any emotion.

And the moment he does dress up an emotion, his mind is confronted with the riddle of that “dressed up" emotion, and he is left peering with eager dismay back into the dim reaches of his own incommunicable life. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life, and he knows that that is impossible. Yet, some curious, wayward motive urges him to supply the answer, for there is the feeling that his dignity as a living being is challenged by something within him that is not understood.

So, at the outset, I say frankly that there are phases of Native Son which I shall make no attempt to account for. There are meanings in my book of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper. I shall sketch the outline of how I consciously came into possession of the materials that went into Native Son, but there will be many things I shall omit, not because I want to, but simply because I don’t know them.

The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect. But let me start with the first Bigger, whom I shall call Bigger No. 1,

When 1 Was a bareheaded, barefoot kid in Jackson, Mis- sissippi, there was a boy who terrorized me and all of the boys I played with. If we were playing games, he would saunter up and snatch from us our balls, bats, spinning tops, and marbles. We would stand around pouting, sniffling, try- ing to keep back our tears, begging for our playthings. But Bigger would refuse. We never demanded that he give them back; we were afraid, and Bigger was bad. We had seen him clout boys when he was angry and we did not want to run that risk. We never recovered our toys unless we flattered him and made him feel that he was superior to us. Then, perhaps, if

HOW “bigger” was born

he felt like it, he condescended, threw them at us and then gave each of us a swift kick in the bargain, just to make us feel his utter contempt.

That was the way Bigger No. 1 lived. His life was a con- tinuous challenge to others. At all times he took his way, right or wrong, and those who contradicted him had him to fight. And never was he happier than when he had someone cornered and at his mercy; it seemed that the deepest mean- ing of his squalid life was in him at such times.

I don’t know what the fate of Bigger No. 1 was. His swag- gering personality is swallowed up somewhere in the amnesia of my childhood. But I suspect that his end was violent. Any- way, he left a marked impression upon me; maybe it was because I longed secretly to be like him and was afraid. I don’t know.

If I had known only one Bigger I would not have written Native Sort, Let me call the next one Bigger No. 2; he was about seventeen and tougher than the first Bigger. Since I, too, had grown older, 1 was a little less afraid of him. And the hardness of this Bigger No. 2 was not directed toward me or the other Negroes, but toward the whites who ruled the South, He'bought clothes and food on credit and would not pay for them. He lived in the dingy shacks of the white landlords and refused to pay rent. Of course, he had no money, but neither did we. We did without the necessities of life and starved ourselves, but he never would. When we asked him why he acted as he did, he would tell us (as though we were little children in a kindergarten) that the white folks had everything and he had nothmg. Further, he would tell us that we were fools not to get what we wanted while we were alive in this world. We would listen and si- lently agree. We longed to believe and act as he did, but we were afraid. We were Southern Negroes and we were hungry and we wanted to live, but we were more willing to tighten our belts than risk conflict. Bigger No. 2 wanted to live and he did; he was in prison the last time I heard from him.

There was Bigger No. 3, whom -the white folks called a “bad nigger.” He carried his life in his hands in a literal fashion. I once worked as a ticket-taker in a Negro movie house (all movie houses in Dixie are Jim Crow; there are movies for whites and movies for blacks), and many times Bigger No. 3 came to the door and gave my arm a hard pinch

HOW “bigger” was born

and walked into the theater. Resentfully and silently, I’d nurse my bruised arm. Presently, the proprietor would come over and ask how things were going. I’d point into the darkened theater and say: “Bigger’s in there.” “Did he pay?” the pro- prietor would ask. “No, sir,” I’d answer. The proprietor would pull down the comers of his lips and speak through his teeth: “We’ll kill that goddamn nigger one of these days.” And the episode would end right there. But later on Bigger No. 3 was killed during the days of Prohibition: while de- livering liquor to a customer he was shot through the back by a white cop.

And then there was Bigger No. 4, whose only law was death. The Jim Crow laws of the South were not for him. But as he laughed and cursed and broke them, he knew that some day he’d have to pay for his freedom. His rebellious spirit made him violate all the taboos and consequently he always oscillated between moods of intense elation and de- pression. He was never happier than when he had outwitted some foolish custom, and he was never more melancholy than when brooding over the impossibility of his ever being free. He had no job, for he regarded digging ditches for fifty cents a day as slavery. “I can’t live on that,” he would say. Ofttimes I’d find him readmg a book; he would stop and in a joking, wistful, and cynical manner ape the antics of the white folks. Generally, he’d end his mimicry in a depressed state and say: "The white folks won’t let us do nothing.” Bigger No. 4 was sent to the asylum for the insane.

Then there was Bigger No. 5, who always rode the Jim Crow streetcars without paying and sat wherever be pleased. I remember one morning his getting into a streetcar (all streetcars in Dixie are divided into two sections: one section is for whites and is labeled — ^FOR WHITES; the other sec- tion is for Negroes and is labeled — FOR COLORED) and sitting in the white section. The conductor went to him and said: “Come on, nigger. Move over where you belong. Can’t you read?” Bigger answered: “Naw, I can’t read.” The con- ductor flared up: “Get out of that seat!” Bigger took out his knife, opened it, held it nonchalantly in his hand, and re- plied: “Make me.” The conductor turned red, blinked, clenched his fists, and walked away, stammering: “The god- damn scum of the earth!” A small angry conference of white men took place m the front of the car and the Negroes sit-

HOW "bigger” was born

ting in the Jim Crow section overheard: “That’s that Bigger Thomas nigger and you’d better leave ’im alone.” The Ne- groes experienced an intense flash of pride and the streetcar moved on its journey without incident. I don’t know what happened to Bigger No. 5. But I can guess.

The Bigger Thomases were the only Negroes I know of who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away with it, at least for a sweet brief spell. Even- tually, the whites who restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price. They were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken.

There were many variations to this behavioristic pattern. Later on I encountered other Bigger Thomases who did not react to the locked-in Black Belts with this same extremity and violence. But before I use Bigger Thomas as a spring- board for the examination of milder types, I’d better indicate more precisely the nature of the environment that produced these men, or the reader will be left with the impression that they were essentially and organically bad.

Bi Dixie there are two worlds, the white world and the black world, and they are physically separated. There are white schools and black schools, white churches and black churches, white businesses and black businesses, white grave- yards and black graveyards, and, for all I know, a white God and a black God. . . .

This separation was accomplished after the Civil War by the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, which swept the newly freed Negro through arson, pillage, and death out of the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the many state legislatures, and out of the public, social, and economic life of the South. The motive for this assault was simple and urgent. The imperialistic tug of history had tom the Negro from his African home and had placed him ironically upon the most fertile plantation areas of the South; and, when the Negro was freed, he outnumbered the whites in many of these fertile areas. Hence, a fierce and bitter struggle took place to keep the ballot from the Negro, for had he had a chance to vote, he would have automatically controlled the richest lands of the South and with them the social, political, and economic destmy of a third of the Republic. Though the South is politically a part of America, the problem that faced

HOW “bigoer” was born

her was peculiar and the struggle between the whites and the blacks after the Civil War was in essence a struggle for power, ranging over thirteen states and involving the lives of tens of millions of people.

But keeping the ballot from the Negro was not enough to hold him in check; disfranchisement had to be supplemented by a whole panoply of rules, taboos, and penalties designed not only to insure peace (complete submission), but to guar- antee that no real threat would ever arise. Had the Negro lived upon a common territory, separate from the bulk of the white population, this program of oppression might not have assumed such a bmtal and violent form. But this war took place between people who were neighbors, whose homes ad- joined, whose farms had common boundaries. Guos and dis- franchisement, therefore, were not enough to make the black neighbor keep his distance. The white neighbor decided to limit the amount of education his black neighbor could re- ceive; decided to keep him off the police force and out of the local national guards; to segregate him residentially; to Jim Crow him in public places; to restrict his participation in the professions and jobs; and to build up a vast, dense ide- ology of racial superiority that would justify any act of vio- lence taken against him to defend white dominance; and further, to condition him to hope for little and to receive that little without rebelling.

But, because the blacks were so close to the very civiliza- tion which sought to keep them out, because they could not help but react in some way to its incentives and priTes, and because the very tissue of their consciousness received its tone and timbre from the strivings of that dominant civiliza- tion, oppression spawned among them a myriad variety of reactions, reaching from outright blind rebellion to a sweet, other-worldly submissiveness.

In the main, this delicately balanced state of affairs has not greatly altered since the Civil War, save in those parts of the South which have been industrialized or urbanized. So vola- tile and tense are these relations that if a Negro rebels against rule and taboo, he is lynched and the reason lor the lynching is usually called “rape,” that catchword which has garnered such vile connotations that it can raise a mob anywhere in the South pretty quickly, even today.

Now for the variations in the Bigger Thomas pattern. Some

HOW “bigger” was born

of the Negroes living under these conditions got religion, felt that Jesus would redeem the void of living, felt that the more bitter life was in the present the happier it would be in the hereafter. Others, dinging still to that brief glimpse of post- Civil War freedom, employed a thousand ruses and strata- gems of struggle to wm their rights. Still others projected their hurts and longings into more naive and mimdane forms — blues, jazz, swing — and, without intellectual guidance, tried to build up a compensatory nourishment for themselves. Many labored under hot suns and then killed the restless ache with alcohol. Then there were those who strove for an educa- tion, and when they got it, enjoyed the financial fruits of it in the style of their bourgeois oppressors. Usually they went hand in hand with the powerfull whites and helped to keep their groaning brothers in line, for that was the safest course of action. Those who did this called themselves “leaders.” To give you an idea of how completely these “leaders” worked with those who oppressed, I can tell you that I lived the first seventeen years of my life in the South without so much as hearing of or seeing one act of rebellion fiom any Negro, save the Bigger Thomases,

But why did Bigger revolt? No explanation based upon a hard and fast rule of conduct can be given. But there were always two factors psychologically dominant in his person- ality. First, through some quirk of circumstance, he had be- come estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race. Second, he was trying to react to and answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter came to him through the newspapers, magazmes, radios, movies, and the mere imposing sight and sound of daily American life. In many respects his emergence as a distinct type was inevitable.

As I grew older, I became familiar with the Bigger Thomas conditionmg and its numerous shadings no matter where I saw It in Negro life. It was not, as 1 have already said, as blatant or extreme as in the originals; but it was there, never- theless, like an undeveloped negative.

Sometimes, in areas far removed from Mississippi, I’d hear a Negro say: “I wish I didn’t have to live this way. I feel like I want to burst.” Then the anger would pass; he would go back to his job and try to eke out a few pennies to support his wife and children

Sometimes I’d hear a Negro say; “God, I wish I had a flag

HOW “bigger” was born

and a country of my own.” But that mood would soon vanish and he would go his way placidly enough.

Sometimes I’d hear a Negro ex-soldier say: “What in hell did I fight in the war for? They segregated me even when I was offering my life for my country.” But he, too, like the others, would soon forget, would become caught up in the tense grind of struggling for bread.

I’ve even heard Negroes, in moments of anger and bitter- ness, praise what Japan is doing in China, not because they believed in oppression (being obiects of oppression them- selves), but because they would suddenly sense how empty their lives were when looking at the dark faces of Japanese generals in the rotogravure supplements of the Sunday news- papers, They would dream of what it would be like to live in a country where they could forget their color and play a responsible role in the vital processes of the nation’s life.

I’ve even heard Negroes say that maybe Hitler and Musso- lini are all right; that maybe Stalin is all right. They did not say this out of any intellectual comprehension of the forces at work in the world, but because they felt that these men “did things,” a phrase which is charged with more meaning than the mere words imply. There was in the back of their minds, when they said this, a wild and intense longing (wild and intense because it was suppressed!) to belong, to be iden- tified, to feel that they were alive as other people were, to be caught up forgetfully and exultingly in the swing of events, to feel the clean, deep, organic satisfaction of doing a job in common with others.

It was not until I went to live in Chicago that I first thought seriously of writing of Bigger Thomas. Two items of my ex- perience combined to make me aware of Bigger as a mean- ingful and prophetic symbol. First, being free of the daily pressure of the Dixie environment, I was able to come into possession of my own feelings. Second, my contact with the labor movement and its ideology made me see Bigger clearly and feel what he meant.

I made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too, and there were literally mil- lions of him, everywhere. The extension of my sense of the personality of Bigger was the pivot of my life; it altered the complexion of my existence. I became conscious, at first dimly, and then later on with increasmg clarity and convic-

HOW “BIGGER” WAS BORN

tion, of a vast, muddied pool of human life in America. It was as though I had put on a pair of spectacles whose power was that of an x-ray enabling me to see deeper into the lives of men. Whenever I picked up a newspaper, I’d no longer feel that I was reading of the doings of whites alone (Negroes are rarely mentioned in the press unless they’ve committed some crime!), but of a complex struggle for life going on in my country, a struggle in which I was involved. I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and im- personal commodity-profit machine.

Trade-union struggles and issues began to grow meaningful to me. The flow of goods across the seas, buoying and de- pressmg the wages of men, held a fascination. The pro- nouncements of foreign governments, their policies, plans, and acts were calculated and weighed in relation to the lives of people about me. I was literally overwhelmed when, in read- ing the works of Russian revolutionists, I came across descrip- tions of the “holiday energies of the masses,” “the locomotives of history,” “the conditions prerequsitc for revolution,” and so forth. I approached all of these new revelations in the light of Bigger Thomas, his hopes, fears, and despairs; and I be- gan to feel far-flung kinships, and sense, with fright and abashment, the possibilities of alliances between the Ameri- can Negro and other people possessing a kindred conscious- ness.

As my mind extended in this general and abstract manner, it was fed with even more vivid and concrete examples of the lives of Bigger Thomas. The urban environment of Chi- cago, affording a more stimulating life, made the Negro Big- ger Thomases react more violently than even in the South. More than ever I began to see and understand the environ- mental factors which made for this extreme conduct. It was not that Chicago segregated Negroes more than the South, but that Chicago had more to offer, that Chicago’s physical aspect noisy, crowded, filled with the sense of power and fulfillment — did so much more to dazzle the mind with a taunting sense of possible achievement that the segregation it did impose brought forth from Bigger a reaction more ob- streperous than in the South.

So the concrete picture and the abstract linkages of rela- tionships fed each other, each making the other more mean- mgful and affording my emotions an opportunity to react to

HOW “bigger” was born

them with success and understanding. The process was like a swinging pendulum, each to and fro motion throwing up its tiny bit of meaning and significance, each stroke helping to develop the dim negative which had been implanted in my mind in the South.

During this period the shadings and nuances which were filling in Bigger’s picture came, not so much from Negro life, as from the lives of whites I met and grew to know. I began to sense that they had their own kind of Bigger Thomas be- havioristic pattern which grew out of a more subtle and broader frustration. The waves of recurring crime, the silly fads and crazes, the quicksilver changes in public taste, the hysteria and fears — all of these had long been mysteries to me. But now I looked back of them and felt the pinch and pressure of the environment that gave them their pitch and peculiar kind of bemg. I began to feel with my mind the inner tensions of the people I met I don’t mean to say that I think that environment makes consciousness (I suppose God makes that, if there is a God), but I do say that I felt and still feel that the environment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expresses itself, and if that environment is warped or tranquil, the mode and manner of behavior will be affected toward deadlocking tensions or orderly fulfillment and satisfaction.

Let me give examples of how I began to develop the dim negative of Bigger. I met white writers who talked of their responses, who told me how whites reacted to this lurid American scene. And, as they talked, I’d translate what they said in terms of Bigger’s life. But what was more important still, I read their novels. Here, for the first time, I found ways and techniques of gauging meaningfully the effects of Ameri- can civilization upon the personalities of people. I took these techniques, these ways of seeing and feeling, and twisted them, bent them, adapted them, until they became my ways of apprehending the locked-in life of the Black Belt areas. This association with white writers was the life preserver of my hope to depict Negro life in fiction, for my race pos- sessed no fictional works dealing with such problems, had no background in such sharp and critical testing of experience, no novels that went with a deep and fearless will down to the dark roots of life.

HOW “bigger” was born

Here are examples of how I culled information relating to Bigger from my reading:

There is in me a memory of reading an interesting pam- phlet telhng of the friendship of Gorky and Lenin in exile. The booklet told of how Lenin and Gorky were walking down a London street. Lenin turned to Gorky and, pointing, said: “Here is their Big Ben.” “There is their Westminster Abbey.” “There is their library.” And at once, while reading that pas- sage, my mind stopped, teased, challenged with the effort to remember, to associate widely disparate but meaningful ex- periences in my life. For a moment nothing would come, but I remained convinced that I had heard the meaning of those words sometime, somewhere before. Then, with a sudden glow of satisfaction of havmg gained a little more knowledge about the world m which I lived. I’d end up by saying: “That’s Bigger. That’s the Bigger Thomas reaction.”

In both instances the deep sense of exclusion was identical. The feeling of looking at things with a painful and unwar- rantable nakedness was an experience, I learned, that tran- scended national and racial boundaries. It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where the look of a world which one did not make or own struck one with a blinding objec- tivity and tangibility, that made me grasp the revolutionary impulse in my life and the lives of those about me and far away.

I remember reading a passage in a book dealing with old Russia which said: “We must be ready to make endless sacri- fices if we are to be able to overthrow the Czar.” And again I’d say to myself: “I’ve heard that somewhere, sometime be- fore.” And again I’d hear Bigger Thomas, far away and long ago, telling some white man who was trying to impose upon him: “I’ll kill you and go to hell and pay for it.” While living in America I heard from far away Russia the bitter accents of tragic calculation of how much human life and suffering it would cost a man to live as a man in a world that denied him the right to live with dignity. Actions and feelings of men ten thousand miles from home helped me to understand the moods and impulses of those wallung the streets of Chicago and Dixie.

I am not saying that I heard any talk of revolution in the

HOW “bigger” was born

South when I w<is a kid there. But 1 did hear the lispings, the whispers, the mutters which some day, under one stimulus or another, will surely grow into open revolt unless the con- ditions which produce Bigger Thomases are changed.

In 1932 another source of information was dramatically opened up to me and I saw data of a surprising nature that helped to clarify the personality of Bigger. From the moment that Hitler took power in Germany and began to oppress the Jews, I tried to keep track of what was happening. And on mnumerable occasions I was startled to detect, either from the side of the Fascists or from the side of the oppressed, re- actions, moods, phrases, attitudes that remmded me strongly of Bigger, that helped to bring out more clearly the shadowy outlines of the negative that lay in the back of my mind.

I read every account of the Fascist movement in Germany I could lay my hands on, and from page to page I encoun- tered and recognized familiar emotional patterns. What struck me with particular force was the Nazi preoccupation with the construction of a society in which there would exist among all people (German people, of coursel) one solidarity of ideals, one continuous circulation of fundamental beliefs, notions, and assumptions. I am not now speaking of the popular idea of regimenting people’s thought; I’m speaking of the implicit, almost unconscious, or pre-conscious, assump- tions and ideals upon which whole nations and races act and live. And while reading these Nazi pages I’d be reminded of the Negro preacher in the South telling of a life beyond this world, a life in which the color of men’s skins would not matter, a life in which each man would know what was deep down in the hearts of his fellow man. And I could hear Bigger Thomas standing on a street comer in America expressing his agonizing doubts and chronic suspicions, thus: “I ain’t going to trust nobody. Everything is a racket and everybody is out to get what he can for himself. Maybe if we had a true leader, we could do something.” And I’d know that I was still on the track of learning about Bigger, still in the midst of the modem stmggle for solidarity among men.

When the Nazis spoke of the necessity of a highly ritual- ized and symbolized life, I could hear Bigger Thomas on Chicago’s ;^uth Side saying; “Man, what we need is a leader like Marcus Garvey. We need a nation, a flag, an army of our own. We colored folks ought to organize into groups and

HOW “bigger" was born

have generals, captains, lieutenants, and so forth. We ought to take Africa and have a national honae." I’d know, while hstening to these childish words, that a white man would smile densively at them. But I could not smile, for I knew the truth of those simple words from the facts of my own life. The deep hunger in those childish ideas was like a flash of lightning illuminating the whole dark inner landscape of Bigger’s mind Those words told me that the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sus- tenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplmed and unchannelized im- pulses. The results of these observatioas made me feel more than ever estranged from the civilization in which 1 lived, and more than ever resolved toward the task of creating with words a scheme of images and symbols whose direction could enlist the sympathies, loyalties, and yearnings of the millions of Bigger Thomases in every land and race. . . .

But more than anything else, as a writer, I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless. From far away Nazi Germany and old Russia had come to me items of knowledge that told me that certain modem experiences were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial and na- tional lines of demarcation, that these personalities carried with them a more universal drama-element than anything I’d ever encountered before; that these personalities were mainly imposed upon men and women living in a world whose fundamental assumptions could no longer be taken for granted: a world ridden with national and class strife; a world whose metaphysical meanings had vanished; a world in which God no longer existed as a daily focal point of men’s lives; a world m which men could no longer retain their faith in an ultimate hereafter. It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision impenously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone.

It was a world in which millions of men lived and behaved like drunkards, taking a stiff drink of hard life to lift them

HOW “bigger" was born

up for a thrilling moment, to give them a quivering sense of wild exultation and fulfillment that soon faded and let them down. Eagerly they took another drink, wanting to avoid the dull, flat look of things, then still another, this time stronger, and then they felt that their lives had meaning. Speaking fig- uratively, they were soon chronic alcoholics, men who lived by violence, through extreme action and sensation, through drowning daily in a perpetual nervous agitation.

From these items I drew my first political conclusions about Bigger: I felt that Bigger, an American product, a native son of this land, carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism. I don’t mean to say that the Negro boy I depicted in Native Son is either a Communist or a Fascist. He is not either. But he is product of a dis- located society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out. Whether he’ll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who’ll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he’ll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-union or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America. But, granting the emo- tional state, the tensity, the fear, the hate, the impatience, the sense of exclusion, the ache for violent action, the emo- tional and cultural hunger, Bigger Thomas, conditioned as his organism is, will not become an ardent, or even a luke- warm, supporter of the status quo.

The difference between Bigger’s tensity and the German variety is that Bigger’s, due to America’s educational restric- tions on the bulk of her Negro population, is in a nascent state, not yet articulate. And the difference between Bigger’s longing for self-identification and the Russian principle of self-determination is that Bigger’s, due to the effects of American oppression, which has not allowed for the forming of deep ideas of solidarity among Negroes, is still in a state of individual anger and hatred. Here, I felt, was drama! Who will be the first to touch off these Bigger Thomases in Amer- ica, white and black?

For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a novel in which a Negro Bigger Thomas would loom as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future. I felt strongly that he held within

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him, in a measure which perhaps no other contemporary type did, the outlines of action and feeling which we would en- counter on a vast scale in the days to come. Just as one sees when one walks into a medical research laboratory jars of alcohol containing abnormally large or distorted portions of the human body, just so did I see and feel that the conditions of life under which Negroes are forced to live in America contain the embryonic emotional prefigurations of how a large part of the body politic would react under stress.

So, with this much knowledge of myself and the world gained and known, why should I not try to work out on paper the problem of what will happen to Bigger? Why should I not, like a scientist in a laboratory, use my imagination and invent test-tube situations, place Bigger in them, and, follow- ing the guidance of my own hopes and fears, what I had learned and remembered, work out in fictional form an emo- tional statement and resolution of this problem?

But several things militated against my starting to work. Like Bigger himself, I felt a mental censor — product of the fears which a Negro feels from livmg in America — standing over me, draped in white, warning me not to write. This censor’s warnings were translated into my own thought proc- esses thus: “What will white people think if I draw the pic- ture of such a Negro boy? Will they not at once say: ‘See, didn’t we tell you all along that niggers are like that? Now, look, one of their own kind has come along and drawn the picture for usl’ ’’ I felt that if I drew the picture of Bigger truthfully, there would be many reactionary whites who would try to make of him something I did not intend. And yet, and this was what made it difficult, I knew that I could not write of Bigger convincingly if I did not depict him as he was: that is, resentful toward whites, sullen, angry, ignorant, emotionally unstable, depressed and unaccountably elated at times, and unable even, because of his own lack of inner or- ganization which American oppression has fostered in him, to unite with the members of his own race. And would not whites misread Bigger and, doubting his authenticity, say: “This man is preaching hate against the whole white race”?

The more I thought of it the more I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, if I did not try to make him a living personality and at the same time a symbol of all the larger things I felt and saw in him, I’d be

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reacting as Bigger himself reacted: that is, I’d be acting out of fear if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me.

As I contemplated Bigger and what he meant, I said to myself; “I must wnte this novel, not only for others to read, hut to free myself of this sense of shame and fear." In fact, the novel, as time passed, grew upon me to the extent that it became a necessity to write it; the writing of it turned into a way of living for me.

Another thought kept me from writing. What would my own white and black comrades in the Communist party say? This thought was the most bewildering of all. Politics is a hard and narrow game; its policies represent the aggregate desires and aspirations of millions of people. Its goals are rigid and simply drawn, and the minds of the majority of politicians are set, congealed in terms of daily tactical maneu- vers. How could I create such complex and wide schemes of assoclatlonal thought and feeling, such filigreed webs of dreams and politics, without being mistaken for a “smuggler of reaction,” “an ideological confusionist,” or “an individu- alistic and dangerous element”? Though my heart is with the collectivist and proletarian ideal, I solved this problem by assuring myself that honest politics and honest feeling in imaginative representation ought to be able to meet on com- mon healthy ground without fear, suspicion, and quarreling. Further, and more importantly, I steeled myself by coming to the conclusion that whether politicians accepted or rejected Bigger did not really matter; my task, as I felt it, was to free myself of this burden of impressions and feelings, recast them into the image of Bigger and make him true. Lastly, I felt that a right more immediately deeper than that of poli- tics or race was at stake; that is, a human right, the right of a man to think and feel honestly. And especially did this personal and human right bear hard upon me, for tempera- mentally I am inclined to satisfy the claims of my own ideals rather than the expectations of others. It was this obscure need that had pulled me into the labor movement in the be- ' ginning and by exercising it I was but fulfilling what I felt to be the laws of my own growth.

There was another constricting thought that kept me from work. It deals with my own race. I asked myself: “What will Negro doctors, lawyers, dentists, bankers, school teachers.

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social workers and business men, think of me if I draw such a picture of Bigger?” I knew from long and painful experi- ence that the Negro middle and professional classes were the people of my own race who were more than others ashamed of Bigger and what he meant Having narrowly escaped the Bigger Thomas reaction pattern themselves — indeed, still re- taining traces of it within the confines of their own timid personalities — they would not relish being publicly reminded of the lowly, shameful depths of life above which they en- joyed their bourgeois lives. Never did they want people, especially white people, to think that their lives were so much touched by anything so dark and brutal as Bigger.

Their attitude toward life and art can be summed up in a single paragraph: “But, Mr. Wright, there are so many of us who are not like Bigger. Why don’t you portray in your fiction the best traits of our race, something that will show the white people what we have done in spite of oppression? Don’t represent anger and bitterness. Smile when a white per- son comes to you. Never let him feel that you are so small that what he has done to crush you has made you hate himl Oh, above all, save your pride!”

But Bigger won over all these claims; he won because I felt that I was hunting on the trail of more exciting and thrilling game. What Bigger meant had claimed me because I felt with all of my being that he was more important than what any person, white or black, would say or try to make of him, more important than any political analysis designed to explain or deny him, more important, even, than my own sense of fear, shame, and diffidence.

But Bigger was still not down upon paper. For a long time I had been writing of him in my mind, but I had yet to put him into an image, a breathing symbol draped out in the guise of the only form of life my native land had allowed me to know mtimately, that is, the ghetto life of the American Negro. But the basic reason for my hesitancy was that an- other and far more complex problem had risen to plague me. Bigger, as I saw and felt him, was a snarl of many realities; he had in him many levels of life.

First, there was his personal and private life, that intimate existence that is so difficult to snare and nail down in fiction, that elusive core of being, that individual data of conscious- ness which in every man and woman is like that in no other.

HOW “bigger” was noRiJ

I had to deal with Bigger's dreams, his fleeting, momentary sensations, his yearning, visions, his deep emotional responses.

Then I was confronted with that part of him that was dual in aspect, dim, wavering, that part of him which is so much a part of oil Negroes and all whites that I realixed that I could put it down upon paper only by feeling out its meaning first within the confines of my own life. Bigger was attracted and repelled by the American scene. He was an American, be- cause he was a native son; but he was also a Negro nationalist in a vague sense because he was not allowed to live as an American. Such was his way of life and mine; neither Bigger nor I resided fully in either camp.

Of this dual aspect of Bigger’s social consciousness, I placed the nationalistic side first, not because I agreed with Bigger’s wild and intense hatred of white people, but because his hate had placed him, like a wild animal at bay, in a posi- tion where he was most symbolic and explainable. In other words, his nationalist complex was for me a concept through which I could grasp more of the total meaning of his life than I cbuld in any other way. I tried to approach Bigger’s snarled and confused nationalist feelings with conscious and informed ones of my own. Yet, Bigger was not nationalist enough to feet the need of religion or the folk culture of his own people. What made Bigger’s social consciousness most complex was the fact that he was hovering unwanted between two worlds — between powerful America and his own stunted place in life— and I took upon myself the task of trying to make the reader feel this No Man’s Land. The most that I could say of Bigger was that he felt the need for a whole life and acted out of that need; that was all.

Above and beyond all this, there was that American part of Bigger which is the heritage of us all, that part of him which we get from our seeing and hearing, from school, from the hopes and dreams of our friends; that part of him which the common people of America never talk of but take for granted. Among millions of people the deepest convictions of life are never discussed openly; they are felt, implied, hinted at tacitly and obliquely in their hopes and fears. We live by an idealism that makes us believe that the Constitution is a good document of government, that the Bill of Rights is a good legal and humane principle to safeguard our civil lib- erties, that every man and woman should have the oppor-

HOW “BICGER” WAS BORN

tunity to realize himself, to seek his own individual fate and goal, his own peculiar and untranslatable destiny. I don’t say that Bigger knew this in the terms in which I’m speaking of it; I don’t say that any such thought ever entered his head. His emotional and intellectual life was never that articulate. But he knew it emotionally, intuitively, for his emotions and his desires were developed, and he caught it, as most of us do, from the mental and emotional climate of our time. Big- ger had all of this in him, dammed up, buried, implied, and I had to develop it in fictional form.

There was still another level of Bigger’s life that I felt bound to account for and render, a level as elusive to discuss as it was to grasp in writing. Here again, I had to fall back upon my own feelings as a guide, for Bigger did not offer in his life any articulate verbal explanations. There seems to hover somewhere in that dark part of all our lives, in some more than in others, an objectless, timeless, spaceless element of primal fear and dread, stemming, perhaps, from our birth (depending upon whether one’s outlook upon personality is Freudian or non-Freudian!), a fear and dread which exercises an impelling influence upon our lives all out of proportion to its obscurity. And, accompanying this first fear, is, for the want of a better name, a reflex urge toward ecstasy, complete sub- mission, and trust. The springs of religion are here, and also the origins of rebellion. And in a boy like Bigger, young, un- schooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American “culture,” this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance.

There was yet another level of reality in Bigger’s life: the impliedly political. I’ve already mentioned that Bigger had in him impulses which I had felt were present in the vast up- heavals of Russia and Germany. Well, somehow, I had to make these political impulses felt by the reader in terms of Bigger’s daily actions, keeping in mind as I did so the prob- able danger of my being branded as a propagandist by those who would not like the subject matter.

Then there was Bigger’s relationship with white America, both North and South, which I had to depict, which I had to

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make known once again, alas; a relationship whose effects are earned by every Negro, like scars, somewhere in his body and mind.

I had also to show what oppression had done to Rigger’s relationships with his own people, how it had split him off from them, how it had baffled him; how oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of charac- ter which are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor.

Then there was the fabulous city in which Bigger lived, an indescribable city, huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal; a city of extremes; torrid summers and sub-zero win- ters, white people and black pleople, the English language and strange tongues, foreign bora and native bora, scabby poverty and gaudy luxury, high idealism and hard cynicism! A city so young that, in thinking of its short history, one’s mind, as it travels backward in time, is stopped abruptly by the barren stretches of wmd-swept prairie! But a city old enough to have caught within the homes of its long, straight streets the symbols and images of man's age-old destiny, of truths as old as the mountains and seas, of dramas as abiding as the soul of man itself! A city which has become the pivot of the Eastern, 'Western, Northern, and Southern poles of the nation. But a city whose black smoke clouds shut out the sunshine for seven months of the year; a city in which, on a fine balmy May morning, one can sniff the stench of the stockyards; a city where people have grown so used to gangs and murders and graft that they have honestly forgotten that government can have a pretense of decency!

With all of this thought out, Bigger was still unwritten. Two events, however, came into my life and accelerated the process, made me sit down and actually start work on the typewriter, and just stop the writing of Bigger in my mind as I walked the streets.

The first event was my getting a job in the South Side Boys’ Club, an institution which tried to reclaim the thousands of Negro Bigger Thomases from the dives and the alleys of the Black Belt. Here, on a vast scale, I had an opportunity to ob- serve Bigger in all of his moods, actions, haunts. Here I felt for the first time that the rich folk who were paying ray wages did not really give a good goddamn about Bigger, that their kindness was prompted at bottom by a selfish motive. They

HOW “bigger” was born

were paying me to distract Bigger with ping-pong, checkers, swimming, marbles, and baseball in order that he might not roam the streets and harm the valuable white property which adjoined the Black Belt. I am not condemning boys’ clubs and ping-pong as such; but these little stopgaps were utterly inadequate to fill up the centuries-long chasm of emptiness which American civilization had created in these Biggers. I felt that I was doing a kind of dressed-up police work, and I hated it.

I would work hard with these Biggers, and when it would come time for me to go home I’d say to myself, under my breath so that no one could hear: “Go to it, boys! Prove to the bastards that gave you these games that life is stronger than pmg-pong. . . . Show them that full-blooded life is harder and hotter than they suspect, even though that life is draped in a black skin which at heart they despise. . . .”

They did. The police blotters of Chicago are testimony to how much they did. That was the only way I could contain myself for doing a job I hated; for a moment I’d allow myself, vicariously, to feel as Bigger felt — not much, just a little, just a little — but, still, there it was.

The second event that spurred me to write of Bigger was more personal and subtle, I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom’s Children. When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears. It was this that made me get to work in dead earnest.

Now, until this moment I did not stop to think very much about the plot of Native Son. The reason I did not is because I was not for one moment ever worried about it. I had spent years learning about Bigger, what had made him, what he meant; so, when the time came for writing, what had made him and what he meant constituted my plot. But the far- flung items of his life had to be couched in imaginative terms, terms known and acceptable to a common body of readers, terms which would, in the course of the story, manipulate the deepest held notions and convictions of their lives. That

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came easy. The moment I began to write, the plot fell out, so to speak. I’m not trying to oversimplify or make the process seem oversubtle. At bottom, what happened is very easy to explain.

Any Negro who has lived in the North or the South knows that times without number he has heard of some Negro boy being picked up on the streets and carted off to jail and charged with “rape.” This thing happens so often that to my mind it had become a representative symbol of the Negro’s uncertain position in America. Never for a second was I in doubt as to what kind of social reality or dramatic situation I’d put Bigger in, what kind of test-tube life I’d set up to evoke his deepest reactions. Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart. So frequently do these acts recur that when I was halfway through the first draft of Native Son a case paralleling Digger’s flared forth in the newspapers of Chicago. (Many of the newspaper items and some of the incidents in Native Son are but fictionalized versions of the Robert Nixon case and reVvrites of news stories from the Chicago Tribune.) Indeed, scarcely was Native Son off the press before Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black gave the nation a long and vivid account of the American police methods of handling Negro boys.

Let me describe this stereotyped situation: A crime wave is sweeping a city and citizens are clamoring for police action. Squad cars cruise the Black Belt and grab the first Negro boy who seems to be unattached and homeless. He is held for perhaps a week without charge or bail, without the privilege of communicating with anyone, including his own relatives. After a few days this boy “confesses” anything that he is asked to confess, any crime that handily happens to be un- solved and on the calendar. Why does he confess? After the boy has been grilled night and day, hanged up by his thumbs, dangled by his feet out of twenty-story windows, and beaten (in places that leave no scars — cops have found a way to do that), he signs the papers before him, papers which are usually accompanied by a verbal promise to the boy that he will not go to the electric chair. Of course, he ends up by being executed or sentenced for life. If you think I’m telling tall tales, get chummy with some white cop who works in a Black Belt district and ask him for the lowdown.

When a black boy is carted off to jail in such a fashion, it

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is almost impossible to do anything for him. Even well-disposed Negro lawyers find it difficult to defend him, for the boy will plead guilty one day and then not guilty the next, according to the degree of pressure and persuasion that is brought to bear upon his frightened personality from one side or the other. Even the boy’s own family is scared to death; sometimes fear of police intimidation makes them hesitate to acknowledge that the boy is a blood relation of theirs.

Such has been America’s attitude toward these boys that if one is picked up and confronted in a police cell with ten white cops, he is intimidated almost to the point of confessing anything. So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true; yet, this same average citizen, with his kindness, his American sportsmanship and good will, would probably act with the mob if a self-respecting Negro family moved into his apartment building to escape the Black Belt and its terrors and limita- tions. . . .

Now, after all of this, when I sat down to the typewriter, I could not work; I could not think of a good opening scene for the book. I had definitely in mind the kind of emotion I wanted to evoke in the reader in that first scene, but I could not think of the type of concrete event that would convey the motif of the entire scheme of the book, that would sound, in varied form, the note that was to be resounded throughout its length, that would introduce to the reader just what kind of an organism Bigger’s was and the environment that was bearing hourly upon it. Twenty or thirty times I tried and failed; then I argued that if I could not write the opening scene, I'd start with the scene that followed. I did. The actual writing of the book began with the scene in the pool room.

Now, for the writing. During the years in which I had met all of those Bigger Thomases, those varieties of Bigger Thomases, I had not consciously gathered matenal to write of them; I had not kept a notebook record of their sayings and doings. Their actions had simply made impressions upon my sensibilities as I lived from day to day, impressions which crystallized and coagulated into clusters and configurations of memory, attitudes, moods, ideas. And these subjective states, in turn, were automatically stored away somewhere in me. I was not even aware of the process. But, excited over the

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book which I had set myself to write, under the stress of emo- tion, these things came surging up, tangled, fused, knotted, entertaining me by the sheer variety and potency of their meaning and suggestiveness.

With the whole theme m mind, in an attitude almost akin to prayer, I gave myself up to the story. In an effort to capture some phase of Bigger's life that would not come to me readily, rd jot down as much of it as I could. Then I’d read it over and over, adding each time a word, a phrase, a sentence until I felt that I had caught all the shadings of reality I felt dimly were there. With each of these rereadings and rewritings it seemed that I’d gather in facts and facets that tried to run away. It was an act of concentration, of trying to hold within one’s center of attention all of that bewildering array of facts which science, politics, experience, memory, and imagination were urging upon me. And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive of emo- tion, coalescing and telescoping alien facts into a known and felt truth. That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compound- ing new relationships of perceptions, making new and — until that very split second of time! — unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain and seek for more and more of such re- lationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.

The first draft of the novel was written in four months, straight through, and ran to some 576 pages. Just as a man rises in the mornings to dig ditches for his bread, so I’d work daily. I’d think of some abstract principle of Bigger’s conduQt and at once my mind would turn it into some act I'd seen Bigger peTlorm, some act which I hoped would be familiar enough to the American reader to gain his credence. But in the writing of scene after scene I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the tnnh as I saw it and felt it. That is, to objectify in words some insight derived from my living in the form of action, scene, and dialogue. If a scene seemed im- probable to me, I’d not tear it up, but ask myself: “Does it reveal enough of what I feel to stand in spite of its unreality?” If I felt it did, it stood. If I felt that it did not, I ripped it out. The degree of morality in my writing depended upon the de-

HOW “bigger” was born

gree of felt life and truth I could put down upon the printed page. For example, there is a scene in Native Son where Bigger stands in a cell with a Negro preacher, Jan, Max, the State’s Attorney, Mr. Dalton, Mrs. Dalton, Bigger’s mother, his brother, his sister, Al, Gus, and Jack. White wnting that scene, I knew that it was unlikely that so many people would ever be allowed to come into a murderer’s cell. But I wanted those people in that cell to elicit a certain important emotional response from Bigger. And so the scene stood. I felt that what I wanted that scene to say to the reader was more important than Us surface reality or plausibility.

Always, as I wrote, I was both reader and writer, both the conceiver of the action and the appreciator of it. I tried to wnte so that, in the same instant of time, the objective and subjective aspects of Bigger’s life would be caught in a focus of prose. And always I tried to render, depict, not merely to tell the story. If a thing was cold, 1 tried to make the reader feel cold, and not just tell about it. In writing in this fashion, sometimes I’d find it necessary to use a stream of consciousness technique, then rise to an interior monologue, descend to a direct rendering of a dream state, then to a matter-of-fact depiction of what Bigger was saying, doing, and feeling. Then I’d find it impossible to say what I wanted to say without stepping in and speaking outright on my own; but when doing this I always made an effort to retain the mood of the story, explaining everything only in terms of Bigger’s life and, if possible, in the rhythms of Bigger’s thought (even though the words would be mine). Again, at other times, in the guise of the lawyer’s speech and the newspaper items, or in terms of what Bigger would overhear or see from afar. I’d give what others were saying and thinking of him. But always, from the start to the finish, it was Bigger’s story, Bigger’s fear, Bigger’s flight, and Bigger’s fate that I tried to depict. I wrote with the conviction in mind (I don’t know if this is right or wrong; I only know that I’m temperamentally mclmed to feel this way) that the main burden of all serious fiction consists almost wholly of character-destiny and the items, social, political, and personal, of that character-destiny.

As I wrote I followed, almost unconsciously, many prin- ciples of the novel which my reading of the novels of other writers had made me feel were necessary for the building of a well-constructed book. For the most part the novel is rendered

ttow “bigger” was born

in the present; I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now, like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen. Action follows action, as in a prize fight. Wherever possible, I told of Bigger’s life in close-up, slow-motion, giving the feel of the grain in the passing of time. I had long had the feeling that this was the best way to “enclose" the reader’s mind in a new world, to blot out all reality except that which I was giving him.

Then again, as much as I could, I restricted the novel to what Bigger saw and felt, to the limits of his feeling and thoughts, even when I was conveying more than that to the reader. I had the notion that such a manner of rendering made for a sharper effect, a more pointed sense of the character, his peculiar type of being and consciousness. Throughout there is but one point of view: Bigger’s. This, too, I felt, made for a richer illusion of reality.

I kept out of the story as much as possible, for I wanted the reader to feel that there was nothing between him and Bigger; that the story was a special premiere given in his own private theater.

I kept the scenes long, made as much happen within a short space of time as possible; all of which, I felt, made for greater density and richness of effect.

In a like manner I tried to keep a unified sense of back- ground throughout the story; the background would change, of course, but I tried to keep before the eyes of the reader at all times the forces and elements against which Bigger was striving.

And, because I had limited myself to rendering only what Bigger saw and felt, I gave no more reality to the other char- acters than that which Bigger himself saw.

This, honestly, is all I can account for in the book. If I attempted to account for scenes and characters, to tell why certain scenes were written in certain ways. I’d be stretching facts in order to be pleasantly mtelligible. All else in the book came from my feelings reacting upon the material, and any honest reader knows as much about the rest of what is in the book as I do; that is, if, as he reads, he is willing to let his emotions and Imagination become as influenced by the ma- terials as I did. As I wrote, for some reason or other, one image, symbol, character, scene, mood, feeling evoked its opposite, its parallel, its complementary, and its ironic counter-

HOW “bigger” was born

part. Why? I don't know. My emotions and imagination just like to work that way. One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet.

With the first draft down, I found that I could not end the book satisfactorily. In the first draft I had Bigger going smack to the electric chair; but I felt that two murders were enough for one novel. I cut the final scene and went back to worry about the beginning. I had no luck. The book was one-haft finished, with the opening and closing scenes unwritten. Then, one night, in desperation — I hope that I’m not disclosing the hidden secrets of my craft! — I sneaked out and got a bottle. With the help of it, I began to remember many things which I could not remember before. One of them was that Chicago was overrun with rats. I recalled that I’d seen many rats on the streets, that Fd heard and read of Negro children being bitten by rats in their beds. At first I rejected the idea of Bigger battling a rat in his room; I was afraid that the rat would Vhog” the scene. But the rat would not leave me; he presented himself in many attractive guises. So, cautioning myself to allow the rat scene to disclose only Bigger, his family, their little room, and their relationships, I let the rat walk in, and he did his stuff.

Many of the scenes were tom out as I reworked the book. The mere rereading of what I’d written made me think of the possibility of developing themes which had been only hinted at in the first draft. For example, the entire guilt theme that runs through Native Son was woven in after the first draft was written.

At last I found out how to end the book; I ended it just as I had begun it, showing Bigger living dangerously, taking his life into his hands, accepting what life had made him. The lawyer, Max, was placed in Bigger’s cell at the end of the .novel to register the moral — or what / felt was the moral — I horror of Negro life in the United States.

The writmg of Native Son was to me an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience. With what I’ve learned in the writmg of this book, with all of its blemishes, imperfections, with all of its unrealized potentialities, I am launching out upon another novel, this time about the status of women m modem American society. This book, too, goes back to my childhood just as Bigger went, for, while I was storing away impressions of Bigger, I was stormg away impressions of many

HOW “bigger” was born

other things that made me think and wonder. Some experience will ignite somewhere deep down in me the smoldering embers of new fires and I’ll be oflE again to write yet another novel. It is good to live when one feels that such as that will happen to one. Life becomej'sufficient unto life; the rewards of living are found in living.

I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere wnting of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody.

I feel that I’m lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change. Early American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Haw- thorne, complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modem America. True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that’s above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of ouf country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civiliza- tion. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

New York, March 7, 1940.

Native Son

Even today is my complaint rebellious, My stroke is heavier than my groaning.

—Job

Book One

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IB rrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiMiiinngl

An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman's voice sang out impatiently:

“Bigger, shut that thing offl"

A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring of metal. Naked feet swished dryly across the planks in the wooden floor and the clang ceased abruptly.

“Turn on the light, Bigger.”

“Awiight,” came a sleepy mumble.

Light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow space between two iron beds, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. From a bed to his right the woman spoke again:

“Buddy, get up from there! I got a big washing on my hands today and I want you-all out of here.”

Another black boy rolled from bed and stood up. The woman also rose and stood in her nightgown.

“Turn your heads so I can dress," she said.

The two boys averted their eyes and gazed into a far comer the room. The woman rushed out of her night- gown I'ud put on a pair of step-ins. She turned to the bed from which she had risen and called:

7

8

NATIVE SON

“Vera! Get up from there!”

"What time is it, Ma?” asked a muffled, adolescent voice from beneath a quilt.

“Get up from there, I say!”

“O.K., Ma."

A brown-skinned girl in a cotton gown got up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Sleepily, she sat on a chair and fumbled with her stockings. The two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed. Abruptly, they all paused, holding their clothes in their hands, their attention caught by a light tapping in the thinly plastered walls of the room. They forgot their con- spiracy against shame and their eyes strayed apprehensively over the floor.

“There he is again. Bigger!” the woman screamed, and the tiny one-room apartment galvanized into violent action, A chair toppled as the woman, half-dressed and in her stocking feet, scrambled breathlessly upon the bed. Her two sons, barefoot, stood tense and motionless, their eyes searching anxiously under the bed and chairs. The girl ran into a corner, half- stooped and gathered the hem of her slip into both of her hands and held it tightly over her knees.

“Ohl Oh!” she wailed.

“There he goes!”

The woman pointed a shaking finger. Her eyes were round with fascinated horror.

“Where?”

“I don’t see ’imi”

“Bigger, he’s behind the trunk!” the girl whimpered.

“Vera!” the woman screanned. “Get up here on the bed! Don’t let that thing bite you I"

Frantically, Vera climbed upon the bed and the woman caught hold of her. With their arms entwined about each other, the black mother and the brown daughter gazed open- mouthed at the trunk in the comer.

Bigger looked round the room wnldly, then darted to a curtain and swept it aside and grabbed two heavy iron skil- lets from a wall above a gas stove. He whirled and called softly to his brother, his eyes glued to the trunk.

“Buddy!”

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“Yeah?”

“Here; take this skillet”

“O.K.”

“Now, get over by the doorl”

“O.K.”

Buddy crouched by the door and held the iron skillet by its handle, his arm flexed and poised. Save for the quick, deep breathing of the four people, the room was quiet. Bigger crept on tiptoe toward the trunk with the skillet clutched stiffly in his hand, his eyes dancing and watching every inch of the wooden floor in front of him. He paused and, without moving an eye or muscle, called:

“Buddy!”

“Hunh?”

“Put that box in front of the hole so he can’t get out!”

“O.K.”

Buddy ran to a wooden box and shoved it quickly in front of a gaping hole in the molding and then backed again to the door, holding the skillet ready. Bigger eased to the trunk and peered behind it cautiously. He saw nothing. Care- fully, he stuck out his bare foot and pushed the trunk a few inches.

“There he is!” the mother screamed again.

A huge black rat squealed and leaped at Bigger’s trouser- leg and snagged it in his teeth, hanging on.

“Goddamn!” Bigger whispered fiercely, whirling and kick- ing out his leg with all the strength of his body. The force of his movement shook the rat loose and it sailed through the air and struck a wall. Instantly, it rolled over and leaped again. Bigger dodged and the rat landed against a table leg With clenched teeth, Bigger held the skillet; he was afraid to hurl it, fearing that he might miss. The rat squeaked and turned and ran in a narrow circle, looking for a place to hide; it leaped again past Bigger and scurried on dry rasping feet to one side of the box and then to the other, searching for the hole. Then it turned and reared upon its hind legs.

“Hit ’im. Bigger!” Buddy shouted.

“Kill ’im!” the woman screamed.

The rat’s belly pulsed with fear. Bigger advanced a step and the rat emitted a long thin song of defiance, its black beady eyes glittenng, its tiny forefeet pawing the air rest-

NATTVB SON

10

lessly. Bigger swung the skillet; it skidded over the floor, missing the rat, and clattered to a stop against a wall,

“Goddamn!”

The rat leaped. Bigger sprang to one side. The rat stopped under a chair and let out a furious screak. Bigger moved slowly backward toward the door.

“Gimme that skillet, Buddy," he asked quietly, not taking his eyes from the rat.

Buddy extended his hand. Bigger caught the skillet and lifted it high in the air. The rat scuttled across the floor and stopped again at the box and searched quickly for the hole; then it reared once more and bared long yellow fangs, piping shrilly, belly quivering.

Bigger aimed and let the skillet fly with a heavy grunt. There was a shattering of wood as the box caved in, The woman screamed and hid her face in her hands. Bigger tip- toed forward and peered.

“I got ’im," he muttered, tis clenched teeth bared in a smile. “By God, I got ’im.”

He kicked the splintered box out of the way and the flat black body of the rat lay exposed, Us two long yellow tusks showing distinctly. Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically:

“You sonofaAi/chl”

The woman on the bed sank to her knees and buried her face in the quilts and sobbed;

“Lord, Lord, have mercy . . .”

“Aw, Mama,” Vera whimpered, bending to her. “Don’t cry. It’s dead now."

The two brothers stood over the dead rat and spoke in tones of awed admiration.

“Gee, but he’s a big bastard.”

“That sonofabitch could cut your throat.”

“He’s over a foot long.”

“How in hell do they get so big?”

“Eating garbage and anything else they can get.”

“Look, Bigger, there’s a three-inch rip in your pant-leg.”

“Yeah; he was after me, all right.”

“Please, Bigger, take 'im out,” Vera begged.

“Aw, don’t be so scary,” Buddy said.

The woman on the bed continued to sob. Bigger took a

PEAR 11

piece of newspaper and gingerly lifted the rat by its tail and held it out at arm’s length.

“Bigger, take ’im out,” Vera begged again.

Bigger laughed and approached the bed with the dangling rat, swinging it to and fro like a pendulum, en)oying his sister’s fear.

“Biggerl” Vera gasped convulsively; she screamed and swayed and closed her eyes and fell headlong across her mother and rolled limply from the bed to the floor.

“Bigger, for God’s sake'” the mother sobbed, rising and bending over Vera. “Don’t do that! Throw that rat outl”

He laid the rat down and started to dress.

“Bigger, help me lift Vera to the bed,” the mother said.

He paused and turned round.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, feigning ignorance.

“Do what I asked you, will you, boy?”

He went to the bed and helped his mother lift Vera. Vera’s eyes were closed. He turned away and finished dressing. He wrapped the rat in a newspaper and went out of the door and down the stairs and put it into a garbage can at the comer of an alley. When he returned to the room his mother was still bent over Vera, placing a wet towel upon her head. She straightened and faced him, her cheeks and eyes wet with tears and her lips tight with anger.

“Boy, sometimes 1 wonder what makes you act like you do.”

“What I do now?” he demanded belligerently.

“Sometimes you act the biggest fool I ever saw."

“What you talking about?”

“You scared your sister with that rat and she faintedl Ain’t you got no sense at all?”

“Aw, I didn’t know she was that scary,”

“Buddy!” the mother called.

“Yessum.”

“Take a newspaper and spread it over that spot”

“Yessum.”

Buddy opened out a newspaper and covered the smear of blood on the floor where the rat had been crushed. Bigger went to the window and stood looking out abstractedly into the street. His mother glared at his back.

“Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you,” she said bitterly.

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NATIVE SON

Bigger looked at her and turned away.

“Maybe you oughtn’t’ve. Maybe you ought to left me where I was.”

“You shut your sassy mouth!”

“Aw, for chnssakes!” Bigger said, lighting a cigarette,

“Buddy, pick up them skillets and put ’em in the sink,” the mother said.

“Yessum.”

Bigger walked across the" floor and sat on the bed. His mother’s eyes followed him.

"We wouldn’t have to hve in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you,” she said.

“Aw, don’t start that again.”

"How you feel, ’Vera?” the mother asked.

Vera raised her head and looked about the room as though expecting to see another rat

“Oh, Mamal”

“You poor thing!”

“1 couldn’t help it. Bigger scared me.”

"Did you hurt yourself?”

“I bumped my head.”

"Here; take it easy. You’ll be all right.”

"How come' Bigger acts that way?” Vera asked, crying again.

“He’s just crazy,” the mother said. “Just plain dumb black crazy.”

“I’ll be late for my sewing class at the Y.W.C.A.,” Vera said.

“Here; stretch out on the bed. You’ll feel better in a little while,” the mother said.

She left Vera on the bed and turned a pair of cold eyes upon Bigger.

“Suppose you wake up some morning and find your sister dead? What would you think then?” she asked. “Suppose those rats cut our veins at night when we sleep? Naw! Noth- ing like that ever bothers you' All you care about is your own pleasure! Even when the relief offers you a job you won’t take it till they threaten to cut off your food and starve you! Bigger, honest, you the most no-countest man I ever seen in all my life!”

“You done told me that a thousand times,” he said, not lookmg round.

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13

“Well, I’m telling you aginl And mark my word, some of these days you going to set down and cry. Some of these days you going to wish you had made something out of your- self, instead of just a tramp. But it’ll be too late then.”

“Stop prophesying about me,” he said.

"I prophesy much as I please! And if you don’t like it, you can get out. We can get along without you. We can live in one room just like we living now, even with you gone,” she said.

“Aw, for chrissakes!” he said, his voice filled with nervous irritation.

“You’ll regret how you living some day,” she went on. “If you don’t stop running with that gang of yours and do right you’ll end up where you never thought you would. You think I don’t know what you boys is doing, but I do. And the gallows is at the end of the road you traveling, boy. Just remember that.” She turned and looked at Buddy. “Throw that box outside, Buddy.”

“Yessura.”

There was silence. Buddy took the box out. The mother went behind the curtain to the gas stove. Vera sat up in bed and swung her feet to the floor.

“Lay back down, Vera,” the mother said.

“I feel all right now, Ma. I got to go to my sewing class.”

“Well, if you feel like it, set the table,” the mother said, going behind the curtain again. “Lord, I get so tired of this I don’t know what to do,” her voice floated plaintively from behind the curtain. “All I ever do is try to make a home for you children and you don’t care.”

“Aw, Ma,” Vera protested. "Don’t say that.”

“Vera sometimes I just want to lay down and quit."

“Ma, please don’t say that.”

“I can’t last many more years, living like this."

“I’ll be old enough to work soon, Ma.”

“I reckon I’ll be dead then. I reckon God’ll call me home.”

Vera went behind the curtain and Bigger heard her trying to comfort his mother. He shut their voices out of his mind. He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward

NATIVE SON

14

them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

He got up and crushed his cicarette upon the window sill. Vera came into the room and placed knives and forks upon the table.

“Get ready to eat, you-all,” the mother called.

He sat at the table The odor of frying bacon and boiling coffee drifted to him from behind the curtain. His mother’s voice floated to him in song.

Life is like a mountain railroad With an en^tjinccr that's brave JVe must make the run successful From the cradle to the grave. . , .

The song irked him and he was glad when she stopped and came into the room with a pot of coffee and a plate of crinkled bacon. Vera brought the bread in and they sat down. His mother closed her eyes and lowered her head and mumbled,

“Lord, we thank Thee for the food You done placed before us for the nourishment of our bodies. Amen." She lifted her eyes and without changing her tone of voice, said, “You going to have to learn to get up earlier than this. Bigger, to hold a job.”

He did not answer or look up.

“You want me to pour you some coffee?” Vera asked.

“Yeah.”

“You going to take the job, ain’t you. Bigger?” his mother asked.

He laid down his fork and stared at her.

“I told you last night I was going to take it. How many times you want to ask me?”

‘"Well, don’t bite her head off,” Vera said. “She only asked you a question ”

“Pass the bread and stop being smart.”

“You know you have to see Mr. Dalton at five-thirty,” his mother said.

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15

“You done said that ten times.”

“I don’t want you to forget, son.”

“And you know how you can forget,” Vera said.

“Aw, lay off Bigger,” Buddy said “He told you he was going to take the job.”

“Don’t tell ’em nothing,” Bigger said.

“You shut your mouth. Buddy, or get up from this table,” the mother said. “I’m not going to take any stinking sass from you. One fool in the family’s enough.”

“Lay off, Ma,” Buddy said.

“Bigger’s setting here like he ain’t glad to get a job,” she said.

“What you want me to do? Shout?” Bigger asked.

“Oh, Biggerl” his sister said.

“I wish you’d keep your big mouth out of thisl” he told his sister.

“If you get that job,” his mother said in a low, kind tone of voice, busy slicing a loaf of bread, “I can fix up a nice place for you children. You could be comfortable and not have to live like pigs.”

“Bigger ain’t decent enough to think of nothing like that,” Vera said,

“God, I wish you-all would let me eat,” Bigger said.

His mother talked on as though she had not beard him and he stopped listening.

“Ma’s talking to you, Bigger,” Vera said.

“So whatr

“Don’t be that way, Biggerl”

He laid down his fork and his strong black fingers gripped the edge of the table; there was silence save for the tinkling of his brother’s fork against a plate. He kept staring at his sister till her eyes fell.

“I wish you’d let me eat,” he said again.

As he ate he felt that they were thinking of the job he was to get that evening and it made him angry; he felt that they had tricked him into a cheap surrender.

“I need some carfare,” he said.

“Here’s all I got,” his mother said, pushing a quarter to the nde of his plate.

He put the quarter in his pocket and drained his cup of coffee in one long swallow. He got his coat and cap and went to the door.

16

NATTVB SON

“You know. Bigger,” his mother said, “if you don’t take that job the relief’ll cut us otf. We won't have any food.”

“I told you I’d take itl” he shouted and slammed the door.

He went down the steps into the vestibule and stood look- ing out into the street through the plate glass of the front door. Now and then a street car rattled past over steel tracks He was sick of his life at home. Day in and day out there was nothing but shouts and bickering. But what could he do? Each time he asked himself that question his mind hit a blank wall and he stopped thinking. Across the street di- rectly in front of him, he saw a truck pull to a stop at the curb and two white men in overalls got out with pails and brushes. Yes, he could take the job at Dalton’s and be miserable, or he could refuse it and starve. It maddened him to think that he did not have a wider choice of action. Well, he could not stand here all day like this. What was he to do with himself? He tried to decide if he wanted to buy a ten-cent magazine, or go to a movie, or go to the poolroom and talk with the gang, or just loaf around With his hands deep m his pockets, another cigarette slanting across his chin, he brooded and watched the men at work across the street. They were pasting a huge colored poster to a sign- board. The poster showed a white face.

“That’s Buckley!” He spoke softly to himself. “He’s run- ning for State’s Attorney again.” The men were slapping the poster with wet brushes. He looked at the round florid face and wagged his head. “I bet that sonofabitch rakes off a million bucks in graft a year. Boy, if 1 was in his shoes for just one day I’d never have to worry again.”

When the men were through they gathered up their pails and brushes and got into the truck and drove off. He looked at the poster: the white face was fleshy but stem; one hand was uplifted and its index finger pointed straight out into the street at each passer-by. The poster showed one of those faces that looked straight at you when you looked at it and all the while you were walking and turning your head to look at it it kept looking unblinkingly back at you until you got so far from it you had to take your eyes away, and then it stopped, like a movie blackout. Above the top of the poster were tall red letters: IF YOU BREAK THE LAW, YOU CAN’T WIN!

He snuffed his cigarette and laughed silently. “You crook,”

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he mumbled, shaking his head. “You let whoever pays you off win!” He opened the door and met the morning air. He went along the sidewalk with his head down, fingering the quarter in his pocket. He stopped and searched all of his pockets; in his vest pocket he found a lone copper cent. That made a total of twenty-six cents, fourteen cents of which would have to be saved for carfare to Mr. Dalton’s; that is, if he decided to take the job In order to buy a magazine and go to the movies he would have to have at least twenty cents more “Goddammit, I’m always broke!” he mumbled.

He stood on the comer in the sunshine, watching cars and people pass. He needed more money; if he did not get more than he had now he would not know what to do with him- self for the rest of the day. He wanted to see a movie, his senses hungered for it. In a movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back in a seat and keep his eyes open.

He thought of Gus and G.H. and Jack. Should he go to the poolroom and talk with them? But there was no use m his going unless they were ready to do what they had been long planning to do. If they could, it would mean some sure and quick money. From three o’clock to four o'clock in the afternoon there was no policeman on duty in the block where Blum’s Delicatessen was and it would be safe. One of them could hold a gun on Blum and keep him from yelling; one could watch the front door; one could watch the back; and one could get the money from the box under the counter. Then all four of them could lock Blum in the store and run out through the back and duck down the alley and meet an hour later, either at Doc’s poolroom or at the South Side Boy’s Club, and split the money.

Holding up Blum ought not take more than two minutes, at the most. And it would be their last job. But it would be the toughest one that they had ever pulled All the other times they had raided newsstands, fruit stands, and apartments. And, too, they had never held up a white man before. They had always robbed Negroes. They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes For months they had talked of robbing Blum’s, but had not been able to bnng themselves to do it. They had the feeling that the

18

NATIVE SON

robbing of Blum’s would be a violation of ultimate taboo; it would be a trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an alien white world would be turned loose upon them; in short, it would be a symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them, a challenge which they yearned to make, but were afraid to. Yes; if they could rob Blum’s, it would be a real hold-up, in more senses than one. In comparison, all of their other jobs had been play.

“Good-bye, Bigger.”

He looked up and saw Vera passing with a sewing kit dan- gling from her arm. She paused at the comer and came back to him.

“Now, what you want?”

“Bigger, please. . . . You’re getting a good job now. Why don’t you stay away from Jack and Gus and G.H. and keep out of trouble?”

“You keep your big mouth out of my businessi”

“But, Bigger!”

“Go on to school, will youl”

She turned abruptly and walked on. He knew that his mother had been talking to Vera and Buddy about him, telU ing them that if he got into any more trouble he would be sent to prison and not just to the reform school, where they sent him last time. He did not mind what his mother said to Buddy about him. Buddy was all right. Tough, plenty. But Vera was a sappy girl; she did not have any more sense than to believe everything she was told.

He walked toward the poolroom. 'When he got to the door he saw Gus half a block away, coming toward him. He stopped and waited. It was Gus who had first thought of robbing Blum’s.

“Hi, Bigger!”

“What you saying, Gus?”

"Nothing. Seen G.H. or Jack yet?”

“Naw You?”

“Naw Say, got a cigarette?”

“Yeah.”

Bigger took out his pack and gave Gus a cigarette; he lit his and held the match for Gus. They leaned their backs against the red-brick wall of a building, smoking, their ogarettes slanting white across their black chuis To the east Bigger saw the sun burning a. dazzling yellow. In the sky

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above him a few big white clouds drifted. He puffed silently, relaxed, his mind pleasantly vacant of purpose. Every slight movement in the street evoked a casual curiosity in him. Auto- matically, his eyes followed each car as it whirred over the smooth black asphalt. A woman came by and he watched the gentle sway of her body until she disappeared into a door- way. He sighed, scratched his chin and mumbled,

“Kmda warm today.”

“Yeah,” Gus said.

“You get more heat from this sun than from them old radiators at home.”

“Yeah; them old white landlords sure don’t give much heat.”

“And they always knocking at your door for money.”

“I’ll be glad when summer comes.”

“Me too,” Bigger said.

He stretched his arms above his head and yawned; his eyes moistened. The sharp precision of the world of steel and stone dissolved into blurred waves. He blinked and the world grew hard again, mechanical, distinct. A weaving mo- tion in the sky made him turn his eyes upward; he saw a slen- der streak of billowing white blooming against the deep blue. A plane was writing high up in the air.

“LookI” Bigger said,

•"What?”

“That plane writing up there,” Bigger said, pointing.

“OhI”

They squinted at a tiny ribbon of unfolding vapor that spelled out the word: USE . . . The plane was so far away that at times the strong glare of the sun blanked it from sight.

“You can hardly see it,” Gus said.

"Looks like a little bird,” Bigger breathed with childlike wonder.

“Them white boys sure can fly,” Gus said,

“Yeah,” Bigger said, wistfully. “They get a chance to do everything.”

Noiselessly, the tiny plane looped and veered, vanishing and appearing, leaving behind it a long trail of white plu- mage, hke coils of fluffy paste being squeezed from a tube; a plume-coil that grew and swelled and slowly began to fade

NATIVE SON

20

into the air at the edges. The plane wrote another word: SPEED ...

“How high you reckon he is?” Bigger asked.

“I don't know. Maybe a hundred miles; maybe a thousand.”

“I could fly one of them things if I had a chance,” Bigger mumbled reflectively, as though talking to himself.

Gus pulled down the corners of his lips, stepped out from the wall, squared his shoulders, doffed his cap, bowed low and spoke with mock deference:

“Yessuh.”

“You go to hell,” Bigger said, smiling.

“Yessuh,” Gus said again.

“I could fly a plane if I had a chance,” Bigger said.

“If you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane,” Gus said.

For a moment Bigger contemplated all the “ifs” that Gus had mentioned. Then both boys broke into hard laughter, looking at each other through squinted eyes. When their laughter subsided, Bigger said in a voice that was half-question and half-statement:

“It’s funny how the white folks treat us, ain’t it?”

“It better be funny,” Gus said.

“Maybe they right in not wanting us to fly,” Bigger said. “ ’Cause it I took a plane up I’d take a couple of bombs along and drop ’em as sure as hell . . . .”

They laughed again, still looking upward. The plane sailed and dipped and spread another word against the sky: GASO- LINE

“Use Speed Gasoline,” Bigger mused, rolling the words slowly from his lips. “God, I’d like to fly up there in that sky.”

“Godfll let you fly when He gives you your wings up in heaven,” Gus said.

They laughed again, reclining against the wall. Smoking, the lids of their eyes drooped softly against the sun. Cars whizzed past on rubber tires. Bigger’s face was metallically black in the strong sunlight. There was in his eyes a pensive, brooding amusement, as of a man who had been long con- fronted and tantalized by a riddle whose answer seemed al- ways just on the verge of escaping him, but prodding him ir- resistibly on to seek its solution. The silence irked Bigger; he

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was anxious to do something to evade looking so squarely at this problem.

“Let’s play ‘white,’ ’’ Bigger said, referring to a game of play-acting in which he and his friends imitated the ways and manners of white folks.

“I don’t feel like it,” Gus said.

“Generali” Bigger pronounced in a sonorous tone, looking at Gus expectantly.

“Aw, hell! I don’t want to play,” Gus whined.

“You’ll be court-martialed,” Bigger said, snapping out his words with military precision.

“Nigger, you nuts!” Gus laughed.

“General!” Bigger tried again, determinedly.

Gus looked wearily at Bigger, then straightened, saluted and answered:

“Yessuh.”

“Send your men over the river at dawn and attack the enemy’s left flank,” Bigger ordered.

“Yessuh.”

“Send the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Regiments,” Bigger said, frowning. “And attack with tanks, gas, planes, and in- fantry.”

“Yessuh!” Gus said again, saluting and clicking his heels.

For a moment they were silent, facing each other, their shoulders thrown back, their lips compressed to hold down the mounting impulse to laugh. Then they guffawed, partly at themselves and partly at the vast white world that sprawled and towered in the sun before them.

“Say, what’s a ‘left flank’?” Gus asked,

“I don’t know,” Bigger said. “I heard it in the movies.”

They laughed again. After a bit they relaxed and leaqpd against the wall, smoking. Bigger saw Gus cup his left hand to his ear, as though holding a telephone receiver; and cup his right hand to his mouth, as though talking into a trans- mitter.

“Hello,” Gus said.

“Hello,” Bigger said. ‘“Who’s this?”

“This is Mr. J. P. Morgan speaking,” Gus said.

“Yessuh, Mr, Morgan,” Bigger said; his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect.

“I want you to sell twenty thousand shares of U. S. Steel in the market this morning,” Gus said.

22

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“At what price, suh?” Bigger asked.

“Aw, just dump ’em at any price,” Gus said with casual irritation. “We’re holding too much.”

“Yessuh,” Bigger said.

“And call me at my club at two this afternoon and tell me if the President telephoned,” Gus said.

“Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,” Bigger said.

Both of them made gestures signifying that they were hang- ing up telephone receivers; then they bent double, laughing.

“I bet that’s ]ust the way they talk,” Gus said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Bigger said.

They were silent again. Presently, Bigger cupped his hand to his mouth and spoke through an imaginary telephone transmitter.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” Gus answered. “Who’s this?”

“This is the President of the United States speaking,” Big- ger said.

“Oh, yessuh, Mr. President,” Gus said.

“I’m calling a cabinet meeting this afternoon at four o’clock and you, as Secretary of State, must be there.”

“Well, now, Mr. President,” Gus said, “I’m pretty busy. They raising sand over there in Germany and 1 got to send ’em a note. . . .”

“But this is important,” Bigger said.

“What you going to take up at this cabinet meeting?” Gus asked.

“Well, you see, the niggers is raising sand all over the country,” Bigger said, struggling to keep back his laughter. “We’ve got to do something with these black folks. . . .”

“Oh, if it’s about the niggers. I’ll be right there, Mr. Presi- dent,” Gus said.

They hung up imaginary receivers and leaned against the wall and laughed. A street car rattled by. Bigger sighed and swore.

“Goddammit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“They don’t let us do nothing.”

“Who?”

“The white folks.”

‘JYou talk like you just now finding that out,” Gus said.

“Naw. But I just can’t get used to it,” Bigger said. “I swear

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to God I can’t. I know 1 oughtn’t think about it, but I can’t help it. Every time I think about it I feel like somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down my throat. Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the tune I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping m through a knot-hole in the fence. . .

“Aw, ain’t no use feelmg that way about it. It don’t help none,” Gus said.

“You know one thing?” Bigger said.

“What?”

“Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me,” Bigger spoke with a tinge of bitter pride in his voice.

“What you mean?” Gus asked, looking at him quickly. There was fear in Gus’s eyes.

“I don’t know, I just feel that way. Every time I get to think- ing about me being black and they being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me. . ,

“Aw, for chrissakes! There ain’t nothing you can do about it. How come you want to worry yourself? You black and they make the laws. , . .”

“Why they make us live in one comer of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships. . .

Gus hunched Bigger with his elbow and mumbled good- naturedly, “Aw, nigger, quit thinking about it. You’ll go nuts.”

The plane was gone from the sky and the white plumes of floating smoke were thinly spread, vanishing. Because he was restless and had time on his hands, Bigger yawned again and hoisted his arms high above his head.

“Nothing ever happens,” he complained.

“What you want to happen?”

“Anything,” Bigger said with a wide sweep of his dingy palm, a sweep that included all the possible activities of the world.

Then their eyes were riveted; a slate-colored pigeon swooped down to the middle of the steel car tracks and began strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat neck bobbing with regal pnde. A street car rumbled forward and the pigeon rose swiftly through the air on wings stretched so taut and sheer

NATIVE SON

24

that Bigger could see the gold of the sun through their trans- lucent tips. He tilted his head and watched the slate-colored bird flap and wheel out of sight over the edge of a high roof.

“Now, if I could only do that," Bigger said.

Gus laughed.

“Nigger, you nuts.”

“I reckon we the only things in this city that can’t go where we want to go and do what we want to do.”

“Don’t think about it,” Gus said.

“I can’t help it.”

“That’s why you feeling like something awful’s going to happen to you,” Gus said “You think too much.”

“What in hell can a man do?” Bigger asked, turning to Gus.

“Get drunk and sleep it off.”

“1 can’t. I’m broke ”

Bigger crushed his cigarette and took out another one and offered the package to Gus. They continued smoking. A huge truck swept past, lifting scraps of white paper into the sun- shine; the bits settled down slowly.

“Gus?”

“Hunh?”

“You know where the white folks live?”

“Yeah,” Gus said, pointing eastward. "Over across the ‘line’; over there on Cottage Grove Avenue.”

“Naw; they don’t,” Bigger said.

“What you mean?” Gus asked, puzzled. “Then, where do they live?”

Bigger doubled his flst and struck his solar plexus.

“Right down here in my stomach,” he said.

Gus looked at Bigger searchingly, then away, as though ashamed.

“Yeah; I know what you mean,” he whispered.

“Every time I think of ’em, I feel ’em,” Bigger said.

“Yeah; and in your chest and throat, too,” Gus said.

“It’s like fire.”

“And sometimes you can’t hardly breathe. . . .”

Bigger’s eyes were wide and placid, gazing into space.

“That’s when 1 feel like something awful’s going to happen to me. . . .” Bigger paused, narrowed his eyes. “Naw; it ain’t like something going to happen to me. It’s . . . It’s like I was going to do something I can’t help. . . .”

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25

“Yeah!” Gus said with uneasy eagerness. His eyes were full of a look compounded of fear and admiration for Bigger. “Yeah; I know what you mean. It’s like you going to fall and don’t know where you going to land. . . .’’

Gus’s voice trailed off. The sun slid behind a big white cloud and the street was plunged in cool shadow; quickly the sun edged forth again and it was bright and warm once more. A long sleek black car, its fenders glinting like glass in the sun, shot past them at high speed and turned a comer a few blocks away. Bigger pursed his lips and sang; “Zoooooooooom! ’’

“They got everything,” Gus said.

“They own the world,” Bigger said.

“Aw, what the hell,” Gus said. “Let’s go in the poolroom.” “O.K.”

'They walked toward the door of the poolroom.

“Say, you taking that job you told us about?” Gus asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You talk like you don’t want it ”

“Oh, hell, yes! I want the job,” Bigger said.

They look^ at each other and laughed. They went inside. The poolroom was empty, save for a fat, black man who held a half-smoked, unlit cigar in his mouth and leaned on the front counter. To the rear burned a single green-shaded bulb. "Hi, Doc,” Bigger said.

“You boys kinda early this morning,” Doc said.

“Jack or G.H. around yet?” Bigger asked.

“Naw,” Doc said.

“Let’s shoot a game,” Gus said.

“I’m broke,” Bigger said.

“I got some money.”

“Switch on the light. The balls are racked,” Doc said. Bigger turned on the light. They lagged for first shot. Bigger won They started playing Bigger’s shots were poor; he was thinking of Blum’s, fascinated with the idea of the robbery, and a little afraid of it.

“Remember what we talked about so much?” Bigger asked in a flat, neutral tone,

“Naw.”

“Old Blum.”

“Oh,” Gus said. “We ain’t talked about that for a month. How come you think of it all of a sudden?”

26

NATIVE SON

“Let’s clean the place out.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was your plan from the start,” Bigger said.

Gus straightened and stared at Bigger, then at Doc who was looking out of the front window.

“You going to tell Doc? Can’t you never learn to talk low?” “Aw, I was just asking you, do you want to try it?”

“Naw ”

“How come? You scared ’cause he’s a white man?” “Naw. But Blum keeps a gun. Suppose he beats us to it?” “Aw, you scared; that’s all. He’s a white man and you scared.”

“The hell I’m scared,” Gus, hurt and stung, defended him- self.

Bigger went to Gus and placed an arm about his shoulders. “Listen, you won’t have to go in. You just stand at the door and keep watch, see? Me and Jack and G.H.’ll go in If any- body comes along, you whistle and we’ll go out the back way. That’s all.”

The front door opened; they stopped talking and turned their heads.

“Here comes Jack and G.H. now,” Bigger said.

Jack and G.H. walked to the rear of the poolroom.

“What you guys doing?” Jack asked.

“Shooting a game. Wanna play?” Bigger asked,

“You asldng ’em to play and I’m paying for the game,” Gus said.

They all laughed and Bigger laughed with them but stopped quickly. He felt that the joke was on him and he took a seat alongside the wall and propped his feet upon the rungs of a chair, as though he had not heard. Gus and G.H. kept on laughing.

“You niggers is crazy,” Bigger said. “You laugh like mon- keys and you ain’t got nerve enough to do nothing but talk.” “What you mean?” G.H. asked.

“I got a haul all figured out,” Bigger said.

“What haul?”

“Old Blum’s.”

There was silence. Jack lit a cigarette. Gus looked away, avoiding the conversation.

“If old Blum was a black man, you-all would be itching to go. ’Cause he’s white, everybody’s scared.”

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27

“I ain’t scared,” Jack said, “I’m with you.”

“You say you got it all figured out?” G H. asked.

Bigger took a deep breath and looked from face to face. It seemed to him that he should not have to expla'm.

“Look, it’ll be easy. There ain’t nothing to be scared of. Be- tween three and four ain’t nobody in the store but the old man. The cop is way down at the other end of the block. One of us’ll stay outside and watch. Three of us’ll go in, see? One of ns’ll throw a gun on old Blum; one of us’ll make for the cash box under the counter, one of us’ll make for the back door and have it open so we can make a quick get-away down the back alley. . . . That’s all. It won’t take three min- utes.”

“I thought we said we wasn’t never going to use a gun,” G.H. said. “And we ain’t bothered no white folks before.”

“Can’t you see? This is something big,” Bigger said.

He waited for more objections. When none were forth- coming, he talked again.

“We can do it, if you niggers ain’t scared.”

Save for the sound of Doc’s whistling up front, there was silence. Bigger watched Jack closely; he knew that the sit- uation was one in which Jack’s word would be decisive. Bigger was afraid of Gus, because he knew that Gus would not hold out if Jack said yes. Gus stood at the table, toying with a cue stick, his eyes straying lazily over the billiard balls scattered about the table in the array of an unfinished game. Bigger rose and sent the balls whirling with a sweep of his hand, then looked straight at Gus as the gleaming balls kissed and rebounded from the rubber cushions, zig-zagging across the table’s green cloth. Even though Bigger had asked Gus to be with him in the robbery, the fear that Gus would really go made the muscles of Bigger’s stomach tighten; he was hot all over. He felt as if he wanted to sneeze and could not; only it was more nervous than wanting to sneeze. He grew hotter, tighter; his nerves were taut and his teeth were on edge. He felt that something would soon snap within him.

“Goddammit! Say something, somebody!”

“I’m in,” Jack said again.

"rU go if the rest goes,” G.H. said.

Gus stood without speaking and Bigger felt a curious sensation — half-sensual, half-thoughtful. He was divided and pulled agamst himself. He had handled things just nght so

28

NATTVE SON

far; all but Gus had consented. The way things stood now there were three against Gus, and that was just as he had wanted it to be. Bigger was afraid of robbing a white man and he knew that Gus was afraid, too. Blum’s store was smaU and Blum was alone, but Bigger could not think of robbing him without being flanked by his three pals. But even with his paU he was afraid. He had argued all of his pals but one into consenting to the robbery, and toward the lone man who held out he felt a hot hate and fear; he had transferred his fear of the whites to Gus. He hated Gus because he knew that Gus was afraid, as even he was; and he feared Gus because he felt that Gus would consent and then he would be com- pelled to go through with the robbery. Like a man about to shoot himself and dreading to shoot and yet knowing that he has to shoot and feeling it all at once and powerfully, he watched Gus and waited for him to say yes. But Gus did not speak. Bigger’s teeth clamped so tight that his jaws ached. He edged toward Gus, not looking at Gus, but feeling the pres- ence of Gus over all his body, through him, in and out of him, and hating himself and Gus because he felt it. Then he could not stand it any longer. The hysterical tensity of his nerves urged him to speak, to free himself. He faced Gus, his eyes red with anger and fear, his fists clenched and held stiffly to his sides.

“’i’^ou black sonofabitch,” he said in a voice that did not vary in tone. “You scared ’cause he’s a white man."

“Don’t cuss me. Bigger,” Gus said quietly.

“I am cussing you!’’

“You don’t have to cuss me,” Gus said.

“Then why don’t you use that black tongue of yours?” Bigger asked. “Why don’t you say what you going to do?”

“I don’t have to use my tongue unless I want to!”

“You bastard! You scared bastard!”

“You ain’t my boss,” Gus said.

“You yellow!” Bigger said. “You scared to rob a r^diite man.”

“Aw, Bigger. Don’t say that,” G.H. said. “Leave ’im alone.”

“He’s yellow,” Bigger said “He won’t go with us.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go,” Gus said.

“Then, for chrissakes, say what you going to do,” Bigger said.

Gus leaned on his cue stick and gazed at Bigger and Bigger’s

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29

Stomach tightened as though he were expecting a blow and were getting ready for it. His fists clenched harder In a split second he felt how his fist and arm and body would feel if he hit Gus squarely in the mouth, drawing blood; Gus would fall and he would walk out and the whole thing would be over and the robbery would not take place. And his thinking and feeling in this way made the choking tightness rising from the pit of his stomach to his throat slacken a little.

“You see, Bigger,” began Gus in a tone that was a com- promise between kindness and pride. “You see. Bigger, you the tause of all the trouble we ever have. It’s your hot temper. Now, how come you want to cuss me? Ain’t 1 got a right to make up my mind? Naw; that ain’t your way. You start cuss- ing. You say I’m scared. It’s you who’s scared. You scared I’m going to say yes and you’U have to go through with the job. . .

“Say that again! Say that again and I’ll take one of these balls and sink it in your goddamn mouth,” Bigger said, his pride wounded to the quick.

“Aw, for chrissakes,” Jack said.

“You see how he is,” Gus said.

“Why don’t you say what you going to do?” Bigger de- manded.

“Aw, I’m going with you-all,” Gus said in a nervous tone that sought to hide itself; a tone that hurried on to other things. “I’m going, but Bigger don’t have to act like that. He don’t have to cuss me.”

“Why didn’t you say that at first?” Bigger asked; his anger amounted almost to frenzy. “You make a man want to sock youl”

“. . . I’ll help on the haul,” Gus continued, as though Big- ger had not spoken. “I’ll help just like I always help. But I’ll be goddamn if I’m taking orders from you. Bigger! You just a scared coward! You calling me scared so nobody’ll see how scared you is!”

Bigger leaped at him, but Jack ran between them. G.H, caught Gus’s arm and led him aside.

“Who’s asking you to take orders?” Bigger said. “I never want to give orders to a piss-sop like you!”

“You boys cut out that racket back there!” Doc called.

They stood silently about the pool table. Bigger’s eyes fol- lowed Gus as Gus put his cue stick in the rack and brushed

30

NATIVE SON

chalk dust from his trousers and walked a little distance away. Bigger’s stomach burned and a hazy black cloud hovered a moment before his eyes, and left. Mixed images of violence ran like sand through his mind, dry and fast, vanishing. He could stab Gus with his knife; he could slap him; he could kick him; he could trip him up and send him sprawlmg on his face. He could do a lot of things to Gus for making him feel this way.

“Come on, G H.,” Gus said.

“Where we going?"

“Let’s walk.”

“O.K."

"What we gonna do?” Jack asked. “Meet here at three?”

“Sure,” Bigger said. “Didn’t we just decide?”

“I’ll be here,” Gus said, with his back turned.

When Gus and G.H. had gone Bigger sat down and felt cold sweat on his skin. It was planned now and he would have to go through with it. His teeth gritted and the last image he had seen of Gus going through the door lingered in his mind. He could have taken one of the cue sticks and gripped it hard and swung it at the back of Gus’s head, feel- ing the impact of the hard wood cracking against the bottom of the skull. The tight feeling was stUl in him and he knew that it would remain until they were actually doing the job, until they were in the store taking the money.

“You and Gus sure don’t get along none,” Jack said, shak- ing his head.

Bigger turned and looked at Jack; he had forgotten that Jack was still there.

“Aw, that yellow black bastard,” Bigger said.

“He’s all ri^t,” Jack said.

“He’s scared,’’ Bigger said. “To make him ready for a job, you have to make him scared two ways. You have to make him more scared of what’ll happen to him if he don’t do the job than of what’ll happen to him if he pulls the job.”

“If we going to Blum’s today, we oughtn’t fuss like this” Jack said. “We got a job on our hands, a real job.”

“Sure. Sure, I know,” Bigger said.

Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepen- ing feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it He longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies. He wanted to

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31

run. Or listen to some swing music Or laugh or joke. Or read a Real Detective Story Magazine. Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. All that morning he had lurked behind his curtain of indifference and looked at things, snapping and glanng at whatever had tried to make him come out into the open. But now he was out; the thought of the job at Blum’s and the tilt he had had with Gus had snared him into things and his self-trust was gone. Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget. These were the rhythms of his life; indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger — like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force. Being this way was a need of his as deep as eating. He was like a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night; but the sun that made it bloom and the cold darkness that made it wilt were never seen It was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness. He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them. It was the way he was, he would say; he could not help it, he would say, and his head would wag. And it was his sullen stare and the violent action that followed that made Gus and Jack and G.H. hate and fear him as much as he hated and feared him- self.

“Where you want to go?” Jack asked. ‘Tm tired of setting.”

“Let’s walk,” Bigger said.

They went to the front door. Bigger paused and looked round the poolroom with a wild and exasperated expression, his lips tightening with resolution

“Goin’?” Doc asked, not moving his head.

“Yeah,” Bigger said.

“See you later,” Jack said.

They walked along the street in the morning sunshine. They waited leisurely at corners for cars to pass; it was not that they feared cars, but they had plenty of time. 'They reached South Parkway smoking freshly lit cigarettes.

“I’d like to see a movie,” Bigger said.

“Trader Horn’s running again at the Regal. They’re bring- ing a lot of old pictures back.”

“How much is it?”

“Twenty cents.”

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NATIVE SON

“O.K Let’s see it.”

Bigger strode silently beside Jack for six blocks. It was noon when they reached Forty-seventh Street and South Parkway. The Regal was just opening. Bigger lingered in the lobby and looked at the colored posters while Jack bought the tickets. Two features were advertised: one, The Gay Woman, was pictured on the posters in unages of white men and white women lolling on beaches, swimming, and dancing in night clubs; the other, Trader Horn, was shown on the posters \n terms of black merv and black women dancing against a wild background of barbaric jungle Bigger looked up and saw Jack standing at his side.

"Come on. Let’s go in,” Jack said.

“O.K.”

He followed Jack into the darkened movie. The shadows were soothing to his eyes after the glare of the sun. The picture had not started and he slouched far down in a seat and listened to a pipe organ shudder in waves of nostalgic tone, like a voice humming hauntingly within him. He moved restlessly, looking round as though expecting to see someone sneaking upon him. The organ sang forth full, then dropped almost to silence.

“You reckon we’ll do all right at Blum’s?” he asked in a drawling voice tinged with uneasiness.

“Aw, sure,” Jack said; but his voice, too, was uneasy,

“You know, I’d just as soon go to jail as take that damn relief job,” Bigger said.

“Don’t say that^ Everything’ll be all right.”

“You reckon it will?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“Let’s think about how we’U do it, not about bow we’ll get caught.”

“Scared?”

“Naw, You?”

“Hell, nawl”

They were silent, listening to the organ. It sounded for a long moment on a trembling note, then died away Then it stole forth again in whispenng tones that could scarcely be heard.

“We better take our guns along this time,” Bigger said.

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“O.K. But we gotta be careful. We don’t wanna kill no- body.”

“Yeah. But I’ll feel safer with a gun this time.”

“Gee, I wished it was three o’clock now. I wished it was over.”

“Me too.”

The organ sighed into silence and the screen flashed with the rhythm of moving shadows. There was a short newsreel which Bigger watched without much interest Then came The Gay Woman in which, amid scenes of cocktail drinking, dancing, golfing, swimming, and spinning roulette wheels, a rich young white woman kept clandestine appointments with her lover while her millionaire husband was busy in the offices of a vast paper mill. Several times Bigger nudged Jack in the ribs with his elbow as the giddy young woman duped her husband and kept from him the knowledge of what she was doing.

“She sure got her old man fooled,” Bigger said.

“Looks like it. He’s so busy making money he don’t know what’s going on,” Jack said. “Them rich chicks’ll do any- thing.”

“Yeah. And she’s a hot looking number, all right,” Bigger said. “Say, maybe I’ll be working for folks like that if 1 take that relief job. Maybe I’ll be driving ’em around. ...”

“Sure,” Jack said. “Man, you ought to take that job. You don’t know what you might run into. My ma used to work for rich white folks and you ought to hear the tales she used to tell ”

“What she say?” Bigger asked eagerly.

“Ah, man, them rich white women’ll go to bed with any- body, from a poodle on up. Shucks, they even have their chauffeurs. Say, if you run into anything on that new job that’s too much for you to handle, let me know. . .

They laughed. The play ran on and Bigger saw a night club floor thronged with whirling couples and heard a swing band playing music. The rich young woman was dancing and laughing with her lover.

“I’d like to be invited to a place like that just to find out what it feels like,” Bigger mused.

“Man, if them folks saw you they’d run,” Jack said, “They’d think a gorilla broke loose from the zoo and put on a tuxedo.”

They bent over low in their seats and giggled without re-

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34

straint. When Bigger sat up again he saw the picture flashing on. A tall waiter was serving two slender glasses of drinks to the rich young woman and her lover.

“I bet their mattresses is stuffed with paper dollars,” Bigger said.

“Man, them folks don’t even have to turn over in their sleep,” Jack said. “A butler stands by their beds at night, and when he hears ’em sigh, he gently rolls ’em over . . .”

They laughed again, then fell silent abruptly. The music accompanying the picture dropped to a low, rumbling note and the rich young woman turned and looked toward the front door of the night club from which a chorus of shouts and screams was heard.

“I bet it’s her husband,” Jack said.

“Yeah,” Bigger said.

Bigger saw a sweating, wild-eyed young man fight his way past a group of waiters and whirling dancers.

“He looks like a crazy man,” Jack said.

“What you reckon he wants?” Bigger asked, as though he himself was outraged at the sight of the frenzied intruder.

“Damn if I know,” Jack muttered preoccupiedly.

Bigger watched the wild young man elude the waiters and run in the direction of the rich woman’s table. The music of the swing band stopped and men and women scurried franti- cally into comers and doorways. There were shouts; Stop 'imi Grab 'im! The wild man hidted a few feet from the rich woman and reached inside of his coat and drew forth a black object. There were more screams: He's got a bomb! Stop 'itnl Bigger saw the woman’s lover leap to the center of the floor, fling his hands high into the air and catch the bomb just as the wild man threw it. As the rich woman fainted, her lover hurled the bomb out of a window, shat- tering a pane. Bigger saw a white flash light up the night outside as the bomb exploded deafeningly. Then he was looking at the wild man who was now pinned to the floor by a dozen hands. He heard a woman scream: He’s a Com- munist!

“Say, Jack?”

“Hunh?”

“What’s a Communist?"

“A Communist is a red, ain't he?”

“Yeah; but what’s a red?”

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“Damn if I know. It’s a race of folks who live in Russia, ain’t it?’’

“They must be wild.”

“Looks like it. That guy was trying to kill somebody.”

The scenes showed the wild man weeping on his knees and cursing through his tears. 1 wanted to kill 'im, he sobbed. Bigger now understood that the wild bomb-thrower was a Communist who had mistaken the rich woman’s lover for her husband and had tried to kill him.

“Reds must don’t like rich folks,” Jack said.

“They sure must don’t,” Bigger said. “Every time you hear about one, he’s trying to kill somebody or tear things up.”

The picture continued and showed the rich young woman in a fit of remorse, telling her lover that she thanked him for saving her life, but that what had happened had taught her that her husband needed her. Suppose it had been he? she whimpered.

“She’s going back to her old man,” Bigger said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. “They got to kiss in the end.”

Bigger saw the rich young woman rush home to her mil- lionaire husband. There were long embraces and kisses as the rich woman and the rich man vowed never to leave each other and to forgive each other.

“You reckon folks really act like that?” Bigger asked, full of the sense of a life he had never seen.

“Sure, man. They nch,” Jack said.

“I wonder if this guy I’m going to work for is a rich man like that?” Bigger asked.

“Maybe so,” Jack said.

“Shucks, I got a great mind to take that job,” Bigger said.

“Sure. You don’t know what you might see.”

They laughed. Bigger turned his eyes to the screen, but he did not look. He was filled with a sense of excitement about his new job. Was what he had heard about nch white people really true? Was he going to work for people like you saw in the movies? If he were, then he’d see a lot of things from the inside; he’d get the dope, the low-down. He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances and heard drums beating and then gradually the African scene changed and was re- placed by images in his own mind of white men and women

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36

dressed in black and white clothes, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing. Those were smart people; they knew how to get hold of money, millions of it. Maybe if he were working for them something would happen and he would get some of it. He would see just how they did it Sure, it was all a game and white people knew how to play it. And rich white people were not so hard on Negroes' it was the poor whites who hated Negroes. They hated Negroes because they didn’t have their share of the money. His mother had always told him that rich white people liked Negroes better than they did poor whites. He felt that if he were a poor white and did not get his share of the money, then he would deserve to be kicked. Poor white people were stupid. It was the rich white people who were smart and knew how to treat people. He remembered hearing somebody tell a story of a Negro chauffeur who had married a rich white girl and the girl’s family had shipped the couple out of the country and had supplied them with money.

Yes, his going to work for the Daltons was something big. Maybe Mr. Dalton was a millionaire Maybe he had a daughter who was a hot kind of girl; maybe she spent lots of money: maybe she’d like to come to the South Side and see the sights sometimes Or maybe she had a secret sweet- heart and only he would know about it because he would have to drive her around; maybe she would give him money not to tell.

He was a fool for wanting to rob Blum’s just when he was about to get a good job Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why take a fool’s chance when other things, big things, could happen? If something slipped up this afternoon he would be out of a job and in jail, maybe. And he wasn’t so hot about robbing Blum’s, anyway. He frowned in the darkened movie, hearing the roll of tom-toms and the screams of black men and women dancing free and wild, men and women who were adjusted to their soil and at home in their world, secure from fear and hysteria.

“Come on. Bigger," Jack said. “We gotta go.”

“Hunh?”

“It’s twenty to three."

He rose and walked down the dark aisle over the soft, in- visible carpet. He had seen practically nothing of the picture,

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but he did not care. As he walked into the lobby his insides tightened again with the thought of Gus and Blum’s.

‘‘Swell, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was a killer,” Bigger said.

He walked alongside Jack briskly until they came to Thirty- ninth Street.

“We better get out gims,” Bigger said.

“Yeah.”

“We got about fifteen minutes.”

“O.K.”

“So long.”

He walked home with a mounting feeling of fear. When he reached his doorway, he hesitated about going up. He didn’t want to rob Blum’s; he was scared. But he had to go through with it now. Noiselessly, he went up the steps and inserted his key in the lock; the door swung in silently and he heard his mother smging behmd the curtam.

Lord, I want to be a Christian,

In my heart, in my heart,

Lord, I want to be a Christian,

In my heart, in my heart. . . .

He tiptoed into the room and lifted the top mattress of his bed and pulled forth the gun and slipped it inside of his shirt. Just as he was about to open the door his mother paused in her singing.

“That you. Bigger?”

He stepped quickly into the outer hallway and slammed the door and bounded headlong down the stairs. He went to the vestibule and swung through the door into the street, feeling that ball of hot tightness growing larger and heavier m his stomach and chest. He opened his mouth to breath* He headed for Doc’s and came to the door and looked inside. Jack and G.H. were shooting pool at a rear table. Gus was not there. He felt a slight lessening of nervous tension and swallowed. He looked up and down the street, very few people were out and the cop was not in sight. A clock in a window across the street told him that it was twelve minutes to three. Well, this was it; he had to go in. He lifted his left hand and wiped sweat from his forehead in a long slow gesture. He hesitated a moment longer at the door, then

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38

went in, walking With firm steps to the rear table. He did not speak to Jack or G H . nor they to him. He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers and watched the spinning billiard balls roll and gleam and clack over the green stretch of cloth, dropping into holes after bounding to and fro from the rubber cushions He felt impelled to say something to ease the swelling in his chest Hurriedly, he flicked his cigarette into a spittoon and, with twin eddies of blue smoke jutting from his black nostrils, shouted hoarsely,

"Jack, I betcha two bits you can’t make itl"

Jack did not answer; the ball shot straight across the table and vanished into a side pocket.

“You would've lost,” Jack said.

“Too late now,” Bigger said. “You wouldn’t bet, so you lost,"

He spoke without looking. His entire body hungered for keen sensation, something exciting and violent to relieve the tautness. It was now ten minutes to three and Gus had not come. If Gus stayed away much longer, it would be too late. And Gus knew that. If they were going to do anything, it certainly ought to be done before folks started coming into the streets to buy their food for supper, and while the cop was down at the other end of the block.

“That bastard!” Bigger said. "I knew itl”

“Oh. he’ll be along,” Jack said.

"Sometimes I’d like to cut his yellow heart out,” Bigger said, fingering the knife in his pocket.

“Maybe he’s hanging around some meat,” O.H. said.

“He’s just scared,”' Bigger said. “Scared to rob a white man.”

The billiard balls clacked. Jack chalked his cue stick and the metallic noise made Bigger gnt his teeth until they ached. He didn’t like that noise; it made him feel like cutting something with his knife.

“If he makes us miss this job. I’ll fix 'im, so help me,” Bigger said. “He oughtn’t be late. Every time somebody’s late, things go wrong. Look at the big guys. You don’t ever hear of them being late, do you? Nawl They work like clocks!”

“Ain’t none of us got more guts’n Gus,” G.H. said. “He’s been with us every time.”

"Aw, shut your trap,” Bigger said.

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39

“There you go again, Bigger," G.H. said. “Gus was just talking about how you act this morning. You get too nervous when something’s coming off. . . .”

"Don’t tell me I’m nervous,” Bigger said.

“If we don’t do it today, we can do it tomorrow,” Jack said.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, fooll”

“Bigger, for chrissakes! Don’t holler!” Jack said tensely.

Bigger looked at Jack hard and long, then turned away with a grimace.

“Don’t tell the world what we’re trying to do,” Jack whis- pered m a mollifying tone.

Bigger walked to the front of the store and stood looking out of the plate glass window. Then, suddenly, he felt sick. He saw Gus coming along the street. And his muscles stiffened. He was going to do something to Gus, just what, he did not know. As Gus neared he heard him whistling: “The Merry-Go-Round BroTce Down. . . .” The door swung in.

“Hi, Bigger,” Gus said.

Bigger did not answer. Gus passed him and started toward the rear tables. Bigger whirled and kicked him hard. Gus flopped on his face with a single movement of his body. With a look that showed that he was looking at Gus on the floor and at Jack and G.H. at the rear table and at Doc — looking at them all at once in a kind of smiling, roving, turning-slowly glance — Bigger laughed, softly at first, then harder, louder, hysterically; feeling something like hot water bubbling inside of him and trying to come out. Gus got up and stood, quiet, tus mouth open and his eyes dead-black with hate.

“Take it easy, boys,” Doc said, looking up from behind his counter, and then bending over again.

“What you kick me for?” Gus asked.

“ ’Cause I wanted to,” Bigger said.

Gus looked at Bigger with lowered eyes. G.H. and Jack leaned on their cue sticks and watched silently.

“I’m going to fix you one of these days,” Gus threatened.

‘‘Say that again,” Bigger said.

Doc laughed, straightemng and looking at Bigger,

“Lay off the boy. Bigger.”

Gus turned and walked toward the rear tables. Bigger, with

40 NATIVE SON

an amazing bound, grabbed him in the back of his collar.

“I asked you to say that again*"

“Quit, Bigger!” Gus spluttered, choking, sinking to his knees.

“Don't tell me to quit!"

The muscles of his body gave a tightening lunge and he saw his fist come down on the side of Gus's head; he had Struck him really before he was conscious of doing so.

“Don’t hurt ’im,” Jack said.

“I’ll kill ’im,” Bigger said through shut teeth, tightening his hold on Gus’s collar, choking him harder.

“T-tum m-m-m-me l-Ioose ” Giis gurgled, struggling.

“Make me!” Bigger said, drawing his fingers tighter.

Gus was very still, resting on his knees. Then, like a taut bow finding release, he sprang to his feet, shaking loose from Bigger and turning to get away. Bigger staggered back against the lyall, breathless for a moment. Bigger’s band moved so swiftly that nobody saw it; a gleaming blade flashed. He made a long step, as graceful as an animal leaping, threw out his left foot and tripped Gus to the floor. Gus turned over to rise, but Bigger was on top of him, with the knife open and ready.

“Get up! Get up and I’ll slice your tonsils!"

Gus lay still.

“That’s all right, Bigger,” Gus said in surrender. “Lemme up."

“You trying to make a fool out of me. ain’t you?"

“Naw,” Gus said, his Ups scarcely moving.

“You goddamn right you ain’t.” Bigger said.

His face softened a bit and the hard glint in his bloodshot eyes died. But he still knelt with the open knife. Then he stood.

“Get up!" he said.

“Please, Bigger!”

“You want me to slice you?”

He stooped again and placed the knife at Gus’s throat. Gus did not move and his large black eyes looked pleadingly. Bigger was not satisfied, he felt his muscles tightening again.

“Get up! I ain’t going to ask you no more!"

Slowly, Gus stood. Bigger held the open blade an inch from Gus’s lips. ,

“Lick it,” Bigger said, his body tingling with elation,

Gus’s eyes filled with tears.

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41

“Lick it, I said! You think I’m playing?”

Gus looked round the room without moving his head, just rolling his eyes in a mute appeal for help But no one moved. Bigger’s left fist was slowly lifting to strike, Gus’s lips moved toward the knife; he stuck out his tongue and touched the blade Gus’s lips quivered and tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Hahahahal” Doc laughed.

“Aw, leave 'im alone,” Jack called.

Bigger watched Gus with lips twisted in a crooked smile.

“Say, Bigger, ain’t you scared ’im enotigh?” Doc asked.

Bigger did not answer. His eyes gleamed hard agam, preg- nant with another idea.

“Put your hands up, way up!” he said.

Gus swallowed and stretched his hands high along the wall.

“Leave ’im alone. Bigger,” G.H. called weakly.

“I’m doing this,” B.gger said.

He put the tip of the blade into Gus’s shirt and then made an arc with his arm, as though cutting a circle.

“How would you like me to cut your belly button out?”

Gus did not answer. Sweat trickled down his temples. His lips hung wide, loose.

“Shut them liver lips of yours!”

Gus did not move a muscle. Bigger pushed the knife harder into Gus’s stomach.

“Biggerl” Gus said in a tense whisper.

“Shut your mouth!”

Gus shut his mouth. Doc laughed Jack and G.H laughed. Then Bigger stepped back and looked at Gus with a smile.

“You clown,” he said “Put your hands down and set on that chair.” He watched Gus sit “That ought to teach you not to be late next tune, see?”

“We ain’t late. Bigger. We still got time. . .

“Shut up! It is latel” Bigger insisted commandingly.

Bigger turned aside; then, hearing a sharp scrape on the floor, stiffened Gus sprang from the chair and grabbed a bil- liard ball from the table and threw it with a half-sob and half-curse. Bigger flung his hands upward to shield his face and the impact of the ball struck his wrist. He had shut his eyes when he had glimpsed the ball sailing through the air toward him and when he opened his eyes Gus was flying through the rear door and at the same time he heard the ball

NATIVE SON

42

hit the floor and roll away A hard pain throbbed in his hand. He sprang forward, cursing,

“You sonofabitch!"

He slipped on a cue stick lying In the middle of the floor and tumbled forward.

“That’s enough now. Bigger,” Doc said, laughing.

Jack and G.H also laughed. B.ggcr rose and faced them, holding his hurt hand. His eyes were red and he stared with speechless hate.

“Just keep laughing,” he said.

“Behave yourself, boy.” Doc said.

“Just keep laughing,” Bigger said again, taking out his knife.

“Watch what you’re doing now." Doc cautioned.

“Aw, Bigger,” Jack said, backing away toward the rear door.

“You done spoiled things now,” G.H. said. “1 reckon that was what you wanted. . . .”

“You go to helll” Bigger shouted, drowning out G.H.’s voice.

Doc bent down behind the counter and when he stood up he had something in his hand which he did not show. He stood there laughing. White spittle showed at the corners of Digger’s lips. He walked to the billiard table, his eyes on Doc. Then he began to cut the green cloth on the table with long sweeping strokes of his arm. He never took his eyes from Doc’s face.

"Why, you sonofabitch!” Doc said. "I ought to shoot you, so help me GodI Get out, before I call a cop!”

Bigger walked slowly past Doc, looking at him, not hurry- ing, and holding the open knife in his hand. He paused in the doorway and looked back. Jack and G.H. were gone.

“Get out of here!” Doc said, showing a gun.

“Don’t you like it?” Bigger asked.

“Get out before I shoot you!” Doc said, “And don't you ever set your black feet inside here again!”

Doc was angry and Bigger was afraid. He shut the knife and slipped it in his pocket and swung through the door to the street. He blinked his eyes from the bright sunshine; his nerves were so taut that he had difficulty in breathing. Halfway down the block he passed Blum’s store; he looked out of the comers of his eyes through the plate glass window and saw

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43

that Blum was alone and the stcwe was empty of customers. Yes; they would have had time to rob the store; in fact, they still had time He had lied to Gus and G H. and Jack. He walked on; there was not a policeman in sight. Yes; they could have robbed the store and could have gotten away. He hoped the fight he had had with Gus covered up what he was trying to hide. At least the fight made him feel the equal of them. And he felt the equal of Doc, too; had he not slashed his table and dared him to use his gun?

He had an overwhelming desire to be alone; he walked to the middle of the next block and turned into an alley. He began to laugh, softly, tensely; he stopped still in his tracks and felt something warm roll down his cheek and he brushed it away. “Jesus,” he breathed “1 laughed so hard I cried.” Carefully, he dried his face on his coat sleeve, then stood for two whole minutes stanng at the shadow of a telephone pole on the alley pavement. Suddenly he straightened and walked on with a single expulsion of breath. “What the hell!” He stumbled violently over a tiny crack in the pavement. “GoddamnI” he said. When he reached the end of the alley, he turned into a street, walking slowly in the sunshine, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, his head down, de- pressed.

He went home and sat in a chair by the window, looking out dreamily.

“That you, Bigger?” his mother called from behind the curtain.

“Yeah," he said.

“What you run in here and run out for, a little while ago?”

“Nothing ”

“Don’t you go and get into no trouble, now, boy.”

“Aw, Ma! Leave me alone ”

He listened awhile to her rubbing clothes on the metal washboard, then he gazed abstractedly into the street, thinking of how he had felt when he fought Gus in Doc’s poolroom. He was relieved and glad that in an hour he was going to see about that job at the Dalton place. He was disgusted with the gang; he knew that what had happened today put an end to his being with them in any more jobs. Like a man staring re- gretfully but hopelessly at the stump of a cut-off arm or leg, he knew that the fear of robbing a white man had had hold of him when he started that fight with Gus; but he knew it m a

44

NATIVE SON

way that kept it from coming to his mind in the form of a hard and sharp idea. His confused emotions had made him feel instinctively that it would be better to fight Gus and spoil the plan of the robbery than to confront a white naan with a gun. But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his coimage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness. He had fought Gus because Gus was late; that was the reason his emotions accepted and he did not try to justify himself in his own eyes, or in the eyes of the gang. He did not think enough of them to feel that he had to; he did not consider himself as being responsible to them for what he did, even though they had been mvolved as deeply as he in the planned robbery. He felt that same way toward everyone. As long as he could remember, he had never been responsible to anyone. The moment a situation became so that it exacted some- thing of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.

Outside his window he saw the sim dying over the roof- tops in the western sky and watched the first shade of dusk fall. Now and then a street car ran past. The rusty radiator hissed at the far end of the room. All day long it had been spnnglike; but now dark clouds were slowly swallowing the sun. All at once the street lamps came on and the sky was black and close to the house-tops.

Inside his shirt he felt the cold metal of the gun resting against his naked skin; he ought to put it back between the mattresses. No! He would keep it. He would take it with him to the Dalton place. He felt that he would be safer if he took it. He was not planning to use it and there was nothing in particular that he was afraid of, but there was in him an uneasiness and distrust that made him feel that he ought to have it along. He was going among white people, so he would take his knife and his gtm; it would make him feel that he was the equal of them, give him a sense of completeness. Then he thought of a good reason why he should take it; in order to get to the Dalton place, he had to go through a white neighborhood. He had not heard of any Negroes being molested recently, but he felt that it was always possible.

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45

Far away a clock boomed five times. He sighed and got up and yawned and stretched his arms high above his head to loosen the muscles of his body. He got his overcoat, for it was growing cold outdoors, then got his cap. He tiptoed to the door, wanting to slip out without his mother hearing him. Just as he was about to open it, she called,

“Bigger!”

He stopped and frowned.

“Yeah, Ma.”

“You going to see about that job?”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t you going to eat?”

“I ain’t got time now.”

She came to the door, wiping her soapy hands upon an apron.

“Here; take this quarter and buy you something.”

“O K.”

“And be careful, son.”

He went out and walked south to Forty-sixth Street, then eastward. Well, he would see in a few moments if the Daltons for whom he was to work were like the people he had seen and heard in the movie But while walking through this quiet and spacious white neighborhood, he did not feel the pull and mystery of the thing as strongly as he had in the movie. The houses he passed were huge: lights glowed softly in windows. The streets were empty, save for an occasional car that zoomed past on swift rubber tires. This was a cold and dis- tant world; a world of white secrets carefully guarded. He could feel a pride, a certainty, and a confidence in these streets and houses. He came to Drexel Boulevard and began to look for 4605. V^en he came to it, he stopped and stood before a high, black, iron picket fence, feeling constricted in- side. All he had felt in the movie was gone; only fear and emptiness filled him now.

Would they expect him to come in the front way or back? It was queer that he had not thought of that. Goddamn! He walked the length of the picket fence in front of the house, seeking for a walk leading to the rear. But tlicre was none. Other than the front gate, there was only a driveway, the entrance to which was securely locked. Suppose a policeman saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape some-

46

NATIVE SON

body. He grew angry. Why had he come to take this goddamn job? He could have stayed among his own people and escaped feeling this fear and hate. This was not his world; he had been foolish in thinking that he would have liked it. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his jaws clamped tight; he wanted to strike something with his fist. Well . . . Goddamn! There was nothing to do but go in the front way. If he were doing wrong, they could not kill him, at least; ^ they could do was to tell him that he could not get the job.

Timidly, he lifted the latch on the gate and walked to the steps. He paused, waiting for someone to challenge him. Nothing happened. Maybe nobody was home? He went to the door and saw a dim light burtung in a shaded niche above a doorbell He pushed it and was startled to hear a soft gong sound within. Maybe he had pushed it too hard? Aw, what the hell! He had to do better than this, he relaxed his taut muscles and stood at ease, waiting. The doorknob turned. The door opened. He saw a white face. It was a woman.

“Hello!”

“Yessum,” he said,

“You want to see somebody?"

“Er ... Er ... I want to see Mr. Dalton.”

“Are you the Thomas boy?”

“Yessum.”

“Come in.”

He edged through the door slowly, then stopped halfway. Hie woman was so close to him that he could see a tiny mole at the comer of her mouth. He held his breath. It seemed that there was not room enough for him to pass with- out actually touching her.

“Come on in,” the woman said.

“Yessum,” he whispered.

He squeezed through and stood uncertainly in a softly lighted hallway.

“Follow me,” she said.

With cap in hand and shoulders sloped, he followed, walk- ing over a rug so soft and deep that it seemed he was going to fall at each step he took. He went into a dimly lit room.

“Take a seat,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. Dalton that you’re here and hell be out in a moment.”

“Yessum.”

He sat and looked up at the woman; she was staring at

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47

him and he looked away in confusion. He was glad when she left. That old bastard! What’s so damn funny about me? I’m just like she is. . . . He felt that the position in which he was sitting was too awkward and found that he was on the very edge of the chair. He rose slightly to sit farther back; but when he sat he sank down so suddenly and deeply that he thought the chair had collapsed under him. He bounded halfway up, in fear; then, realizing what had happened, he sank distrust- fully down again He looked round the room; it was lit by dim lights glowing from a hidden source. He tried to find them by roving his eyes, but could not. He had not expected anything like this; he had not thought that this world would be so utterly different from his own that it would intimidate him. On the smooth walls were several paintings whose nature he tried to make out, but failed. He would have liked to examine them, but dared not. Then he listened; a faint sound of piano music floated to him from somewhere. He was sitting in a white home; dim lights burned round him; strange objects challenged him; and he was feeling angry and uncomfortable.

“All right. Come this way.” '

He started at the sound of a man’s voice.

“Suh?”

“Come this way.”

Misjudging how far back he was sitting in the chair, his first attempt to rise failed and he slipped back, resting on his side. Grabbing the arms of the chair, he pulled himself up- right and found a tall, lean, white-haired man holding a piece of paper in his hand The man was gazing at him with an amused smile that made him conscious of every square inch of skin on his black body.

“Thomas?” the man asked. “Bigger Thomas?”

“Yessuh,” he whispered; not speaking, really; but hearing his words issue involuntarily from his lips, as of a force of their own.

“Come this way.”

“Yessuh.”

He followed the man out of the room and down a hall. The man stopped abruptly. Bigger paused, bewildered, then he saw coming slowly toward him a tall, thin, white woman, walking silently, her hands lifted delicately in the air and touching the walls to either side of her. Bigger stepped back

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48

to let her pass. Her face and hair were completely white; she seemed to him like a ghost. The man took her arm gently and held her for a moment. Bigger saw that she was old and her gray eyes looked stony.

“Are you all right?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Where’s Peggy?”

“She’s preparing dinner. I’m quite all right, Henry.”

“You shouldn’t be alone this way. When is Mrs. Patterson coming back?” the man asked.

“She’ll be back Monday. But Mary’s here. I’m all right; don’t worry about me. Is someone with you?”

“Oh, yes. This is the boy the relief sent.”

“The relief people were very anxious for you to work for us,” the woman said; she did not move her body or face as she talked, but she spoke in a tone of voice that indicated that she was speaking to Bigger. “I hope you’ll like it here.”

“Yessum,” Bigger whispered faintly, wondermg as he did so if he ought to say anything at all.

“How far did you go in school?”

“To the eighth grade, mam.”

“Don’t you think it would be a wise procedure to in- ject him into his new environment at once, so he could get the feel of things?” the woman asked, addressing herself by the tone of her voice to the man now.

"Well, tomorrow’ll be time enough,” the man said hesitantly.

“I think it’s important emotionally that he feels free to trust his environment,” the woman said. “Using the analysis contained in the case record the relief sent us, I think we should evoke an immediate feeling of confidence . .

“But that’s too abrupt,” the man said.

Bigger listened, blinking and bewildered. The long strange words they used made no sense to him; it was another language. He felt from the tone of their voices that they were having a difference of opinion about him, but he could not determine what it was about. It made him uneasy, tense, as though there were influences and presences about him which he could feel but not see. He felt strangely blind.

“Well, let’s try it,” the woman said.

“Oh, all right. We’ll see. We’ll see,” the man said.

The man let go of the woman and she walked on slowly, the long white fingers of her hands just barely touching the walls.

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Behind the woman, following at the hem of her dress, was a big white cat, pacing without sound. She’s blind! Bigger thought in amazement.

“Come on; this way,” the man said.

“Yessuh.”

He wondered if the man had seen him staring at the woman. He would have to be careful here. Tl^ere were so many strange things. He followed the man into a room.

“Sit down.”

“Yessuh,” he said, sitting.

“That was Mrs. Dalton,” the man said. “She’s blind.”

“Yessuh.”

“She has a very deep interest in colored people.”

“Yessuh,” Bigger whispered. He was conscious of the effort to breathe, he licked his lips and fumbled nervously with his cap.

“Well, I’m Mr. Dalton.”

"Yessuh.”

“Do you think you’d like driving a car?”

“Oh, yessuh.”

“Did you bring the paper?”

“Suh?”

“Didn’t the relief give you a note to me?”

“Oh, yessuh!”

He had completely forgotten about the paper. He stood to reach into his vest pocket and, in doing so, dropped hi; cap. For a moment his impulses were deadlocked; he did not know if he should pick up his cap and then find the paper, or find the paper and then pick up his cap. He decided to pick up his cap.

“Put your cap here," said Mr. Dalton, indicating a place on hts desk.

“Yessuh.”

Then he was stone-still; the white cat bounded past him and leaped upon the desk, it sat looking at him with large placid eyes and mewed plaintively.

“What’s the matter, Kate?” Mr. Dalton asked, stroking the cat’s fur and smiling. Mr. Dalton turned back to Bigger. “Did you find it?”

“Nawsuh. But I got it here, somewhere.”

He hated himself at that moment. Why was he acting and feeling this way? He wanted to wave his hand aiiu oloi out

50

NATIVE SON

the white man who was making him feel like this. If not that, he wanted to blot himself out. He had not raised his eyes to the level of Mr. Dalton’s face once since be had been in the house. He stood with his knees slightly bent, his lips partly open, his shoulders stooped; and his eyes held a look that went only to the surface of things. There was an organic conviction in him that this was the way white folks wanted him to be when in their presence; none had ever told him that in so many words, but their manner had made him fed that they did. He laid the cap down, noticing that Mr. Dalton was watching him dosely. Maybe he was not acting right? Goddamn! Clumsily, he searched for the paper. He could not find it at first and he felt called upon to say something for taking so long.

“I had it right here In my vest jMJcket,” he mumbled,

‘Take your time.”

‘‘Oh, here it is.”

He drew the paper forth. It was crumpled and soiled. Nervously, he straightened it out and handed it to Mr. Dalton, holding it by its very tip end,

“All right, now,” said Mr. Dalton, "Let’s see what you’ve got here. You live at 3721 Indiana Avenue?”

“Yessuh.”

Mr. Dalton paused, frowned, and looked up at the celling,

“What kind of a building is that over theref ’

‘You mean where I live, suh?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, it’s just an old building.”

“Where do you pay rent?”

“Down on Thirty-first Street”

‘To the South Side Real Estate Company?”

‘Yessuh.”

Bigger wondered what all these questions could mean; he had heard that Mr. Dalton owned the South Side Real Estate Company, but he was not sure.

“How much rent do you pay?”

“Eight dollars a week.”

“For how many rooms?”

“We just got one, suh.”

“I see. . . . Now, Bigger, tell me, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty, suh.”

“Married?”

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51

“Nawsuh.”

“Sit down. You needn’t stand. And I won’t be long.”

“Yessuh.”

He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.

“Now, you have a mother, a brother, and a sister?”

“Yessuh.”

“There are four of you?”

“Yessuh, there’s four of us,” he stammered, trying to show that he was not as stupid as he might appear. He felt a need to speak more, for he felt that maybe Mr. Dalton ex- pected it. And he suddenly remembered the many times his mother had told him not to look at the floor when talking with white folks or asking for a job. He lifted his eyes and saw Mr. Dalton watching him closely. He dropped his eyes again.

“They call you Bigger?”

“Yessuh.”

“Now, Bigger, I’d like to talk with you a little. . .

Yes, goddammit! He knew what was coming. He would bo asked about that time he had been accused of stealing auto tires and had been sent to the reform school. He felt guilty, condemned. He should not have come here.

“The relief people said some funny things about you. I’d like to talk to you about them. Now, you needn’t feel ashamed with me,” said Mr. Dalton, smiling. “I was a boy myself once and I think I know how things are. So just be yourself. . . .” Mr Dalton pulled out a package of cigarettes. “Here; have one.”

“Nawsuh; thank you, suh.”

“You don’t smoke?”

“Yessuh. But I just don’t want one now.”

“Now, Bigger, the relief people said you were a very good worker when you were interested in what you were doing. Is that true?”

“Welt, I do my work, suh.”

“But they said you were always in trouble. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know, suh.”

“Why did they send you to the reform school?”

His eyes glared at the floor.

“They said I was stealing!” he blurted defensively. “But I wasn’t.”

52

NATIVE SON

“Are you sure?"

“Yessuh.”

"Well, how did you get mixed up in it?”

“I was with some boys and the police picked us up.”

Mr. Dalton said nothing. Bigger heard a clock ticking some- where behind him and he had a foolish impulse to look at it. But he restrained himself.

“Well, Bigger, how do you feel about it now?”

“Suh? 'Bout what?”

“If you had a job, would you steal now?”

“Oh, nawsuh. I don't steal.”

“Well,” said Mr. Dalton, “they say you can drive a car and I’m going to give you a job.”

He said nothing.

“You think you can handle it?"

“Oh, yessuh.”

“The pay calls for $20 a week, but I’m going to give you $25. The extra $5 is for yourself, for you to spend as you like. You wiU get the clothes you need and your meals. You’re to sleep in the back room, above the kitchen. You can give the $20 to your mother to keep your brother and sister in school How docs that sound?”

“It sounds all right Yessuh."

“I think we’ll get along."

“Yessuh.”

“I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”

“Nawsuh.”

“Now, Bigger,’' said Mr. Dalton, “since that’s settled, let’s see what you’U have to do every day. I leave every morning for my office at nine. It’s a twenty-minute drive. You are to be back at ten and take Miss Dalton to school. At twelve, you call for Miss Dalton at the University. From then until night you are more or less free. If either Miss Dalton or I go out at night, of course, you do the driving. You work every day, but we don’t get up till noon on Sundays. So you will have Sunday mornings to yourself, unless something unexpected happens. You get one full day off every two weeks.”

■Yessuh.”

“You think you can handle that?”

“Oh, yessuh.”

“And any time you’re bothered about anything, come imd see me. Let’s talk it over.”

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53

“Yessuh.”

“Oh, Father!” a girl’s voice sang out

“Yes, Mary,” said Mr. Dalton.

Bigger turned and saw a white girl walk into the room. She was very slender.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were busy.”

“That’s all right, Mary. What is it?”

Bigger saw that the girl was looking at him,

“Is this the new chauffeur, Father?”

“What do you want, Mary?”

“Will you get the tickets for the Thursday concert?”

“At Orchestra HaU?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. ra get them.”

“Is this the new chauffeur?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Dalton. “This is Bigger Thomas.”

“Hello, Bigger,” the girl said.

Bigger swallowed. He looked at Mr. Dalton, then felt that he should not have looked.

“Good evening, mam ”

The girl came close to him and stopped just opposite his chair.

“Bigger, do you belong to a union?" she asked.

"Now, Mary!” said Mr. Dalton, frowning.

“Well, Father, he should,” the girl said, tiuming to him, then back to Bigger. “Do you?”

“Mary. . . .” said Mr. Dalton.

“I’m just asking him a question. Father!”

Bigger hesitated. He hated the girl then. Why did she have to do this when he was trymg to get a job?

“No’m,” he mumbled, his head down and his eyes glowering.

“And why not?” the girl asked.

Bigger heard Mr. Dalton mumble something. He wished Mr. Dalton would speak and end this thing. He looked up and saw Mr. Dalton staring at the girl. She’s making me lose my job! he thought. Goddanml He knew nothing about unions, except that they were considered bad. And what did she mean by talking to him this way m front of Mr. Dalton, who, surely, didn’t like umons?

“We can settle about the union later, Mary,” said Mr. Dalton.

54

NATIVE SON

“But you wouldn’t mind belonging to a union, would you?” the girl asked.

"I don’t know, mam,” Bigger said.

“Now, Mary, you can see that the boy is new,” said Mr. Dalton. “Leave him alone."

The girl turned and poked out a red tongue at him.

“All right, Mr. Capitalist!” She turned again to Bigger. “Isn’t he a capitalist. Bigger?”

Bigger looked at the floor and did not answer. He did not know what a capitalist was.

The girl started to leave, but stopped,

“Oh, Father, if he hasn’t anything else to do, let him drive me to my lecture at the University tonight.”

“I’m talking to him now, Mary. He’ll be through in a mo- ment.”

The girl picked up the cat and walked from the room. There was a short interval of silence. Bigger wished the girl had not said anything about unions. Maybe he would not be hired now. Or, if hired, maybe he would be fired soon if she kept acting like that. He had never seen anyone like her before. She was not a bit the way he had imagined she would be.

“Oh, Mar}'!” Mr. Dalton called.

“Yes, Father,” Bigger heard her answer from the hallway.

Mr. Dalton rose and left the room. He sat still, listening. Once or twice he thought he heard the girl laugh, but he was not sure. The best thing he could do was to leave that crazy girl alone. He had heard about unions; in his mind unions and Communists were linked. He relaxed a little, then stiffened when he heard Mr. Dalton walk back into the room. Word- lessly, the white man sat behind the desk and picked up the paper and looked at it in a long silence. Bigger watched him vfith lowered eyes; he knew that Mr, Dalton was thinking of something other than that paper, In his heart he cursed the crazy girl. Maybe Mr. Dalton was deciding not to hire him. Goddamn! Maybe he would not get the extra five dollars a week now. Goddamn that woman > She spoiled everything! Maybe Mr. Dalton would feel that he could not trust him.

“Oh, Bigger,” said Mr. Dalton.

“Yessuh ”

“I want you to know why I’m hiring you.”

"Yessuh.”

“You see, Bigger, I’m a supporter of the National As-

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sociation for the Advancement of Colored People. Did you ever hear of that organization?”

“Nawsuh.”

“Well, It doesn’t matter,” said Mr Dalton. “Have you had your dinner?”

“Nawsuh.”

“Well, I think you’ll do.”

Mr Dalton pushed a button. There was silence. The woman who had answered the front door came in.

“Yes, Mr. Dalton.”

“Peggy, this IS Bigger. He’s going to drive for us. Give him something to eat, and show him where he’s to sleep and where the car is.”

“Yes, Mr. Dalton.”

“And, Bigger, at eight-thirty, drive Miss Dalton out to the University and wait for her,” said Mr. Dalton.

“Yessuh.”

“That’s all now,”

“Yessuh.”

“Come with me,” Peggy said

Bigger rose and got his cap and followed the woman through the house to the kitchen. The air was full of the scent of food cooking and pots bubbled on the stove.

“Sit here,” Peggy said, clearing a place for him at a white- topped table. He sat and rested his cap on his knees He felt a little better now that he was out of the front part of the house, but still not quite comfortable

“Dinner isn’t quite ready yet,” Peggy said. “You like bacon and eggs?”

“Yessum.”

“Coffee?”

“Yessum,”

He sat looking at the white walls of the kitchen and heard the woman stir about behind him.

“Did Mr. Dalton tell you about the furnace?”

“No’m.”

“Well, he must have forgotten it. You’re supposed to attend to that, too. ni show you where it is before you go.”

“You mean I got to keep the fire going, mam?"

“Yes But it’s easy. Did you ever fire before?”

“No’m.”

“You can learn. There’s nothing to it ’’

56

NATIVE SON

“Yessum.”

Peggy seemed kind enough, but maybe she was being kind in order to shove her part of the work on him. Well, he would wait and see. If she got nasty, he would talk to Mr. Dalton about her. He smelt the odor of frying bacon and realized that he was very hungry. He had forgotten to buy a sandwich with the quarter his mother had given him, and he had not eaten since morning. Peggy placed a plate, knife, fork, spoon, sugar, cream, and bread before him; then she dished up the bacon and eggs.

“You can get more if you want it.”

The food was good. This was not going to be a bad job. The only thing bad so far was that crazy girl. He chewed his bacon and eggs whUe some remote part of his mind considered in amazement how different this rich girl was from the one he had seen in the movies. This woman he had watched on the screen had not seemed dangerous and his mmd had been able to do with her as it liked, but this rich girl walked over everything, put herself in the way and, what was strange beyond understanding, talked and acted so simply and di- rectly that she confounded him. He had quite forgotten that Peggy was in the kitchen and when his plate was empty he took a soft piece of bread and began to sop it clean, carrying the bread to his mouth in huge chunks.

“You want some more?”

He stopped chewing and laid the bread aside. He had not wanted to let her see him do that; he did that only at home.

“No’m,” he said. “I got a plenty,"

“You reckon you’ll like it hereT’ Peggy asked.

“Yessum. I hope so.”

“This is a swell place,” Peggy said. “About as good as you'll find anywhere. The last colored man who worked for us stayed ten years.”

Bigger wondered why she said “us.” She must stand in with the old man and old woman pretty good, he thought.

‘Ten years?” he said.

“Yes; ten years. His name was Green. He was a good man, too.”

“How come he to leave?”

“Oh, he was smart, that Green was. He took a job with the government. Mrs. Dalton made him go to night school. Mrs. Dalton’s always trying to help somebody.”

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57

Yes; Bigger knew that. But he was not going to any night school. He looked at Peggy; she was bent over the sink, wash- ing dishes. Her words had challenged him and he felt he had to say something.

“Yessum, he was smart,” he said. “And ten years is a long time.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so long,” Peggy said. “I’ve been here twenty years myself I always was one for sticking to a job. I always say when you get a good place, then stick there. A rolhng stone gathers no moss, and it’s true.”

Bigger said nothing.

“Everything’s simple and nice around here,” Peggy said. “They’ve got millions, but they live like hurrian beings. They don't put on airs and strut. Mrs. Dalton believes that people should be that way.”

“Yessum.”

“They’re Christian people and beheve in everybody work- ing hard, and living a clean life. Some people think we ought to have more servants than we do, but we get along. It’s just like one big family.”

“Yessum.”

“Mr. Dalton’s a fine man,” Peggy said.

“Oh, yessum. He is.”

“You know, he does a lot for your people.”

“My people?” asked Bigger, puzzled.

“Yes, the colored people. He gave over five million dollars to colored schools.”

“Ohl”

“But Mrs. Dalton’s the one who’s really nice. If it wasn’t for her, he would not be doing what he does. S' e made him rich She had millions when he married her Of course, he made a lot of money himself afterwards out of real estate. But most of the money’s hers. She’s blind, poor thing. She lost her sight ten years ago. Did you see her yet?”

“Yessum.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yessum.”

“Poor thing! Mrs. Patterson, who takes care of her, is away for the week-end and she’s all alone. Isn’t it too bad, about her?”

“Oh, yessum,” he said, trying to get into his voice some

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58

of the pity for Mrs. Dalton that he thought Peggy expected him to feel.

“It’s really more than a job you’ve got here," Peggy went on. “It’s just like home. I’m always telling Mrs. Dalton that this is the only home I’ll ever know I wasn’t in this country but two years before I started working here. . .

“Oh." said Bigger, looking at her.

“I’m Irish, you know,” she said “My folks in the old country feel about England like the colored folks feel about this country. So I know something about colored peo- ple Oh, these are fine people, fine as silk. Even the girl. Did you meet her yet?”

“Yessum ”

“Tonight?”

"Yessum,”

Peggy turned and looked at him sharply.

"She’s a sweet thing, she is,” she said ‘T've known her since she was two years old. To me she’s still a baby and will al- ways be one. But she’s kind of wild, she is, Always in hot water. Keeps her folks worried to death, she does. She runs around with a wild and crazy bunch of reds. . .

“Reds!" Bigger exclaimed.

"Yes. But she don’t mean nothing by it,” Peggy said. "Like her mother and father, she feels sorry for people and she thinks the reds’ll do something for ’em. The Lord only knows where she got her wild ways, but she’s got ’em. If you stay around here, you'll get to know her. But don’t you pay no attention to her red friends. They just keep up a lot of fuss,”

Bigger wanted to ask her to tell him more about the girl, but thought that he had better not do that now.

"If you’re through. I’ll show you the furnace and the car, and where your room is,” she said and turned the fire low under the pots on the stove.

“Yessum ”

He rose and followed her out of the kitchen, down a narrow stairway at the end of which was the b.isement It was dark: Bigger heard a sharp click and the light came on.

“This way. . . . What did you say your name was?”

"Bigger, mam.”

“What?”

“Bigger.”

FEAR 59

He smelt the scent of coal and ashes and heard fire roar- ing. He saw a red bed of embers glowing m the furnace.

“This is the furnace,” she said.

“Yessum."

“Every morning you’ll find the garbage here; you bum it and put the bucket on the dumb-waiter."

“Yessum.”

“You never have to use a shovel for coal. It's a self-feeder. Look, see?”

Peggy pulled a lever and there came a loud rattle of fine lumps of coal sliding down a metal chute. Bigger stooped and saw, through the cracks of the furnace, the coal spreadmg out fanwise over the red bed of fire.

“That’s fine,” he mumbled in admiration.

“And you don’t have to worry about water, either. It fills itself.”

Bigger liked that; it was easy; it would be fun, almost.

“Your biggest trouble will be taking out the ashes and sweeping. And keep track of how the coal runs; when it’s low, tell me or Mr. Dalton and we’ll order some more,”

“Yessum. I can handle it."

"Now, to get to your room all you have to do is go up these back stairs. Come on ”

He followed up a stretch of stairs. She opened a door and switched on a light and Bigger saw a large room whose walls were covered with pictures of girls’ faces and prize fighters.

“This was Green’s room. He was always one for pictures. But he kept things neat and nice. It’s plenty warm here. Oh, yes; before I forget. Here are the keys to the room and the garage and the car. Now, I’ll show you the garage. You have to get to it from the outside.”

He followed her down the steps and outside into the driveway. It was much warmer,

“Looks like snow,” Peggy said.

“Yessum.”

“This is the garage," she said, unlocking and pushing open a door which, as it swung in, made lights come on auto- matically. “You always bring the car out and wait at the side door for the folks. Let’s see. You say you’re driving Miss Dalton tonight?”

“Yessum.”

60

NATIVE SON

“Well, she leaves at eight-thirty. So you’re free until then. You can look over your room if you want to.”

“Yessuni I reckon I will.”

Bigger went behind Peggy down the stairs and back into the basement. She went to the kitchen and he went to his room He stood in the middle of the floor, looking at the walls. There were pictures of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and Henry Armstrong; there were others of Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, and Janet Gay nor The room was large and had two radiators. He felt the bed; it was soft Geel He would bring Bessie here some night Not right at once; he would wait until he had learned the ropes of the place A room all to himself! He could bnng a pint of liquor up here and drink it in peace. He would not have to slip around any more. He would not have to sleep with Buddy and stand Buddy’s kicking all night long He lit a cigarette and stretched himself full length upon the bed. Ohhhh. . . . This was not going to be bad at all. He looked at his dollar watch; it was seven. In a little while he would go down and examine the car, And he would buy himself another watch, too. A dollar watch was not gond enough for a job like this; he would buy a gold one. There were a lot of new things he could get. Oh, boy' This would be an easy life. Everything was all right, except that girl. She worried him. She might cause him to lose his job if she kept talking about unions She was a funny girl, all right. Never in his life had he met anyone like her She puzzled him. She was rich, but she didn’t act like she was rich. She acted like , . . Well, he didn’t know exactly what she did act like. In all of the white women he had met, mostly on jobs and at relief stations, there was always a certain coldness and reserve; they stood their distance and spoke to him from afar. But this girl waded right in and hit him between the eyes with her words and ways. Aw, hell! What good was there m thinking about her like this? Maybe she was all right Maybe he would just have to get used to her; that was all. I bet she spends a plenty of dough, he thought. And the old man had snven five million dollars to colored people. If a man could give five million dollars away, the millions must be as common to him as nickels. He rose up and sat on the edge of the bed.

What make of car was he to drive? He had not thought to look when Peggy had opened the gmage door He hoped

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61

it would be a Packard, or a Lincoln, or a Rolls Royce. Boy! Would he drive! Just wait! Of course, he would be careful when he was driving Miss or Mr Dalton But when he was alone he would bum up the pavement; he would make those tires smoke!

He licked his lips; he was thirsty. He looked at his watch; it was ten past eight He would go to the kitchen and get a drink of water and then drive the car out of the garage. He went down the steps, through the basement to the stairs leading to the kitchen door Though he did not know it, he walked on tiptoe He eased the door open and peeped in. What he saw made him suck his breath in; Mrs. Dalton in flowing white clothes was standing stonestill in the middle of the kitchen floor. There was silence, save for the slow ticking of a large clock on a white wall For a moment he did not know if he should go in or go back down the steps; his thirst was gone. Mrs. Dalton’s face was held in an at- titude of intense listening and her hands were hanging loosely at her sides. To Big'>er her face seemed to be capable of hearing in every pore of the skin and listening always to some low voice speaking, Sitting quietly on the floor beside her was the white cat, its large black eyes fastened upon him. It made him uneasy just to look at her and that white cat; he was about to close the door and tiptoe softly back down the stairs when she spoke.

“Are you the new boy?”

•'Yessum.”

“Did you want something?”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you, mam. I — I ... I j’ust wanted a drink of water.”

“Well, come on in. I think youll find a glass somewhere ”

He went to the sink, watching her as he walked, feeling that she could see him even though he knew that she was blind. His skin tingled. He took a glass from a narrow shelf and filled it from a faucet. As he drank he stole a glance at her over the rim of the glass Her face was still, tilted, wait- ing. It reminded him of a dead man’s face he had once seen. Then he realized that Mrs. Dalton had turned and listened to the sound of his feet as he had walked. She knows exactly where I’m standing, he thought.

“You like your room?” she asked; and as she spoke he

NATtVE SON

62

realized that she had been standing there waiting to hear the sound of his glass as it had clinked on the sink.

“Oh, yessum ”

"I hope you’re a careful driver."

“Oh, yessum I’ll be careful.”

“Did you ever drive before?”

“Yessum. But it was a grocery truck.”

He had the feeling that talking to a blind person was like talking to someone whom he himself could scarcely see.

“How far did you say you went in school. Bigger?”

“To the eighth grade, mam.”

“Did you ever think of going back?”

“Well, I gotta work now, mam.

“Suppose you had the chance to go back?”

“Well, I don’t know, mam.”

“The last man who worked here went to night school and got an education.”

“Yessum.”

“What would you want to be if you had an education?”

“I don’t know, mam ”

“Did you ever think about it?”

“No’m.”

"You would rather work?”

“I reckon I would, mam.”

“Well, we’ll talk about that some other time. I think you’d better get the car for Miss Dalton now.”

“Yessum.”

He left her standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, exactly as he had found her. He did not know just how to take her; she made him feel that she would judge all he did harshly but kindly. He had a feeling toward her that was akin to that which he held toward his mother. The difference in his feelings toward Mrs. Dalton and his mother was that he felt that his mother wanted him to do the things she wanted him to do, and he felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do. But he did not want to go to night school Night school was all right, but be had other plans. Well, he didn’t know just what they were right now, but he was working them out.

The night air had grown warmer A wind had risen. He lit a cigarette and unlocked the garage; the door swung in and again he was surprised and pleased to see the hghts

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63

spring on automatically. These people’s got everything, he mused. He examined the car, it was a dark blue Buick, with steel spoke wheels and of a new make. He stepped back from it and looked it over; then he opened the door and looked at the dashboard He was a little disappointed that the car was not so expensive as he had hoped, but what it lacked in price was more than made up for in color and style. ‘‘It's all right," he said half-aloud. He got m and backed it into the drive- way and turned it round and pulled it up to the side door.

‘‘Is that you. Bigger?”

The girl stood on the steps.

‘‘Yessum.”

He got out and held the rear door open for her.

"Thank you ’’

He touched his cap and wondered if it were the right thing to do.

“Is it that university-school out there on the Midway, mam?”

Through the rear mirror above him he saw her hesitate before answering.

“Yes; that’s the one.”

He pulled the car into the street and headed south, driv- ing about thirty-five miles an hour. He handled the car ex- pertly, picking up speed at the beginning of each block and slowing slightly as he approached each street intersection.

‘‘You drive well,” she said.

“Yessum,” he said proudly.

He watched her through the rear mirror as he drove; she was kind of pretty, but very little She looked like a doll in a show window: black eyes, white face, red lips. And she was not acting at all now as she had acted when he first saw her In fact, she had a remote look in her eyes. He stopped the car at Forty-seventh Street for a red light; he did not have to stop again until he reached Fifty-first Street where a long line of cars formed in front of him and a long line in back He held the steering wheel lightly, waiting for the line to move forward. He had a keen sense of power when driving; the feel of a car added something to him He loved to press his foot against a pedal and sail along, watching others stand still, seeing the asphalt road unwind under him The lights hashed from red to green and he nosed the car forward.

64

NATIVE SON

“Biggerl"

“Yessum.**

“Turn at this comer and pull up on a side street.”

“Here, mam?”

“Yes; here.”

Now, what on earth did this mean? He pulled the car off Cottage Grove Avenue and drew to a curb He turned to look at her and was startled to see that she was sitting on the sheer edge of the back seat, her face some six mches from his.

“I scare you?” she asked softly, smilmg.

“Oh, no’m,” he mumbled, bewildered.

He watched her through the mirror. Her tiny white hands dangled over the back of the front seat and her eyes looked out vacantly.

“I don’t know how to say what I’m going to say,” she said.

He said nothing. There was a long silence. What in all hell did this ^1 want? A street car rumbled by. Behind him, reflected in the rear mirror, he saw the traffic lights flash from green to red, and back again. Well, whatever she was going to say, he wished she would say it and get it over. This girl was strange She did the unexpected every minute. He waited for her to speak She took her hands from the back of the front seat and fumbled in her purse.

"Gotta match?”

“Yessum.”

He dug a match from his vest pocket.

“Strike it,” she said.

He bimked. He struck the match and held the flame for her. She smoked awhile in silence.

“You’re not a tattletale, are you?” she asked with a smile.

He opened his mouth to reply, but no words came. What she had asked and the tone of voice in which she had asked it made him feel that he ought to have answered in some way; but what?

“I’m not going to the University,” she said at last. “But you can forget that. I want you to drive me to the Loop But if anyone should ask you, then I went to the University, see, Bigger?”

“Yessum, it’s all right with me,” he mumbled.

“I think I can trust you.”

“Yessum.”

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65

“After all, I'm on your side.”

Now, what did that mean? She was on his side. What side was he on? Did she mean that she liked colored people? Well, he had heard that about her whole family. Was she really crazy? How much did her folks know of how she acted? But if she were really crazy, why did Mr. Dalton let him drive her out?

“I’m going to meet a friend of mine who’s also a friend of yours,” she said.

“Fnend of mine!" he could not help exclaiming.

“Oh, you don’t know him yet,” she said, laughing.

“Oh.”

“Go to the Outer Drive and then to 16 Lake Street.”

“Yessum.”

Maybe she was talking about the reds? That was it! But none of his friends were reds. What was all this? If Mr. Dal- ton should ask him if he had taken her to the University, he would have to say yes and depend upon her to back him up. But suppose Mr Dalton had someone watching, someone who would tell where he had really taken her? He had heard that many rich people had detectives working for them. If only he knew what this was all about he would feel much better. And she had said that she was going to meet someone who was a friend of his He didn’t want to meet any Com munists. They didn't have any money. He felt that it was all right for a man to go to jail for robbery, but to go to jail for fooling around with reds was bunk. Well, he would dnve her; that was what he had been hired for. But he was going to watch his step in this business. The only thing he hoped was that she would not make him lose his job. He pulled the car off the Outer Drive at Seventh Street, drove north on Michigan Boulevard to Lake Street, then headed west for two blocks, looking tor number 16.

“It’s right here. Bigger.”

“Yessum.”

He pulled to a stop in front of a dark building.

“Wait,” she said, getting out of the car

He saw her smiling broadly at him, almost laughing. He felt that she knew every feeling and thought he had at that moment and he turned his head away in confusion. Goddamn that woman!

“1 won’t be long,” she said.

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She started off, then tamed back.

•Take it easy, Bigger. You’ll understand it better bye and bye.”

“Yessura,” ho said, trying to smile; but couldn’t.

“Isn’t there a song like that, a song your people sing?”

“Like what, mam?”

“We’ll understand it better bye and bye?”

“Oh, yessum.”

She was an odd girl, all right. He felt something in her over and above the fear she inspired in him She responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she. And he had never felt that before in a white person. But why? Was this some kind of game? The guarded feeling of freedom he had while listening to her was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do.

He looked at the biiilding into which she had gone; it was old and impjunted; there were no lights in the windows or doorway. Maybe she was meeting her sweetheart? If that was all, then things would straighten out, But if she had gone to meet those Communists? And what were Communists like, anyway? Was she one? What made people Communists? He remembered seeing many cartoons of Communists in newspapers and always they had flaming torches in their hands and wore beards and were trying to commit murder or set things on fire. People who acted that way were crazy. All he could recall having heard about Communists was as- sociated in his mind with darkness, old houses, people speak- ing in whispers, and trade unions on strike. And this was something like it

He stiffened; the door into which she had gone opened. She came out, followed by a young white man. They walked to the car; but, instead of getting into the back seat, they came to the side of the car and stood, facing him.

“Oh, Bigger, this is Jan. And Jan, this is Bigger Thomas.” Jan smiled broadly, then extended an open palm toward him. Bigger’s entire body tightened with suspense and dread. “How are you, Bigger?”

Bigger’s right hand gripped the steering wheel and he wondered if he ought to shake hands with this white man. “I’m fine,” he mumbled.

FEAR

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