Is It Noir? Native Son by Richard Wright

Recently, I listened to Richard Wright's Native Son on audio. There were a number of reasons, not the least of which being it's on a list of banned books I made two years ago. I did read up on the book ahead of time because it could easily have ended up on a list of classics.

The book, published in 1940, is a treatise on racism at the tail-end of the Depression. Little mention is made of the coming war. Instead, it depicts public relief as a trap as many of its recipients are not permitted to climb out of poverty. They're broke and less-than-citizens, and forever they will stay that way.

That's where Bigger Thomas finds himself. Living in a single room with his mother, brother, and sister, Bigger is idle but restless. He and some friends plot a robbery of a deli which falls apart when one of them provokes Bigger into a fight. Instead, he relents to his mother's pressure and takes a job chauffeuring for the Dalton family. On his first night, he is to take their daughter Mary to a lecture at the university. She has other plans, mainly meeting up with her boyfriend and going to see how those people live. Meaning Black people. Mary and her boyfriend are communists. They know Black people are being kept down and want to help. But Mary, the daughter of rich white parents, is absolutely clueless. They go back to Bigger's neighborhood and insist he dine with them at a diner where everyone knows him. They think they're doing him a favor, but Bigger is humiliated. 

The real trouble begins when Bigger brings Mary home. She's so drunk she can't walk, and Bigger accidentally kills her. Now we get into noir territory. Bigger covers up by burning Mary's body in the family's enormous coal furnace and taking her luggage to the train station as she was leaving on a trip the next morning. When the luggage is returned, and people in Detroit call asking where she is, Bigger convinces his girlfriend to help him fake a kidnapping. But she panics, and he kills her, too. He's found out when one of the reporters crowding the Dalton home helps change the ashes in the furnace, and Mary's charred bones fall out.

Once Bigger is arrested and in the system, Wright seamlessly moves to making his case about systemic racism, how uncomfortable whites of the day are in acknowledging it, and how monumentally stupid the Red Scare is. But in prison, from the most evil people (Think Germany in the late 1920s) to most noble (Henry David Thoreau in jail for not paying his taxes in protest) have a lot of time to write out their grievances. Bigger doesn't write them, but he talks them through with his lawyer, who in turn interprets them for the court, sparing no one. 

But is it noir?

Richard Wright said it was. In fact, he saw that as the best way to get his point across, something more than one crime writer has stated once their books have gotten meatier. Wright's work usually centers on the Black experience in the mid-twentieth century and life in Chicago of the Depression. But he also said this book was "fun" to write. He's clearly a fan of writers like James M. Cain, who delighted in how badly he cold screw over an everyman protagonist. And Wright is definitely taking sadistic glee in throwing every available roadblock in Bigger's way. Plus, at a lecture, Wright said he liked the motif of a modern (for 1940) crime novel. This from a writer who produced mostly short stories and essays. So, like Shakespeare's bewildering attempt at a blockbuster, Titus Andronicus (or... What Happens When George RR Martin actually finishes Game of Thrones), Wright is stretching himself. Naturally, some of his contemporaries, most notably James Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain fame, didn't like it. Baldwin called it a protest novel, which it very much is. But so is Ellison's Invisible Man. Scratch the surface, and Baldwin likely didn't like that kind of work being done as what he considered a dime novel. 

One can imagine the reactions of various readers to Native Son. Love it or hate it, you can't deny it stays with you. And it is noir as hell.

Next column, I revisit The Merchant of Venice, in which the movie version has Al Pacino stealing every scene he's in.