"A igger's place": lynching and specularity in Richard Wright's "Fire and Cloud" and 'Native Son.' - b

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Miko Juhani Tuhkanen

In 1947, casting the backward glance of a recent expatriate, Richard Wright observes in an interview, "To be American in the United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely black people and anyone else who can be easily identified" ("I Feel" 126; emphasis added). In the United States, Wright suggests, such things as citizenship are determined to a large extent through the subject's - more precisely, his or her body's - relation to specularity; questions of authority and disenfranchisement in American society relate to the ways in which the subject is located within the regimes of (in)visibility.

In her recent book devoted to uncovering the Western economies of visibility, Robyn Wiegman proposes what seems very much like a reiteration of Wright's argument:

Modern citizenship functions as a disproportionate system in which the universalism ascribed to certain bodies (white, male, propertied) is protected and subtended by the infinite particularity assigned to others (black, female, unpropertied). . . . this system is itself contingent on certain visual relations, where only those particularities associated with the Other are, quite literally, seen. . . . (6)

Similarly, in her influential essay "National Brands/National Body," Lauren Berlant argues that, in the United States, corporeality and citizenship (and its consequent rights) seem to be incompatible with one another. ". . . white male privilege," she writes, "has been veiled by the rhetoric of the bodiless citizen, the generic 'person' whose political identity is a priori precisely because it is, in theory, non-corporeal." Unable to approximate the "ideal model of bodily abstraction . . . American women and African-Americans have never had the privilege to suppress the body" (Berlant 112-13). Wiegman agrees with this: "The white male [is] 'freed' from the corporeality that might otherwise impede his insertion into the larger body of national identity," whereas, for the African-American male, "the imposition of an extreme corporeality . . . define[s] his distance from the privileged ranks of citizenry" (94).

In this paper, I propose to delineate the specificities of the African-American "place" in the field of vision by turning to two of Richard Wright's texts, his 1940 novel Native Son and his 1938 short story "Fire and Cloud." What becomes explicit from the comparison between Wright's hugely influential debut novel and the much less well-known story is a continuity; that is, both the differences and similarities between two practices of subjugation through enforced visibility. We will see how the effects of overdetermined specularity on African-American subjects depend on "racial," epidermal markings being naturalized differences which are there, ineffaceably in full view on "black" bodies, as opposed to corporeal inscriptions which have been imposed onto the bodies of African-American subjects at any particular time.

Lynching and/as Enforced Visibility

While he was composing Native Son, Wright also wrote "Fire and Cloud," which originally appeared in Story Magazine in 1938. The story tells of an African-American minister, Dan Taylor, who, because of his influence among his congregation, is approached by Communist activists to endorse their cause, while being intimidated by the town's white mayor and law enforcement officers not to get involved. When he will not promise his white visitors to tell his starving congregation not to take part in a march organized by the communists, a white mob kidnaps him and drives him to the outskirts of the town where they beat him savagely. Bleeding, he makes his way back to his neighborhood. Taylor's hesitant ideas of justice are galvanized into a conviction by his lynching,(1) and he makes a stand: As the starving members of his community gather at the church, he addresses them, saying that they have to show a united front if they are to defeat the white law which keeps them in poverty and hunger. As the crowd marches from the African-American section of the town, they are joined by the poor white population. Reaching City Hall, they are met by a blockade of policemen and other white people, including the mayor. The threat of further violence is deflected as the mayor, persuaded by the multitude of the crowd, prepares to address the people, apparently ready to compromise to meet their demands. The story ends with Taylor, seeing the mayor hushing the crowd, saying to himself: "'Freedom belongs t the strong? "(406).(2)

"Fire and Cloud" has usually been read as a straightforward, realistic depiction of the beginnings of politicized class consciousness in a rural African-American community. The story, that is, has been regarded as a piece of more or less pure political propaganda in which Wright shows how the disenfranchised, poor black and white people are able to confront their rich, capitalist oppressors as a united front under the banner of communism; Michel Fabre, for instance, writes that the story "was expressly designed to show the development of political awareness among Negroes" (134). While one needs to remain thoroughly suspicious of such propagandistic readings of even Wright's earliest texts,(3) for my present purposes, I want to contrast the scene of Taylor's lynching to what I consider a crucial passage from Native Son. In this scene, the novel's protagonist, Bigger Thomas, visits his new employer's house for the first time and finds himself face to face with a white man, Mr. Dalton. By reading these two scenes together, we are able to elaborate on the ways in which visibility works to determine "racially" marked subjects.