Richard Wright's Lawd Today! And the political uses of modernism

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Brannon Costello

Clearly, Lawd Today! does not end with the revolutionary elan that Mike Gold advocated for the proletarian novel. However, Wright does not leave the door of radical enlightenment completely shut for the characters in this novel. Instead, he holds out hope, however slight, for the possibility of the development of a revolutionary or proletarian or at the very least community-oriented sensibility in Jake and his cronies. In one passage in which all four men speak without dialogue tags to identify the speaker, they achieve a rare moment of potentially meaningful conversation. They remark, "'Ain't it funny how some few folks is rich and just millions is poor? . . . And them few rich folks owns the whole world ... and runs it like they please.. . and the rest ain't got nothing?'" (173). At first, it seems that the men will dismiss this glaring injustice with the typical quasireligious bootstraps fatalism that makes social change seem so untenable; they remark that "'Gawd said the poor'll be with you always. . . an d he was right, too,'" and that "'some folks just ain't got not brains, that's all. If you divided up all the money in the world right now we'd be just where we is tomorrow'" (174). However, the men soon return to the topic of economic and racial oppression, and they even see the Communist Party in a positive light when they remember that "'the Reds sure scared them white folks down South when they put up that fight for the Scottsboro boys'" (176). Even more strikingly, the men begin to exhibit an inkling of community-minded consciousness and a desire, however haltingly expressed, to change the current system. One says that "'a lot of times I been wanting to do things I just wouldn't do. ... And I bet a lot of other folks feel the same way.'" Another responds with "'Now Wait a minute....Now, you see, if all the folks felt like that, why in hell don't they do something?'" "'Ah, hell,'" says another, some guy's got something you want, and you got something he wants, and when you do something you bump into each other ... like you see trains crashing up in the movies.'" However, another of the workers wonders, "'But shucks, if we all was in the same train going in the same direction...'" This line of thought, unfortunately, does not develop far beyond this point; one of the men finally says,"' Aw, man, ain't no sense in talking about things like this,'" and the conversation moves on to other topics (183).

In this brief but significant conversation, Jake, Slim, Al, and Bob demonstrate that their indoctrination into the hegemonic values of acquisitive, individualistic capitalist culture is less than complete, however slightly so. Here, Wright argues that, even in the most apparently irredeemably bourgeois characters, there exists the possibility for an awakening of revolutionary sensibility. In Lawd Today!, rather than offering an oversimplified vision of a romanticized proletariat worker, class-conscious and heroic, struggling against his capitalist oppressors, Wright draws on modernist techniques and themes to paint a complex, unflinching, honest, and sometimes brutal picture of four "common people." These men who feel alienated and hollow after their move to the urban wasteland of Chicago desperately desire something that will lessen their alienation, that will offer some reasonable explanation for their oppressed condition. By showing the pitfalls that lake encounters when he loses the cultural traditions th at helped to sustain him in the South--such as an equally wholehearted belief in the "spirit realm," in the evilness of radicalism, and in the American success myth--Wright both offers us and, perhaps more importantly, sought to offer his 1930s comrades, a better, more complicated and complete vision of how actual common people might feel about society and their position in it, a vision that Communist organizers could use to determine how best to nurture that seed of proletarian consciousness -- perhaps, as he would later suggest, by attempting to re-establish some of those forms of community disrupted by urban Depression life. Notes