Call-and-response: tracing the ideological shifts of Richard Wright through his correspondence with friends and fellow literati

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Matthew M. Briones

There are other chapters that should be in the book; for example, what the psychoanalysts have discovered about the Negro. Here's what a chap said to me the other day. He was looking at a "sissy" on the street, and he commented to me, "That fellow had to give up the struggle," and I didn't get it at first. Then he explained. He said, "That Negro came to the point where he could no longer maintain his manhood in this culture, so he completely gave up and became a sissy. It's a way to solve his problem. Negroes are biologically men; the culture describes how a man should behave; but a Negro can't behave that way. Some become so frustrated that the only thing they can do is retreat and say, 'I'm not a man; I'm a woman, a sissy, or something, but I'm not a man. So I'll marcel my hair and flaunt it in people's face that I'm not a man, because I can't carry the emotional load.'" That's what's happening to Negro personality.

You could lead this thing, Dick -- I don't mean a formal movement or anything like that, but you could nurture it, encourage it....

A book like that would startle and convulse and shock to its moral depths white American society -- and Negro society, for that matter. I hope you really want to do it. (Letter to Wright, 22 Oct. 1944, Wright Papers; my emphasis)

Judging from the 188 letters Cayton sent to Wright, one may consider Cayton a reliable source, as well as a trusted friend of Wright's. In the early part of the decade, Cayton first introduced Wright to information and sociological concepts that Wright would use in Twelve Million Black Voices. Needless to say, then, Cayton's word was "good" with Wright -- his speaking of a great and "shocking" novel must have appealed to Wright tremendously.

Future correspondences expressed Cayton's desire to work collaboratively with Wright. Although Wright did not explicitly work with Cayton on such projects (he did, however, pen the introduction to Cayton and St. Clair Drake's 1945 sociological study Black Metropolis), Cayton's constant querying must have prompted Wright to be thinking in the direction of that important novel. On April 2, 1945, Cayton writes: "I have in mind writing this summer a book of essays on the Negro and would like to talk it over with you. Perhaps you and I could do it together if you're interested.... What I have in mind now is an expansion of this piece 'Frightened Children of Frightened Parents' into a literary-scientific discussion of the whole question of psychoanalysis and the Negro." Later in the letter, he asks once again for collaboration: "About the whole problem of psychoanalysis I would like to talk to you at length. Especially would I like to discuss the question of what constitutes the rock bottom of the Negro's existence & personality structure -- his earlier psychological conditioning in the family or his reaction to his subjugation.... It is not in the literature and we could make a real contribution if we could express it" (Wright Papers).

As Cayton alludes to in the first of his letters above, Wright was seen as the preeminent leader and forerunner in issues and writings of the American Negro. Hence, Cayton wanted desperately to collaborate with Wright to bolster his own work. Wright had already helped a young James Baldwin secure a Saxton Fellowship in 1945, had attempted to help his childhood buddy Joe Brown with his poetry, and had taken Ralph Ellison under his wing. At this point in the 1940s, many writers looked to Wright for leadership and for instruction. Chester Himes once writes to him: "It is really warming to a new novelist to learn that the petty jealousies, snipings, bickerings, and animosities that have plagued Negro writers are being put aside in this new school which it has fallen your responsibility to head" (qtd. in Rowley 317). In another letter, dated October 10, 1946, Dorothy Norman equally privileges Wright (Wright Papers). (8)