The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick

African American Review, Winter, 1999 by Elizabeth Schultz

[Bigger] looked ahead and saw something huge and round and white looming up in the dark: a bulk rising up sheer from the snow of the roof and swelling in the night, glittering in the glare of the searching knives of light.... He wove among the chimneys, his feet slipping sliding over snow, keeping in mind that white looming bulk which he had glimpsed ahead of him.... He ran to another ledge, past the white looming bulk which towered directly above him, then stopped, blinking: deep down below was a sea of white faces and he saw himself falling, spinning straight down into that ocean of boiling hate. [13] ... He remembered the quick glimpse he had had of the white looming bulk; he looked up. Directly above him, white with snow, was a high water tank with a round flat top. (307-08)

As Melville generates a sense of suspense by delaying Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick through 132 chapters, Wright arouses his reader's anxiety for Bigger by prolonging the moment of his capture. By postponing the precise identification of the water tower, he places Bigger in the heroic posture of Ahab before the White Whale, thereby encouraging his reader's admiration for him. While the White Whale looms over the narrative of Moby-Dick, Wright reverses Melville's color iconography to give his reader "a Negro Bigger Thomas [who] loom[s] as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within the prophecy of our future" ("How" 522).

Wright also draws upon other images of the White Whale in Moby-Dick to convey Bigger's profound antipathy for whiteness and his alienation from white society. Metaphors of both the mask and wall occur through-out Native Son as if in explicit reference to Ahab's well-known quarterdeck speech regarding Moby Dick:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event ... some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.... I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate." (164)

In Bigger's desperate flight across rooftops through the snow, the face of one of his pursuers appears "like a piece of white pasteboard" (305), and later Bigger sees Jan Erlone as wearing "a deforming mask" (334). The wall-- or curtain--in Native Son, however, is white society shoved near to Bigger, beyond which he is forbidden to go; a metaphor permeating Native Son, it is also the impenetrable defensive mechanism which white society causes Bigger to create in order to protect himself from all feelings--except hatred and rage. Wright, thus, parodies Ahab's metaphor of power and inscrutability, inverting them to evoke Bigger's powerlessness and to reveal the psychologically catastrophic impact white racism has upon Bigger.

Initially, Melville describes Ahab as masking himself--as presenting himself to the ship owners and his shipmates in the guise of rationality rather than as displaying his irrational obsession, as promoting the commercial interests of the whaling voyage rather than as revealing his audacious desire for vengeance on Moby Dick. Similarly, Wright describes Bigger initially as masking his feelings and his intentions. In the presence of other blacks--his family and friends-- Wright explains, "he lived... behind a wall, a curtain.... he denied himself and acted tough" (9). In the presence of whites, he also denies himself. However, with them, he acts as they demand--with deprecation, complaisance, subservience. Responding to Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, Peggy, and Mary with" 'Yessuh' "and" 'Yessum,' "he is consequently perceived as" 'a quiet colored boy'" (220). Following Mary's murder, as he contrives his plans for a ransom note, and as he finds himself confronting white police and journalists, he persists in acting the role of docile servant; at this point, however, his feelings of impotency are privately transformed into feelings of powerful pride. He believes that the white world cannot imagine that one who is "black and clownlike" (170), "a black, timid Negro" (214), or "a meek black boy like him" (218) would have been able to devise a kidnaping, let alone execute a murder as successfully as he has done.