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

African American Review, Winter, 1999 by Elizabeth Schultz

As Wright presents Bigger's blackness continuously contrasted with the whiteness of the snow, of the ghostly Mrs. Dalton, her white cat, her white kitchen, he shows visually how Bigger's environment determines racial categorizations. Whiteness, as ubiquitous socially as Melville claims Moby Dick is in the seas, defines and debases his blackness. Although some white characters in Native Son prove benign in Book III, there is no possible moral ambiguity regarding white racism in Wright's novel. Through his signifying revisions, Wright thus challenges not only Melville's nineteenth-century epistemological deliberations regarding whiteness, but also the negligence of Moby-Dick's critics in the 1930s regarding race, by naming the construction of racial categories as a demonstrable social evil, deeply affecting multiple aspects of American life.

Both Ahab and Bigger, however, have been permanently scarred--mutilated and humiliated, physically and psychologically--by the power of whiteness. In Ahab's case, external mutilation precedes internal mutilation; the White Whale having taken his leg, Ahab's "torn body and gashed soul bled into one another" (185), leaving him "gnawed within and scorched without" (186). His scars are visible--a "slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish" (123), darts down his face and neck--and he stands on a white whalebone stump instead of a leg. Although Melville gives his reader the option of understanding the first of these scars as a natural birthmark, he presents both of them as symbolically signifying Ahab's human limitations, his imperfection, his incompleteness. It is his missing leg, however, which prompts Ahab to identify with Moby Dick "not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperation ... all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race" (184).

As if signifying on Melville's general reference to "race" here as designating the black race in particular, Wright shows the source of Bigger's "bodily woes [and] intellectual and spiritual exasperation" to be the white race. Bigger's scars, thus, are not symbolic of a general human condition; they are the peculiarly painful manifestations of racism as practiced in the United States. In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright claims the necessity of his representing Bigger's "relationship with white America, both North and South,... a relationship whose effects are carried by every Negro, like scars, somewhere in his body and mind" (529). Unlike Ahab, Bigger bears no visible, bodily scars. However, Wright repeatedly indicates that white society's negative perceptions of blackness cause Bigger to regard his body as eradicated and deformed:

They made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him .... He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin.... He felt naked, transparent; he felt that this white man, having helped to put him down, having helped to deform him, held him up now to look at him and be amused. (76)