Getting Richard right

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2001 by Cobb, William Jelani

RICHARD WRIGHT: HE LIFE AND TIMES By Hazel Rowley(Henry Holt, $35) It is easy at this distant remove, to forget the genius of Black self-invention. In these days of multiplatinum selling musicians and Pulitzer prize-winning authors, we scarcely recognize the immense artistic will it took for that first generation of "Black and unknown bards" to create themselves and lay the broad foundation for Black art and literature in America. In the abject depths of the early 20th century, it required Herculean effort to be simply Black and literate; to be a Black literati was a superlative accomplishment. Robert Park, the renowned sociologist and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington, was supremely conscious of this fact. Upon first making the acquaintance of Richard Wright (1908-- 1960), the scholar asked bluntly, "How in hell did you happen?"

Hazel Rowley's new biography, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, is an excellent chronicle of how the first major African American novelist "happened." Fortified by meticulous research and clear, lucid prose, the volume is a detailed and compelling reconstruction of Wright's life from the backwater shanties of Mississippi, where he was born, to the bohemian streets of Paris, where he died a half-century later.

Born in 1908 to Nathan and Ella Wright - both of whose parents had been slaves - his childhood was a metaphor for the trials of Black people in the nadir of post-Reconstruction America. Inheriting the poverty that was the lot of Black Mississippi, Nathan Wright struggled vainly to improve his family's fortunes. When Richard was 5 years old, Nathan simply gave up and abandoned the family. After his exit, poverty forced Ella Wright to relinquish custody of Richard and his younger brother, Leon, to a state home. When Ella suffered an incapacitating stroke at age 35, the family moved in with Wright's maternal grandmother, an ascetic Christian who believed novels were the work of the devil.

By any measure, Wright was an incorrigible young man. In that era in Mississippi, he was the kind of youth that seemed to have a rope with his name on it waiting for him. He refused even the pretense of religion, drew a knife on a relative attempting to discipline him and nursed a simmering resentment for the white supremacist "customs" of his home state. His saving grace was the written word.

Wright's first exposure to secular literature came from a border in his grandmother's home. The young woman gave him access to novels that immediately captivated the adolescent Wright (his grandmother sent the young woman packing for committing such a grave offense). Nevertheless, Wright's incessant "scribbling" and voracious reading became defining characteristics, venues into which he could channel his rebellious energy.

It was not until years later, after the family had joined the mass of Mississippi Negroes making the migration to Chicago, that Wright found a consistent outlet for his literary aspirations. The John Reed club was the first literary forum for Wright - and, importantly, the avenue through which he became exposed to the radical politics that would be central to his life, both artistically and socially, for the next decade.

Named after the American journalist who traveled revolutionary Russia, the clubs were a virtual training ground for Communist aesthetes. It was in the John Reed workshops that Wright began working on a series of short stories that would comprise his first collection, Uncle Tom's Children (1938).

It was in the interracial Communist circles of Chicago that Wright began dating white women. As a young man in Mississippi, Wright had known Black men who were castrated and murdered for the most innocuous exchanges with white women; among the Communists, interracial relationships were not only tolerated, but encouraged.

Moreover, as Rowley establishes, Wright's relationship to Black women was complex and multilayered. His published fiction displays a deep ambivalence toward Black females, yet Wright spent years laboring on a manuscript that would detail the particular horrors visited upon "the women of the race." Wright proposed to two Black women before his first marriage to Dhimah Rose Meidman, a Jewish dancer. The union was a disaster (her son uncharitably described her as a "sophisticated airhead") and dissolved within six months.

In the wake of his failed marriage, Wright turned his attentions to his first novel. Native Son was written during Wright's daily sojourns to Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park. In creating Bigger Thomas, Wright had violated every sacred literary creed of the preceding generation of African American writers. The arts and letters were, the theory held, a medium to present the best visage of the race possible; they were expected to function as a type of aesthetic public relations project. To many, Black and white, Bigger was an urban nightmare; he was the personification of the worst stereotypes of the race. But to others, he was an unprecedented indictment of American racism and a threat issued in bold print.