Books: Bad Nigger

NATIVE SON—Richard Wright—Harper ($2.50).

Richard Wright is a 31-year-old, Mississippi-born Negro who two years ago won a $500 prize competition with a collection of short stories titled Uncle Tom's Children. Among them were the most powerful lynching stories in U. S. fiction.

This week he dwarfed his first performance with a full-length novel, Native Son. Laid in Chicago, only a Negro could have written it; but until now no Negro has possessed either the talent or the daring to write it.

Native Son tells the story of a "bad nigger," coal-black, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, who lives with his pious mother, a mild sister and brother in a one-bedroom tenement apartment on Chicago's South Side. In a flawlessly keyed first scene Bigger smashes a rat with a skillet, frightening his sister into a faint. Sullen and sassy through breakfast, he begs the last quarter in the house, joins his poolroom pals to plan a delicatessen stickup. Instead, getting cold feet, he picks a fight with them. Bigger and his pals play a game of mimic called "white," speculate on whites' lives, particularly as portrayed in movies of the rich. Rarely has literature afforded such ruthlessly intimate glimpses into anti-white thoughts.

That afternoon Bigger is hired as chauffeur by Philanthropist Dalton, who makes his money in Negro tenements. It is a good job except for the philanthropist's radical daughter Mary. His first instructions are to drive her that evening to a lecture. She redirects him to a rendezvous with her Communist lover. What follows, as baffled and suspicious Bigger is accepted as a comrade, is one of the most devastating accounts yet printed of that tragicomic, Negrophilous bohemianism which passes among Communists as a solution of the Negro Problem.

About four that morning Bigger murders Mary in her bedroom, carries her downstairs in a trunk, burns her body in the furnace, conceives an alibi to implicate her Communist lover. Bigger's explanation to himself is that the murder was an accident, would not have happened if she had not passed out on rum. Shortly before he is caught in a rooftop chase he murders his girl Bessie with a brick, throws her down an airshaft.

But for all its murder-mystery suspense, Native Son is no more simply a crime story than was Crime and Punishment. Bigger's murders only pull the trigger of Author Wright's bigger story—the murderous potentialities of the whole U. S. Negro problem.