The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  But sharecropping, the immediate heir to slavery in the South, offered little hope of economic gain, and within a few years whites began to reassert their power, using terror and intimidation to strip black people of the right to vote. Segregation laws soon followed and by the early years of the twentieth century—the years of Richard Wright’s childhood—African Americans were trapped in a crippled imitation of freedom, subjected constantly to the whims of Southern whites.

  “I never heard him speak of white people,” Wright later wrote of his grandfather. “I think he hated them too much to talk of them.”

  For Wright, however, whites were not the source of his earliest misery, at least not directly, for he suffered instead from the terrifying dysfunctions of his own family. In his autobiography, Black Boy, he opens with a story of the time his mother nearly beat him to death. He was barely four years old when it happened, playing with his brother on a winter day, when he accidentally set fire to the house. In her horror and grief, his mother, Ella Wright, began to beat him with a switch, slashing again and again across his body until he finally passed out from the pain. Later he lapsed into fevers and chills, and a doctor who was called by the family said the boy’s life was hanging in the balance.

  Even after he finally recovered, he was left with an emotionally devastating thought. “. . . I was chastened,” he wrote, “whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me.”

  His childhood anguish continued from there, as the family moved from place to place through the South, and for many years he lived with the feeling that almost all of his relatives disliked him. And then came a newfound terror of whites. When Richard was eight, he and his mother went to live with an aunt in Elaine, Arkansas, a sawmill town where his uncle, Silas Hoskins, had established a profitable saloon for the black mill hands. Hoskins was a controversial figure, resented by whites for his success, and he slept with a pistol by his bed for protection.

  One night he didn’t come home from work, and the family learned that he had been killed—murdered by whites who had also threatened the members of his family. Richard’s aunt and mother fled in panic, taking Richard with them, and the three of them hid for days in a rented room in the town of West Helena. There was never an investigation of the shooting, never a funeral, never a resolution of the terror. “Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst,” Wright would later recount in Black Boy, “and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us . . . Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.”

  For Wright, the only reprieve from the unrelenting agonies of his youth came from an unexpected source, his discovery of books. He had always loved to read in school, but the breakthrough came when he was eighteen and living in Memphis. One morning, as he often did, he bought a copy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and thumbing through the pages, he came to an editorial denouncing H. L. Mencken, the American satirist, for his unkind words about the South. Intrigued, Wright made his way to the public library—an all-white facility in 1926—and presented the librarian with a note he had written himself: Madame: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken? Wright ended the note with the forged signature of a white man, and the librarian, though dubious, gave him two of Mencken’s titles, Prejudices and A Book of Prefaces.

  That night in his room Wright found himself reading until almost dawn, astonished by the power of Mencken’s prose. “I was jarred and shocked by the style,” he remembered, “the clear, clean sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen . . . He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as weapons? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.”

  Other trips to the library quickly followed, for Mencken, in his criticism, introduced Wright to authors whose names he had never even heard: Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Stephen Crane, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Tolstoy, T. S. Eliot. “Reading was like a drug, a dope,” Wright recalled, and it awakened something deep inside. “I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.”

  I had learned these things about Richard Wright, had followed his journey toward becoming a writer, by reading Black Boy. But it was not my introduction to him. That came in the form of Uncle Tom’s Children, his book of short stories published in 1938, a slash-and-burn portrayal of the South, written after he had moved to the North. The fury of the prose was gripping in itself—“words as weapons” describing in graphic, unforgettable terms the racial cruelties he had seen growing up.

  The first story is the one most people remember. “Big Boy Leaves Home” contains, in the course of its forty-five pages, one of the most horrifying scenes in American fiction—a black boy lynched, tarred and feathered and burned alive, for his unintended role in the killing of a white man. Another of his friends being hunted by the mob is forced to hide in a cave nearby, unable to do anything but watch.

  The scream came again. Big Boy trembled and looked. The mob was running down the slopes, leaving the fire clear. Then he saw a writhing white mass cradled in yellow flame, and heard screams, one on top of the other, each shriller and shorter than the last.

  It is a scene so vivid, so elemental in its violence that even black writers like Zora Neale Hurston were appalled—startled by the lack of redemption in the story. But Wright believed he was telling the truth, forcing the country to confront, perhaps in a way that it never had, the reality of violence and lynching in the South.

  He also knew there was more than savagery in his brutal word pictures.

  In the last of the four novellas in the book, a story that he called “Bright and Morning Star,” he sketched an aching, fully realized portrait of Sue, a black woman struggling to understand the world.

  Long hours of scrubbing floors for a few cents a day had taught her who Jesus was, what a great boon it was to cling to Him, to be like Him and suffer without a mumbling word. She had poured the yearning of her life into the songs, feeling buoyed with a faith beyond this world. The figure of the Man nailed in agony to the Cross, His burial in a cold grave, His transfigured Resurrection, His being breath and clay, God and Man—all had focused her feelings upon an imagery which had swept her life into a wondrous vision.

  But against that faith and her love of old hymns loomed the terrible reality of the world, and she had two sons who were ready to fight, ready to struggle in the here and now for the justice that lay in a different kind of vision. Lacking other allies, her boys had joined the Communist party, a decision more common in the 1930s than many people remember, and they dreamed of a day when poor whites and blacks would come together against a common foe. Slowly, inevitably, the dream had become their mother’s as well, and she was astonished at the way it made her feel.

  And day by day her sons had ripped from her startled eyes her old vision, and image by image had given her a new one, different, but great and strong enough to fling her into the light of another grace. The wrongs and sufferings of black men had taken the place of Him nailed to the Cross; the meager beginnings of the party had become another Resurrection; and the hate of those who would destroy her new faith had quickened in her a hunger to feel how deeply her new strength went.

  She knew they might pay a terrible price, but like her sons she was willing to pay it, for she knew it would be the cost o
f their faith.

  As I read these dark and disturbing stories, written with such improbable beauty, I was struck by the power of the truth they contained. I had already read enough history to know that the grim statistics were on Wright’s side. As historian Joel Williamson has noted, during a period beginning in 1889 and lasting through the end of World War II, nearly four thousand blacks were lynched in America, mostly in the South. This was more than one a week for nearly sixty years, and these were not just random murders, but grisly, stylized executions, most often carried out by a mob.

  “There was indeed,” Williamson wrote, “something new and horribly palpable on the earth. It was signalized by the mob, the rushing, swelling fury of a mass of struggling men, the bloody and mangled bodies, and the smell of burning flesh.”

  In Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright had given that reality a face, but now the questions loomed unanswered. What were we to do with that legacy? Was it possible for America to deal with it at all?

  II

  For Richard Wright, the answer was no. Or at least that seemed to be his verdict when he moved to Paris in 1946 and entered the American expatriate community. He soon became friends with the existentialist authors Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, and with a young American writer, James Baldwin, who had recently arrived in Paris from Harlem. Baldwin shared with Wright a literary quest to come to terms with his blackness, and all the implications that it held.

  Baldwin was born in 1924, and his own life story, though set initially in a different place, held similar memories of family dysfunction. Raised in Harlem, Baldwin never knew his biological father, but his stepfather, David Baldwin, was a cruel, bombastic tyrant of a man who wrapped his terrible temper in piety. He worked for his daily wages in a factory, but he also served as a part-time preacher, and whatever his gifts may have been in the pulpit, his children cowered in the face of his rage.

  On the day he died, August 2, 1943, a race riot broke out in Harlem, and in Baldwin’s first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, he remembered the funeral procession.

  We drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass . . . He had lived and died in intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that it was now mine.

  Again and again in the course of his writings, Baldwin made clear his own understanding that racism in America—and the crippled humanity that went along with it—was not a problem confined to the South. His first encounter with segregation had come when he was in his late teens and went to work in a defense plant in New Jersey. The restaurants nearby refused to serve him, and his supervisors and white co-workers all seemed to hate him for his self-esteem—his refusal, simply, to carry himself with any kind of deference.

  For all his life, he had sensed his father’s hatred of whites, but his father seemed to hate everybody, or at least to mistrust them, and in the schools that Baldwin attended (and in which he had flourished, largely because of his gift with the language) he had found white teachers who were genuinely kind. But now, he discovered, there was a new kind of tension in the streets of Harlem, for the nation had now entered World War II and black soldiers who had gone to fight for their country wrote home about the indignities they encountered—not at the hands of Germans or Japanese, but from fellow soldiers who were white.

  Many of these indignities occurred in the South, where the black recruits had gone for basic training. But then came the night in 1943 when much of Harlem exploded in rage. It began with an argument between a black soldier and a white policeman, which ended with the soldier being shot. In the violence that followed, there was massive looting of white-owned stores, and Baldwin saw how destructive such bitterness could be.

  And yet he had to admit that he felt it. Sorting through his emotions in the years that followed, he found himself writing from his Paris sanctuary: “I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress: that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they had failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world.”

  I had read some of these words as a college student in the 1960s. But my first real dive into Baldwin’s work came sometime early in the 1970s. I discovered an article in Harper’s magazine, published in 1958, recounting his first visit to the South. As it happened, he had come to Charlotte, North Carolina, the city where I was working as a journalist, and the story he had come to write about—the desegregation of Charlotte’s public schools—was the one I was covering, more than a decade after it began.

  In September 1957, four teenagers had broken the color barrier in the city, and Baldwin read about it in a Paris newspaper. There was a photograph that went with the story, the image of a girl who was maybe fifteen making her way through a mob of white students. She seemed so alone in her prim, checked dress with a bow at the collar, her head erect, no trace of fear in her round, pretty eyes. “It filled me with both hatred and pity,” Baldwin wrote in Harper’s, “and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her!”

  He decided immediately that he would leave his expatriate friends in Paris and travel to the American South, a place that had always filled him with dread. He remembered later how he stared out the window of his plane and noticed the rust-red color of the soil. He couldn’t suppress the thought, he said, “that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees. My mind was filled with the image of a black man, younger than I, perhaps, or my own age, hanging from a tree, while white men watched him and cut out his sex with a knife . . . The southern landscape—the trees, the silence, the liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great distances—seems designed for violence, seems, almost, to demand it. What passions cannot be unleashed on a southern night!”

  In the end, however, Baldwin found something on his journey he had not been expecting—Southern white people who, even in 1957, were grappling honestly with the changes beginning to take place around them. On his stop in Charlotte, he met Ed Sanders, principal of the city’s Central High School, where one of the black teenagers had been assigned. “He explained to me, with difficulty,” Baldwin wrote, “that desegregation was contrary to everything he’d ever seen or believed. He’d never dreamed of a mingling of the races; had never lived that way himself and didn’t suppose he ever would . . . The eyes came to life then, or a veil fell, and I found myself staring at a man in anguish. The eyes were full of pain and bewilderment . . . It is not an easy thing to be forced to reexamine a way of life and to speculate, in a personal way, on the general injustice.”

  As it happened, by the time I read Baldwin’s article in Harper’s, I had come to know Ed Sanders well; knew him as a good and decent man who had walked side by side through the mob with the first black student who came to his school, and had dedicated much of his career to the cause of integration. I asked him sometime early in the 1970s if he remembered Baldwin’s visit in 1957.

  Oh, yes, he said, he remembered it well. He had been deeply impressed by this earnest young writer from New York City, who had come to Charlotte by way of Paris. “He was not critical of us,” said Sanders. “He was just asking a whole lot of questions.” Certainly, it was clear enough to Sanders that Baldwin was there to document injustice, but he also seemed to be eager to learn, perhaps to record those glimmers of decency that might matter in the struggle within his own heart.

  That, at least, was our speculation when Sanders and I talked about the encounter, and it was soon after that that I picked up a copy of The Fire Next Time. In this extended essay, published in 1963, Baldwin wrestled with the lure of black separatism, which was gaining momentum in the 1960s, as powerful leaders such as Mal
colm X gave voice to the rage in the nation’s ghettoes. It was an anger that Baldwin understood very well.

  The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.

  It seemed to me as I read both Baldwin and Wright that I was seeing the poetry and evolution of black rage. For here was Wright in the 1930s, armed with the terrible weapon of his words, flinging the truth at white America, hoping for nothing except to be heard. But now, barely more than twenty years later, James Baldwin improbably was hoping for more. He understood the toll of his country’s racism, in the South, certainly, but also in the North. And yet he had seen certain things along the way—a young black girl in Charlotte, North Carolina, serene in the face of the white mob around her, and a white man, too, who later faced the same kind of mob, guiding a black student into his school. Perhaps neither one had wanted to be there, but each had come to a powerful understanding: that they were, inevitably, caught up together in the reluctant quest to build a better world.

  For Baldwin in the end, neither black nor white could afford the luxury of anything less, for the price was likely to be measured in violence, and even worse, in a spirit-killing bitterness that affected us all. “We, the black and the white,” he wrote, “deeply need each other . . . if we are really to become a nation.” But the question, he wondered, was whether we would realize it in time. Writing in 1963, Baldwin was afraid that time was running out, as all Americans, black and white together, approached the prophecy of an old slave song: