THE AMBIVALENT ROLE OF THE BLACK FAMILY IN RICHARD WRIGHT'S MAJOR WRITINGS

Abstract

According to an analysis of the 1910 census, "black mothers with children were more than three times as likely to be living without a male partner in the household as were white mothers with children, [and] black children were more often raised by kin other than their parents, even when the parents were still alive" (Cherlin 1992:109-110). According to Green (2009:47), this work seems to be Wright's "attempt to address his feelings about his father as the foundation for the feelings that emerge in his life after his father leaves." [...]the only communication he seems to have with Richard is when he scolds or beats him. Since the father is gone, Ella Wright is now the one who has to take over the responsibility to provide for the family, she is now the mother and the father to her children and has no man in her life who could complement what she does.

Headnote

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, the legacy of slavery greatly contributed to the problem of social dislocation of African Americans and it affected the bonds between family members. The family social structure shifted from the nuclear to the extended family, as single parents struggled under the burden of racism. In this article, Richard Wright's portrayal of the black family in his novels will be analyzed as a place of refuge from the oppressive environment but also as a source of destruction and restriction.

Keywords: African-American family structure, poverty, racism, social invisibility

1. Introduction

In the late 19th and the early 20th century, the burden of racism and the social restrictions deeply affected the relationship between husbands and wives as the feeling of inequality and limited opportunities undermined men's roles as fathers and husbands. When compared to the white families and in relation to the turn of the century African-American family structure, "African-American women were more likely to become parents, bear children as teenagers, have out-of wedlock births, remain single, experience marital disruption if ever married and remain unmarried if separated or divorced" (Morgan et al. 1993:799), and as a direct result of this, "African-American children were much more likely than white children to live in female-headed households or in a household without either parent" (Morgan et. al. 1993:800). According to an analysis of the 1910 census, "black mothers with children were more than three times as likely to be living without a male partner in the household as were white mothers with children, [and] black children were more often raised by kin other than their parents, even when the parents were still alive" (Cherlin 1992:109-110). Inevitably, the relatives became a support system as well as a form of replacement for the missing parent. Research showed that extended households were more common among families headed by single females (Anderson and Allen 1984:11), which was attributed to the mother's greater economic needs.

It is these tribulations of everyday African-American life that Richard Wright, the first black best-selling author in American history and one of the leading writers of a powerful protest fiction of the World War II era, portrayed in his major writings which won him international acclaim. In his novels Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945) and The Outsider (1953), he portrayed the discrimination which was deeply rooted in the American everyday life during the first half of the twentieth century and, by covering the period of two largest migratory movements to the North, he depicted the fragility of family bonds which were deeply affected by the seemingly unavoidable discrimination, making the family both a refuge from social oppression and the very center of the loss of family values. This is an aspect which is crucial for the understanding of the complex familial relationships within the African-American community as well as of its impact on the overall African-American literary production during the Jim Crow era. However, this has not been emphasized enough in the case of Richard Wright's novels. Instead, scholarly research has placed an emphasis on the existentialist philosophy which influenced his fictional writing (Elkholy 2007, Carson 2008, Hogue 2009), as well as on his harsh criticism of racism in the United States (Wilson 2005, Davis 2009, Tuhkanen 2010).

2. Psychological alienation as a means of overcoming social invisibility

Published in 1940, Native Son was an immediate success. It was the first novel written by an African American to be designated the book-of-the-month and has since then often been considered as "the foremost work of African-American fiction and one of the key American novels of the century" (Brivic 1974:231), as well as "a document of social protest" (Tuttleton 1992:267), and "the finest novel yet written by an American Negro" (Poore 1995:25). The naturalistic approach to Native Son provides an account of how economic and social obstacles directed at specific ethnic groups can lead to the destruction of family values - inability of accepting other men as father figures or even forming stable relationships with women. Here, Wright managed to evoke sympathy and understanding for the hardships of the black families who struggled to make ends meet in the poverty stricken slums of Chicago. When compared to his later works of fiction, Native Son can be considered as an introductory attempt at depicting the black family's sufferings, one of the crucial themes in Wright's fiction, which was further elaborated on in greater detail in his subsequent major novels, Black Boy and The Outsider.

Native Son, written entirely from the perspective of the protagonist using the stream of consciousness technique, which provides "a richer illusion of reality," as Wright (1972:36) noted in his introduction to the novel, tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a deprived young man, living in a rat-infested tenement in the Black Belt of Chicago, with his mother and siblings. He is a product of the segregationist Southern policies, his life being characterized by utter poverty, fear of their oppressive environment and violence, which resulted in his father being killed in a riot in the South.

What virtually all of Wright's protagonists demonstrate is a harsh discrepancy between their inner world and the impression they give of themselves when openly expressing their feelings. On the surface, Bigger is aggressive and selfish, pretending not to be interested in providing moral comfort or financial aid to his family. The inescapable poverty in which his family found itself and its dependence on public charity, due to the social and mobility restrictions imposed on African Americans after the first great migratory movement to the North, make Bigger feel bitter and reserved towards his family members. The inability to help his family as well as to help himself is what drives him further away from them. Home is not a place of refuge or comfort, but a painful reminder of the deeply rooted poverty and limited opportunities:

[H]e hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they both lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. (Wright 1972:48)

His relationship with his mother and siblings is a superficial one and verbalizing the compassion for the same fate that his mother and siblings share seems out of the question. However, on the inside he is suffering greatly, and is struggling to come to terms with his fate as a social outcast. His description of his sister proves his recognition of the effect poverty had on his sister:

she seemed to be shrinking from life in every gesture she made. The very manner in which she sat showed a fear so deep as to be an organic part of her: she carried the food to her mouth in tiny bits, as if dreading it's choking her, or fearing that it would give out too quickly. (Wright 1972:147)

At the age of twenty, Bigger is faced with a death sentence for having killed a rich young white girl. The burden of racism appears unbearable and the only plausible coping mechanism seems to be violence. The murder might not have been planned, but it seems to have been inevitable, since his hatred of the Whites is profound enough to go through with it without feeling remorse. The murder was both an accident and also a subconscious reaction to a life spent in misery. In the final hours of his life, Bigger realizes just how much his actions have affected not only his own life, but his family as well. His sister Vera drops out of school because her classmates make her feel ashamed of Bigger's actions and the family loses the public charity.

However, in his end, Bigger finally realizes that in a family, one is never alone:

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit. (Wright 1972:336)

Despite all he had done, his family is still hopeful that his life will be spared and that one day, they will be together again.

No matter what happens to us here, we can be together in God's heaven. (Wright 1972:337)

3. Absence of a father figure

In the opening pages of his autobiographical novel, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), which is to this day considered as one of the most important accounts of the black experience in the United States, Wright focuses on the impact which the absence of the father had on the black family and he sets the tone of the relationship between children and their parents of that time. According to Green (2009:47), this work seems to be Wright's "attempt to address his feelings about his father as the foundation for the feelings that emerge in his life after his father leaves." It is in these opening pages that we notice a recurring motif: the absent father and the strict yet always present mother. It is the mother who is mentioned repeatedly as being the one who worries, scolds and punishes. The father, on the other hand, partakes rather reluctantly in his children's upbringing, being neither the punisher nor the supportive parent. Throughout the novel, the father's absence is not the dominant motif but rather the effect of his absence on the family.

Little Richard's descriptions of his father are hardly ever detached from the context of a food provider who should be respected at all costs:

He worked as a night porter in a Beale Street drugstore and he became important and forbidding to me only when I learned that I could not make noise when he was sleeping in the daytime. He was the lawgiver in our family and I never laughed in his presence. (Wright 2005:10)

At the same time, his words contain profound scorn and bitterness which reflect his attitude towards the high authority that a man in the house seems to represent but also towards the entire social structure which provides the grounds for his hunger - both physical and emotional. He used to stare at his father in awe as the latter

gulped his beer from a tin bucket, as he ate long and heavily, sighed, belched, closed his eyes to nod on a stuffed belly. He was quite fat and his bloated stomach always lapped over his belt. (Wright 2005:10)

The correlation between food and the father figure in Wright's accounts of his childhood is clearly traceable. Here, the socially accepted role of a father is that of food provider. The role of the mother, on the other hand, is to raise the children and to be dependent upon her husband. Little Richard clearly states his feelings towards his father when he says that "he was always a stranger to me, always somehow alien and remote." (Wright 2005:10) A close father and son relationship is virtually non-existent in the family and it leaves Richard feeling bitter and alone. Nathaniel Wright is never mentioned in the context of a loving father who voluntarily spends time with his children nor does he interact with them, unless utterly necessary. In fact, the only communication he seems to have with Richard is when he scolds or beats him.

Young Richard's feeling of emotional rejection from his father is likely the beginning of the "I" that always seems alone and at odds with his family. (Green 2009:47)

Wright introduces the absence of the father subtly through Richard's hunger, i.e. lack of food in the household. The father has abandoned the family, but no reason is given for it, no foreshadowing so as to understand why this has occurred, and now the family needs to find new ways to survive.

Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly" (Wright 2005:14),

Although he was used to never having enough to eat even with the father present, this time it is different, the hunger is physical and permanent just like the abandonment by his father is.

I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think of what was happening to me. (Wright 2005: 15)

Gary and Leadshore (in Hudgins et al. 1990:13) consider the institutional racism to be responsible for such a turn of events. Although the father's absence is not uniquely attributed to the African American community, but is rather one which affects families regardless of their ethnic background, in this novel Wright clearly states that it was a common occurrence in his childhood and that he wasn't the only child to be growing up without his biological father. From his accounts it is observable that entire groups of children were roaming the streets aimlessly, without proper supervision, abandoned by their parents or mothers for the day. Nathaniel Wright, a freed sharecropper, son of enslaved parents, abandoned his family for another woman, but possibly also because he could no longer carry the burden of a family man struggling to survive in a racist environment, saturated with economic barriers for African Americans. He turned his back on his wife and children and permanently dislocated himself from their lives.

Since the father is gone, Ella Wright is now the one who has to take over the responsibility to provide for the family, she is now the mother and the father to her children and has no man in her life who could complement what she does. Regardless of the fact that Richard repeatedly mentions the mother in the context of punishment, it is her presence that he could always rely on and she represents the only reliable constant in his childhood and a tight bond which seems to exist between mothers and their sons within the black community recurs in all of Wright's major novels. The mother is the one that knows Richard best and the one person he would grow emotionally dependent on even in his adulthood. According to S. Philip Morgan et al. (1993:799), children at the time were "more likely to live in mother-headed households", although the father might have been more capable of providing a financially safe upbringing.

The children's maturing process is accelerated, as they need to learn how to take care of themselves and it is this physical abandonment by the father that strikes Richard the most. It is a turning point in his life and one which will require of him to take over the role of family protector, as he is the older one of the two sons:

His responsibility to feed his family is a reminder that his father is gone and that he must fill the void of his father's absence. (Green 2009:48)

Much as Ella's role of a mother is important to her children's emotional and social development, there are still "limitations to a mother's sphere of influence. She can give all of herself and still come up short." (Barras 2000:52). Although Ella Wright willingly takes over the role of both parents, she cannot substitute the father part of parenting. Nathaniel Wright is the one who should be giving his sons the advice necessary for them to survive in the hostile society and he is the one who should be teaching them the lessons of manhood. At least that is something Ella Wright cannot give them. A mother and a father play two different yet equally important roles which complement each other and which are essential for a child's emotional and behavioral development.

4. Violence within the black family

In The Outsider (1953), Wright not only focused on the overall position of the black family in America, but he also introduced violence as a part of the husband-wife relationship within the black community. In this novel, Wright developed almost an extension of Bigger Thomas. Cross Damon appears to be what Bigger would have been had he not committed crimes in his youth. Cross feels both physically and emotionally outside of the American society. He is an outcast who cannot live freely or unburdened by the racialized social norms. The limitations imposed on his race lead him to develop an internal rather than an external conflict as it was the case with Bigger Thomas and his social dislocation and invisibility make him ponder on the existentialist premises regarding the meaning of life and freedom. He feels alone, unable to find comfort in the outside world and religion. Cross Damon's life is characterized by adultery, impulse acts of violence and escapes from apparently inescapable obstacles as well as form his own family.

To Cross, as it was the case with Bigger, family comes second as the invisibility of his race becomes the focal point of his existence and this in the end prevents him from performing his roles as son, husband and father. He feels trapped and unable to comply with the norms of his surroundings and therefore escape seems the only logical solution to his problems.

Wright's protagonists can always be seen from two perspectives - the way they are seen by others and the way they wish themselves to be seen. This kind of double vision or ambivalence is what Du Bois called "double consciousness". (Wright 1993:xxiv)

This duality of character reflects the reasoning behind Cross's past and future decisions but a closer examination of this duality enables an insight into his personal relationships with his family members. A recurring pattem emerges yet again - the present mother and the absent father, this time, however, this imbalance in the family works on two levels - Cross grew up without a father and now he willingly abandons his own children.

The relationship between Cross and his mother is a close one.

As her son, he was much too close, much too warm toward her and much too cold. To keep her life from crushing his own, he had slain the sense of her in his heart and at the same time had clung frantically to his memory of that sense. (Wright 1993:21)

Although she is his harshest critic, he describes her with utmost sympathy and affection. Just as in Black Boy and Native Son, the mother represents stability, selfless love and sacrifice. No woman throughout the novel is described in such gentle and compassionate terms as the mother,

she appeared to have shrunken a bit more; and he knew that it was her chronic fretting, her always tearing at her emotions that was whitening the hairs of her head, deepening the lines in her face, and accentuating the stoop of her back. (Wright 1993:23)

Cross's old mother lost her husband years ago when Cross was a little boy. The marriage couldn't work because she was just one of the many women her husband was seeing during World War I, when he was a soldier. She believed their love was real, followed him from one camp to another, yet in his eyes she was just a worrisome wife who was in his way. A year into their marriage, during her pregnancy with Cross, he was found severely wounded after a drunken street fight in Harlem and died soon after in an army hospital. Cross, having fathered three children himself with his wife Gladys and another one with his underage girlfriend Dot, willingly abandons his children because he cannot cope with the responsibility of his actions. As if history were repeating itself, he echoes his father's actions.

Cross is a modem man who thinks critically about social issues which concern his race and is able to engage into complex discussions on the political matters of his time. However, he is also a man who will not hesitate to raise his hand on a woman and even commit murder and, as the plot unfolds, it becomes evident that murder to him signifies "an act of freedom, performed in the interest of continued freedom." (Ford 1953:91) Cross commits adultery and, once his wife finds out, he deals with it by beating her up. "He slapped her furiously and she went down like a log" (Wright 1993:81), after which he nonchalantly goes off to have drinks with his friends at a local bar. He never shows signs of remorse for willingly abandoning her and their children. The pressure instigated by Gladys and the revelation that his underage girlfriend is pregnant cause him to contemplate escape as the only means of starting up a new life. Similarly to Nathaniel Wright who willingly abandoned his children and Bigger Thomas who disregarded his family's financial needs, Cross Damon takes the first opportunity he gets and turns his back on his familial responsibility in search of a new start. He switches his identity with that of a black man's whose body is unrecognizable after a crash and seizes the opportunity to abandon the city. Yet the memories of his old mother make him he go back, one last time, in hope of catching a glimpse of her:

at quarter to eleven she came out, dressed in black, her face hidden by a veil, and packed her way gingerly over the deep snow toward her church some two blocks away. Cross felt hot tears stinging his cheeks for the first time since his childhood. He longed to run to her, fall on his knees in the snow and clasp her to him, begging her forgiveness. His poor, sad, baffled old Mama..." (Wright 1993:123)

The only one he truly regrets not seeing one last time is his mother and occasionally, his children and Dot:

He yearned for just one more glimpse of his mother, his three sons, he hungered for just one more embrace with Dot... (Wright 1993:114)

However, Cross does not see Dot in terms of a possible future wife, just as Bigger didn't see Bessie as his potential wife either. He regards her as a woman who is capable of taking advantage of him and "would try to wring out a simple act of compassion a promise of marriage" (Wright 1993:54), because marriage denotes a commitment he cannot deliver just as his father couldn't.

5. Conclusion

Although physically a member of the American society of that time, psychologically Richard Wright felt as an outsider hoping in vain, like many other African Americans of his time, to be fully accepted into his own country. His revolt against the oppressive white world is expressed best through his characters. They are all victimized individuals who through their actions convey a bitter criticism of the society which had for centuries encouraged racial injustice, as well as outsiders in the white world, but who try to prove both to themselves and to their discriminatory surroundings that African Americans deserve an opportunity to be treated as equal members of the American society. His fiction is always focused on the psychological motivations and sociological background which drive his plots." (Ward and Butler 2008:99)

In Native Son, Black Boy and The Outsider, which had turned Wrights into a worldwide success, he not only managed to shed the light on the apparently insurmountable interracial strife in both the southern as well the northern parts of the United States, he also brought to attention the impact which the racist environment had on the black family of that time. In his narratives, it is observable just in what form the societal oppression manifested itself with regard to the black family of the twentieth century - broken homes, high levels of poverty and the mother's losing the battle to fill the void of the missing father.

In these novels, the mother is the backbone of the family and the preserver of the tight bonds between family members which used to shape the black family during slavery. The absence of the father, on the other hand, cannot be easily overcome despite the mother's attempts at filling that void and the children in Wright's novels grow up to defy male authority and seem incapable of forming stable relationships with women, as it is the case with all of his protagonists. Such circumstances gradually lead to a shift from a stable, nuclear family structure to a relative-dependent one.

References

References

Anderson, C., W. Allen, 1984. "Correlates of Extended Household Structure" in "The Impact of Family Structure Variations among Black Families on the Underenumeration of Black Males - Part 1: A Review of Literature." Preliminary Report for Joint Statistical Agreement 89-6. J.L. Hudgins, B.J. Holmes, M.E. Locke. Hampton University Black Family Institute. Hampton, Virginia. March 1990, pp 1-24 [Online]. Available: http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdftex9007.pdf [2012, February 12]

Barras, J.R. 2000. Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl? The Impact of atherlessness on Black Women. New York: The Random House Publishing Group. Brivic, S. 1974. "Conflict of Values: Richard Wright's Native Son" in NOVEL: A forum of fiction. Vol. 7, No. 3. Duke University Press, pp 231-245.

Carson, B. D. 2008. "To make a bridge from man to man: Existentialism in Richard Wright's The Outsider" in IRWLE Vol. 4 No. 1, Indian Institute of World Literature, pp 28-39.

Cherlin, A.J. 1992. Marriage, divorce, remarriage. Harvard University Press.

Davis, Thadious M. 2009. "Becoming: Richard Wright and the WPA" in The Black Scholar, Vol. 39, No. 1-2, Black World Foundation, pp 11-16.

Elkholy, s. n. 2007. "Friendship Across Differences: Heidegger and Richard Wright's Native Son" in Janus Head, Vol. W, No. l, Trivium Publications, pp 199-216.

Ford, N.A. 1953. "The Ordeal of Richard Wright" in College English. Vol. 15, No. 2, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, pp 87-94.

Green, T.T. 2009. A Fatherless Child. Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Hogue, W. L. 2009. "Can the Subaltern Speak? A Postcolonial, Existential Reading of Richard Wright's Native Son" in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2, University of Southern Mississippi, pp 9-39.

Hudgins, J.L., B.J. Holmes, M.E. Locke. 1990. "The Impact of Family Structure Variations among Black Families on the Underenumeration of Black Males - Part 1: A Review of Literature." Preliminary Report for Joint Statistical Agreement 89-6. Hampton University Black Family Institute. Hampton, Virginia, pp 1-24 [Online]. Available: http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf7ex9007.pdf [2012, February 12].

Morgan, S.P., A. McDaniel, A.T. Miller, S.H. Preston. 1993. "Racial Differences in Household and Family Structure at the Turn of the Century" in The American Journal of Sociology Vol. 98, No. 4. University of Chicago, pp. 799-828.

Poore, C. 1995. "Review of Native Son" in The Critical Response to Richard Wright. R.J. Butler (ed). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp 25-26.

Tuhkanen, M. 2010. "Richard Wright's Oneiropolitics" in American Literature, Vol. 82, No. 1, Duke University Press, pp 151-179.

Tuttleton, J.W. 1992. "The Problematic Texts of Richard Wright" in The Hudson Review Vol. 45, No. 2, The Hudson Review, Inc., pp 261-271.

Ward, J.W., Butler, R.J. 2008. The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Wilson, C. E, Jr. 2005. Race and Racism in Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Wright, R. 2005 (1945). Black Boy. An American Hunger. New York: HarperCollins.

Wright, R. 1972 (1940). Native Son. Bungay, Suffolk: Penguin Modem Classics.

Wright, R. 1993 (1953). The Outsider. New York: HarperPerennial.