Bigger Thomas is the original b-boy. He is an anxious, brooding, angry, suspicious, day dreaming, under educated, ambitious, stifled and profiled young black man who’s walked American soil since slavery was “abolished.” The difference between Richard Wright’s doomed protagonist in ‘Native Son’ and the kid rocking the mic in your most recent down load is articulation. Bigger never able to give voice the full range of his feelings in Wright’s novel or stand outside his experience and analyze it (at least not until a series of clunky last act scenes with a Communist organizer.) Hip hop generation kids who for Bigger’s demo can define themselves (though often in reductive commercial terms) and dream of a better future (which in the Black Lives Matter universe, thankfully, is more than about getting paid.) If born in another time, say six decades later in Chicago, Bigger might have dreamed with tangibly of flying an airplane. Or, caught up in the gang wars of Chiraq, trapped in a modern version of the tragedy that unfolds in ‘Native Son.’
As a child raised in the ‘60s Wright’s ‘Native Son’ and his memoir, the more optimistic ‘Black Boy,’ were required reading in the black history assignments shoe horned into our curriculum in New York City. I doubt young people today read ‘Native Son’ anymore. Why would they can listen to a Bigger’s story in booming, five minute recorded segments filled with contemporary slang and beats you can dance too. Plus Wright’s rep has taken a serious ass whipping in literary circles over the years for a multitude of sins: dissing Zora Neale Hurston’s work, not returning to the States from Europe during the civil rights movement, misunderstanding the African independence movement, having a tin ear for black music and being too enamored of existentialism. Reading some of the biographies about him, particularly Margaret Walker’s, it appears Wright would have been convicted by a jury of his peers.
Fortunately for me I’m not one of Wright’s peers. I am an acolyte lucky enough to have walked through doors his career helped kick in. The modern landscape of then Negro (then Afro-American, black and now African-American) literature begins with the success of ‘Native Son,’ published in March 1940. I know my psyche was very much impacted by the very idea of Wright. In the classrooms of conscious teachers I’d see photos of Wright in a treed jacket, sometimes in wire framed glasses, occassionally at at typewriter. I’d marvel that a black man could enjoy enduring fame by putting words on paper. I’m not sure any novel about the particulars of the black male experience could ever be that impactful again when you consider woman now buy most literary fiction and black men gravitate to non fiction and financial self-help books.
My connection to Wright was reignited as an adult when I found out he wrote most of ‘Native Son’ in Fort Greene Park and lived on Carlton Avenue, both a few steps from my first solo Brooklyn apartment. There’s a bench in the park with his name on it. When the Village Voice offered me a column in the late ‘80s I titled ‘Native Son’ in a homage to Wright and Bigger.
Strangely my admiration for Wright for a long time made me reluctant to spend much time in Paris. Depending on how you viewed his career one could argue the City of Light destroyed his talent and his connection to black people in America. James Baldwin was able to balance his French life with American agitation. Wright wasn’t able to do that and his reputation suffered deeply as a result.
Still Paris got its hooks in me. Reading about black expatriates sipping wine, playing jazz and wearing berets in cafe’s is as romantic as it gets. They lived a precarious life, not trying to piss off the French, being spied on by the State Department and trying to eek out a living in a foreign country. Sex was on the agenda. But so was exploitation and casual racism. The biggest advertisement for visiting France was the 1961 black & white film ‘Paris Blues’ in which Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll stroll, flirt and kiss while walking the streets at night. The plot contrivances of Martin Ritt’s film aside there’s no more glorious image in cinema of Poitier and Carroll, both beautiful and poised, debating race relations and staring into each other’s eyes.
When I finally made it over the romance ended quickly. Parisians were rougher and ruder than New Yorkers and my black skin didn’t earn me any special treatment or much respect. At the bar of club a white Frenchman damn near knocked me down with his shoulder as he walked by. Twenty minutes later, down on the dance floor a French African dude send me wobbling as he kneed me as he passed me. No excuse me or I’m sorry or even a look back.
I was determined to make my second trip better. I stayed at a flat near the Champs- Elysee with a beautiful woman and retraced the steps of the black expats, lingering on the Left Bank, sipping wine (back when I drank) at cafes, traversing the Louvre picking out images of black faces in Renaissance paintings.
One afternoon went on a pilgrimage on the Left Bank, wandered a winding street named rue Monsieur le Prince in search of number 14. I’d knew that famous writers in Paris had their places of residences marked with a plaque and, decades after reading Native Son, I wanted to find his residence from 1948 to 1959. I walked onto le Prince but found no plaque. Next thing I knew I was standing a few blocks away in front of the Sorbonne. I retraced by steps but again didn’t seem an historic markings. I’d come from Fort Greene to Paris to pay my respects to one of my literary fathers but couldn’t find an old apartment building. Feeling close and silly I just happened to look up and there was the plaque, posted high on the building’s wall.
I had one more mission is Paris. I took the train out to the 20th arrondissement to Paris’ largest and most celebrated cemetery — Pere Lachaise. I bought a map, which was very needed to navigate the centuries of crypts and graves. There were lots of people my Jim Morrison’s grave and the names of famous writers and performers wer everywhere, bu my destination was more prosaic. The crematorium was a long walk from the entrance and lacks the gothic beauty of the rest of Pere Lachaise. Long rows of names written on square slabs of black marble line the open air space. There are a few staircases to look for people resting higher up. It was almost behind one of those ladders that I found Richard Wright’s ashes. Born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, reared in Chicago, famous in New York and self-exiled in Paris, Wright’s journey was unique and a bit sad. As one of his literary sons I wished his resting place, and reputation, were higher profile. I thanked him for his words and example, bowed by head and promised I’d complete reading all his books, which is as close to immortality as a writer gets.