Bigger Thomas is guilty.
I’m not spoiling the story of Richard Wright’s Native Son by saying so. It’s a fact.
Even Bigger Thomas, a number of times throughout the text, will tell you that himself. He is guilty. Of course he is. He was born guilty. He’s black in America in the late 1930‘s. Besides, I can’t spoil a story you already know, a story you’ve already heard and/or read a million times before.
You know how it goes: Bigger Thomas, poor black kid with an eighth-grade education and a long juvenile criminal record, gets a job as a chauffeur for a white, liberal big-shot millionaire named Mr. Dalton. Mr. Dalton owns just about every piece of real estate in “The Black Belt” of Chicago’s Southside and beyond, including Bigger’s rat hole of a place, a one-room shack with no heat and real rats the size of small poodles, where Bigger and his family somehow just manage to scrape by on meager government assistance and Bigger’s illegal enterprises.
Mrs. Dalton, the wife, (you know her too), is a saint. Of course she is. Not only is she blind (and apparently wears all white all of the time) she’s even more liberal than her husband. Heavily associated with the NAACP and other similar organizations, Mrs. Dalton spends her time and her husband’s millions getting poor, inner city types like Bigger Thomas educated and working. She’s a great woman, ironically blind, in an enlightened family.
Read the full essay at The Journal of Cultural Conversation
