024: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
NOVELS
Uncle Tom's Children is a
collection of short stories by African American author Richard Wright,
also the author of Black Boy, Native Son, and The
Outsider. Uncle Tom's Children includes four short
stories and was successful when it was first published in 1938. In 1940,
Harper reissued the volume as Uncle Tom's Children: Five Long Stories,
incorporating "Bright and Morning Star" as well as placing "The
Ethics of Living Jim Crow" as the text's introduction. The Harper
Perennial edition of Wright's novel Black Boy, under the heading 'Books by Richard Wright',
misprints "Uncle Tom's Children" as "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
Plot
The Ethics of
Living Jim Crow
"The Ethics of Living Jim
Crow" describes Wright's own experiences growing up. The essay starts with
his first encounter with racism, when his attempt to play a war game with white
children turns ugly, and follows his experiences with the problems of being
black in the South through his adolescence and adulthood. It describes his
experience of prejudice at his first job. While working at an optical factory,
his white fellow employees bully and eventually beat him for wanting to learn
job skills that could allow him to advance. Wright also discusses suffering
attacks by white youths and explores the many hypocrisies of white prejudice
against blacks. These include black men being allowed to work around naked
white prostitutes while having to pretend they do not exist. Whites have
exploitative sex with black maids, and yet any sexual relations between a black
man and a white woman, even a prostitute, is cause for castration or death.
Wright also delves into the more subtle humiliations inherent in the Jim Crow
system, such as being unable to say "thank you," to a white man, lest
he take it as a statement of equality.
Big Boy Leaves
Home
Big Boy was chosen to be the leader of
his friends. One day, Big Boy and friends Bobo, Lester, and Buck decide to go
swimming in a restricted area. They take off their clothes and proceed to play
in the water. Soon, a white woman comes upon them and the boys are unable to
get their clothes without being seen. After reacting to the boys with shock and
disgust, she calls for "Jim". Jim quickly appears and, feeling
threatened, proceeds to kill Lester and Buck. After a short struggle between
Big Boy and Jim, Big Boy takes control of the rifle and shoots Jim, seemingly
killing him. The remaining two members of the group quickly gather their
clothes and flee the scene. The story moves with Big Boy as he makes his way
back home. He relates the story to his family. All the while, Big Boy is
terrified that the white people will form a mob and lynch him. The family has
an acquaintance who drives a truck and can help Big Boy escape. Big Boy is sent
off with some food while he waits for the acquaintance to leave with the truck
at 6:00 AM the next morning. As he finds a place to settle for a while, he
overhears some white men discussing the search situation and learns that
they've captured Bobo, the other surviving boy of the original group of four.
Bobo is burned at the stake. Later, the acquaintance, Will, finds Big Boy and
they head off in the truck. The story ends in bittersweet fashion as Big Boy
thinks about the slaughter of his friends in the new sunny day.
Down by the
Riverside
"Down by the Riverside" takes
place during a major flood. Its main character, a farmer named Mann, must get
his family to safety in the hills, but he does not have a boat. In addition,
his wife, Lulu, has been in labor for several days but cannot deliver the baby.
Mann must get her to a hospital - the Red Cross hospital. He has sent his
cousin Bob to sell a donkey and use the money to buy a boat, but Bob returns
with only fifteen dollars from the donkey and a stolen boat. Mann must take the
boat through town to the hospital, even though Bob advises against this, since
the boat is very recognizable. Rowing his family, including Lulu, Peewee, his
son and Grannie, Lulu's mother, in this white boat, Mann calls for help at the
first house he reaches. This house is the home of the boat's white owner,
Heartfield, who immediately begins shooting. Mann, who has brought his gun,
returns fire and kills the man, while the man's family witnesses the act from
the windows of the house.
Mann rows on to the Red Cross hospital
but is too late; Lulu and the undelivered baby have died. Soldiers take away
Grannie and Peewee to safety in the hills, and Mann is conscripted to work on
the failing levee. However, the levee breaks, and Mann must return to the hospital,
where he smashes a hole in the ceiling at the direction of a colonel - who then
directs Mann to find him once everything's over saying he'll help Mann if he
can - allowing the hospital to be evacuated. Mann and a young black boy,
Brinkley, are told to rescue a family at the edge of town, who turn out to be
the Heartfields. Inside the house, Heartfield's son recognizes Mann as his
father's killer and Mann raises his axe thinking to kill the children &
their mother but is stopped when the house shifts in the rising flood waters.
Despite his terror that he might be fingered as Heartfield's murderer and
accordingly facing the possibility of a brutal and torturous death, Mann takes
the boy, the boy's sister and his mother to "the hills" and safety.
There, Mann tries to blend with "his people", hoping he might find
his family, until the white boy identifies Mann as the killer of his father.
Armed soldiers take Mann away after tribunal with the general and then the
colonel he'd helped at the Red Cross. Knowing he's doomed and vowing to
"die fo they kill [him]" Mann runs and the soldiers shoot him dead by
the river's edge.
Long Black Song
"Long Black Song" takes place
on a solitary farm, where a young black woman, Sarah, waits for her husband,
Silas, to return from selling his crop. She also has to take care of her baby,
Ruth. Sarah has fantasies about another man, Tom, and is unsure if she loves
Silas. A white salesman shows up as the sun goes down and tries to sell her a
record player. They make conversation, and as she gets him some water, he
attempts to seduce her. Initially protesting, she leads him to the bedroom, and
they have sex. He leaves the record player with her and says he will try to
return in the morning and convince her husband to buy it.Silas returns, sees
the record player and suspects Sarah has been unfaithful. He drives her from
the house in a rage, whipping her as she goes. Silas hates white people and has
worked ten years to own his farm free and clear. He is livid that Sarah has
slept with a white man, and when the white salesman returns in the morning, he
first whips and then shoots him. As Silas protests that he does not want to
die, but must because he can never be free in a white man's world, Sarah takes
Ruth and runs into the hills, where she watches Silas have a gunfight with the
white mob that comes to get him. He dies when they burn the house down around
him, but he does not make a sound as it collapses on him.
Fire and Cloud
"Fire and Cloud" follows a
preacher, Taylor, as he tries to save his people from a wave of starvation.
Denied food aid by the white authorities, Taylor must return empty-handed to
his church. There he finds a tricky problem. He has been talking about marching
in a demonstration with communists, and they have come to visit him in one
room. In another room, the mayor and the police chief have arrived to talk to
him. Taylor has a history with the mayor, who has done him favors in exchange
for his securing peace and order among the black community. However, if the mayor
finds out about the communists, Taylor will be in trouble. First Taylor talks
to the communists, who try to convince him to further commit to marching by
adding his name to the pamphlets they distribute. Taylor gives them only vague
answers. He then talks to the mayor and the sheriff, who try to convince him
not to march. Again, Taylor is unsure of what to do as he feels that adding his
name will threaten not only himself but his community. He successfully gets
both groups out of the church without their paths crossing. Then he talks to
his deacons. One among them, Deacon Smith, has been plotting to depose Taylor
and take over the church.
A car pulls up, and Taylor leaves the
deacons to see who is in the car. Whites beat him and throw him in the back, taking
him out to the woods. There, they whip him and make him recite the Lord's
Prayer, in a move designed to keep him from marching. Taylor must walk back
through a white neighborhood, where a policeman stops him but does not arrest
him. Once home, Taylor realizes that this beating directly connects him to the
suffering of his people, and he tells his son that the march must go on. Seeing
that many in his congregation have also been beaten over the night, Taylor
leads them in the march through town. He realizes that together, the pain of
his being whipped and the strength of the assembled marchers, black and white
people in one crowd, are a sign from God. The whipping is fire, and the crowd
is the cloud of the fire and the cloud God used to lead the Hebrews to the
Promised Land.
Bright and
Morning Star
"Bright and Morning Star"
concerns an old woman, Sue, whose sons are communist party organizers. One son,
Sug, has already been imprisoned for this and does not appear in the story. Sue
waits for the other son, Johnny-Boy, to arrive home when the story begins.
Though she is no longer a Christian, believing instead in a communist vision of
the human struggle, Sue finds herself singing an old hymn as she waits. A white
fellow communist, Reva, the daughter of a major organizer, Lem, stops by to
tell Sue that the sheriff has discovered plans for a meeting at Lem's and that
the comrades must be told or they will be caught. Someone in the group has
become an informer. Reva departs, and Johnny-Boy comes home. Sue feeds him
dinner, and they discuss her mistrust of white fellow-communists. Then, she
sends him out to tell the comrades not to go to Lem's for the meeting.
The sheriff shows up at Sue's looking
for Johnny-Boy. The sheriff threatens Sue, saying that if she does not get him
to talk, she had best bring a sheet to get his body. Sue speaks defiantly to
the sheriff, who slaps her around but starts to leave. Then Sue shouts after
him from the door, and he returns, this time beating her badly. In her weakened
state, she reveals the comrades' names to Booker, a white communist who is
actually the sheriff's informer. Sue realizes that she is the only one left who
can save the comrades, and she dedicates herself completely to this task.
Remembering the sheriff's words, she takes a white sheet and wraps a gun in it.
She goes through the woods until she finds the sheriff, who has caught
Johnny-Boy. The sheriff tortures Johnny-Boy before her eyes, but she does not
relent or try to get Johnny-Boy to give up. Then Booker shows up, and she
shoots him through the sheet. The sheriff's men shoot first Johnny-Boy and then
Sue dead. As she lies on the ground, she realizes she has fulfilled her purpose
in life.
Literary
significance and criticism
The stories won high critical praise;
what one critic had to say of them is characteristic: "Uncle Tom's
Children has its full share of violence and brutality; violent deaths occur in
three stories and the mob goes to work in all four. Violence has long been an
important element in fiction about Negroes, just as it is in their life. But
where Julia Peterkin in her pastorals and Roark Bradford in his levee farces
show violence to be the reaction of primitives unadjusted to modern
civilization, Richard Wright shows it as the way in which civilization keeps
the Negro in his place. And he knows what he is writing about.
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