Native Sons

LAWD TODAY (189 pp.)--Richard Wright--Walker & Co. ($3.50).

"It is a complex fate to be an American." That this goes double for the American Negro, Novelist James Baldwin has made clear. As a spokesman for his generation of U.S. Negroes (TIME, Jan. 4), Baldwin demonstrates how complicated can be the business of defining what that fate is. Things were simpler for yesterday's generation, which had its voice in the novels of Richard Wright, who died in 1960, aged 52.

Wright's Lawd Today was never published during his life, and it predates Native Son, which established his reputation. It tells of a dreadful day in the dreadful life of Jake Jackson, a faceless phantom of insulted life from Chicago's black ghetto. Greedy, but with never enough ham hocks and collard greens, lecherous, but always frustrated, aggressive, but always a victim (even to his beaten, tumor-plagued wife, who cuts him up bad at the end of a long, long day), Jake is no left-wing stereotype of a good man. He and society match each other in crude nastiness. The Depression and the code of "The Man" (meaning the white man) press down on him like the lid on a garbage can.

Common Demand. Speaking of Wright today, Baldwin observes: "Today's racial manifestoes are being written very differently." Where is the difference? With Wright, the pain of being a Negro is basically economic--its site is mainly in the pocket. With Baldwin, the pain suffuses the whole man, so that he cannot even stand the white liberals who would "offer" him the equality that is his by right.

Wright today should be judged, Baldwin says, by "how accurately or deeply the life of Chicago's South Side had been conveyed." It is hard to judge. Even if half-true, Lawd Today is an appalling document. As an artist, Wright was as crude and humorlessly "sincere" as his Depression-period white twin, James Farrell. The U.S. Negro of Baldwin's generation would not be as credulous as was Wright's Jake Jackson, who was dazzled by a preposterous parade of a mythical black army headed by "The Supreme Undisputed Exalted Commander of the Allied Imperial African War Councils unto the Fourth and Last Generations." Yet Baldwin himself has admitted to having been tempted by the less bizarre but more sinister desperado politics of the Black Muslims. If Baldwin's sights are higher than Wright's, it is in part because Wright helped to raise them. Wright and Baldwin had had one thing in common: the demand to be treated as men. When this elementary thing is denied, no wonder fantasy comes as an only friend.

The Cage. Wright saw society as an iron cage for his Jake Jackson. There was no key; the cage must be smashed. Nothing less than revolutionary Communism would do. But the Communists betrayed Wright as badly as Baldwin feels let down by the white liberals. The time came when he saw that colored comrades would denounce a fellow Negro in the presence of white comrades. Wright abandoned the fight and fled to Paris with his white wife.

Baldwin met Wright there. Of course, the meeting was awkward; Baldwin, indeed, was standing on Wright's shoulders. No more books can be written in which the fate of the U.S. Negro is as nasty, brutish, short and hard as it was only yesterday for Jake Jackson. But Lawd Today is a thing to remember.

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