6.

The Great Migration

RICHARD WRIGHT

Most days, Richard Wright would rise at six o’clock. With the summer sun blooming in the sky, he walked a short block west from Carlton Avenue to Fort Greene Park, entering at the intersection of Willoughby Avenue and tony Washington Park. On this short street, prosperous Manhattanites had resettled in the mid- to late nineteenth century. They built a row of elegant brownstones overlooking the green space that Walt Whitman had championed and Olmsted and Vaux had overhauled. Wright climbed to the top of the hill, with a legal pad under his arm, and sat down near the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument to work. A decade earlier, in the 1920s, Henry Miller had made this very place his reading spot when he was writing a bad serial novel under his wife’s name and barely making rent on his apartment nearby. Marianne Moore would have often been in the park at the same time as Wright; her apartment was around the corner and she loved touring the greenery and playing tennis on the courts there.

But for passersby, Wright made for a more curious sight than Miller or Moore. In 1938, when Wright spent mornings in the park scrawling in his pad, black people (or Negroes, in one of the era’s least derogatory terms) constituted less than 4 percent of Brooklyn’s population—a strikingly low number in retrospect. (The current figure is roughly 35 percent.) Blacks did live in greater numbers in areas relatively close to the park, in Fort Greene and downtown Brooklyn, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in northern Crown Heights. Apart from those spots and a pocket in Brownsville, the map of Brooklyn was lily white, with microscopic dots where black servants boarded in the homes of their employers. Nearly all of Brooklyn’s working black adults were engaged in menial labor—as domestics, porters, messengers, chauffeurs, or perhaps as longshoremen and factory workers if they were lucky enough to find a listing that didn’t specify “whites only.” And of course, in 1938, many blacks filled no job at all. It’s possible that not one black man in Brooklyn was being paid to write a novel, except Richard Wright.

Today Fort Greene Park features a bench dedicated in Wright’s honor. Of the novel Wright labored over there in longhand, James Baldwin would write, over a decade after its publication, “Now the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably Richard Wright’s Native Son.”

Without the benefit of hindsight, Wright himself likely couldn’t have fully grasped the historical significance reflected in his life and work. His experience and talent put him in a unique position to capture one of the central stories of twentieth-century American life: the “Great Migration” of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and the painful adaptation that followed. As he recounts in his landmark memoir Black Boy (1945), Wright, born in 1908, grew up in the South in very trying circumstances. Also written during his Brooklyn days, the book originally bore the title “American Hunger,” which referred to not only a metaphorical condition but a physical one. By the time Wright was four, the father who provided for him had left. Early in Black Boy comes this passage, which I have remembered since I first read it in high school: “Hunger stole on me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my side when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly.” Wright spent his childhood being shunted around the South, mostly in Mississippi. He was housed by various relatives, willing and unwilling, and even spent a terrible time in an orphanage when his mother lacked the means to support him.

Twenty-five years passed before Wright saw his father again, “standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation,… smiling toothlessly, his hair whitened, his body bent, his eyes glazed by dim recollection.” The sight brought home how far the younger man had come. By his late twenties, his “mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered” by avid self-education, while the father remained in a life that still resembled enslavement. “I stood before him … feeling how completely his soul was imprisoned by the slow flow of the seasons, by wind and rain and sun, how fastened were his memories to a crude and raw past.” Like the Depression-era Jewish writers who were his contemporaries, Wright survived a brutal upbringing that emerged from the even more brutal experiences of his parents and grandparents. Wright’s grandparents were slaves.

When Black Boy appeared in 1945, others had documented the early-twentieth-century Jim Crow South, but most of them were white and almost none had Wright’s raw voice, which had the resonant ring of authenticity. What is more, Wright had already made his mark and become famous with Native Son. His established reputation gave Black Boy an arresting imprimatur, for the reader knew already how high he had climbed but did not yet know just how humble were his beginnings. That Wright was known for a novel about interracial crime and suffering in Chicago, rather than his life of southern hardship, made the memoir all the more remarkable. It underlined just how typical his past really was. Pick any black man from the South, it seemed, and the song was more or less the same. An accomplished man could show you the same scars borne by a prisoner; the same neighborhoods that “swarmed with rats, cats, dogs, fortune-tellers, cripples, blind men, whores”; the same childhood apartment houses next to a sewage ditch and across from a locomotive repair depot that sent cinders floating into beds and living rooms and plates of food. On top of the physical conditions were the humiliations wrought by Jim Crow. Wright was only a skilled chronicler, rather than a unique victim, of growing up beneath a low ceiling that seemed utterly arbitrary to a rational child. Why are white people’s lives so different, and why am I supposed to agree to whatever they demand?

Young Richard resisted the hard facts more than most. In the parlance of the whites around him (and some of the blacks), he didn’t “know his place.” At sixteen, he submitted a short story to a black weekly, which printed it. According to Hazel Rowley’s fine biography Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001), his schoolmates widened their eyes; they didn’t study literature, and to them there was no such thing as a Negro writer. Wright’s grandmother, a devout woman, upbraided him, calling made-up stories “devil’s work.” No countervailing voice supported him. After he cycled through odd jobs that ended badly, his black friend gave him a talking-to: “Dick, you’re black, black, black, see? Can’t you understand that?”

Much as Wright despaired over “what kind of life was possible under that hate” of racism, though, his reading gave rise to an inchoate yearning that could not be contained. In his mid-teens, “I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel.” Like Norman Podhoretz, Wright claims, in Black Boy, that “pushing against the current of my environment” required a certain ignorance of the consequences. Otherwise fear would have stopped him cold.

The locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.

The locomotive analogy is appropriate, for Black Boy leads us to the train ride that much of black America was taking almost as one—to the cities of the North. In the months before publication, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had played a key role in Wright’s success by selecting Native Son five years before, considered Wright’s memoir as well. In a revealing debate surrounding the book, the board applied pressure on Wright and his editor—Edward Aswell, also the editor of Thomas Wolfe’s late works—to make the ending more positive and to give some credit to Americans who were not racist. Wright rather pointedly resisted thanking white America. His response: “Frankly, the narrative as it now stands simply will not support a more general or hopeful conclusion. The Negro who flees the South is really a refugee.”

Part of what lay beneath this disagreement was not only a concern about anti-Americanism on the left and among black men but also a debate about what was causing the Great Migration. Board members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, mainstay of the northern establishment, had a bit of investment in the idea that blacks who came north were setting out for a land of prospects and leaving behind a legacy of degradation. They preferred to think that the North was pulling black America in, with not only its economic climate but also—and this was more crucial to northern moral vanity—its enlightened attitudes on civil rights. To a substantial degree, they were right. The early to mid-twentieth century presented many southern black men with an almost startling opportunity. In his superb book The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), Nicholas Lemann writes, “That moment in the black rural South was one of the few in American history when virtually every member of a large class of people was guaranteed an immediate quadrupling of income” for simply relocating. And the legacy of the Underground Railroad and the slavery-era notion that the North Star led to a place of freedom meant that for some the North symbolized liberty. More concretely, transplants who came back to visit reported that in places like Chicago, the number one destination of the time, “a black person could go anywhere, and could vote, and was not required to step off the sidewalk so that whites could pass, and was not called ‘boy,’ and did not have to sit in the back of the bus.” The southern police didn’t like these returnees, calling their new assertiveness “The Attitude.”

However, most black southerners knew better than to believe in a land of real equality. You could also easily find a migrant explaining that, despite the paycheck, in Chicago he was scrubbing floors and living with several others, as Wright himself did, in a tiny kitchenette apartment in the teeming, dirty South Side. Landlords created these crude hovels by cutting an apartment into tiny pieces. They were squeezing out profits any way they could, and they didn’t cut into those profits by doing repairs. Toilets were located in the building hallways and shared by several families.

As Wright argued, the South was pushing blacks out more than the North was reeling them in. Besides the poverty, which sufficed to make things miserable, lynchings and other wicked abuses occurred almost routinely, especially for perceived sexual offenses like looking at a white woman in the street. Complaining led nowhere good. For Wright, the indignities were more mundane and depressingly typical. The South offered less and less to blacks to counterbalance its many injustices.

Wright himself moved to Chicago at age nineteen, after his mother had a stroke and became unable to work. Hopes of a good job were better there, and he wanted to support his mother and other relatives. That was important. But he got on a train north from Memphis—where by then he had already been living a city life and working city jobs—largely to escape an intolerable feeling of repression: “The safety of my life in the South depended upon how well I concealed from all whites what I felt.”

Part of what makes Black Boy such a powerful book—more powerful, I think, than Native Son—is that Wright does not lean heavily on his stories of hardship; that is plainly unnecessary. And he does not celebrate his own victory over circumstance, explaining only that to do other than what he did “was impossible.” We come to understand that his ambitions actually made life more difficult.

Wright’s decision that he could no longer stay in the South and accept his “proper place” was but one man’s version of a choice that became a widespread phenomenon. One by one, men and women made this quiet resolution to head north, perhaps late at night while staring at the ceiling or smoking a cigarette on the porch. In the process they forever changed the nation. Modern-day Brooklyn would be unrecognizable were it not for the hundreds of thousands who arrived because they made this decision. Scholars have devoted much attention to pre–World War II black migration, but the fact that Brooklyn was only 4 percent black at the war’s inception illustrates one of Lemann’s points: the Great Migration’s prime period began in roughly 1940, when 77 percent of black Americans still lived in the South, and ended around 1970. In those three decades, 5 million black people moved to the North, or about 3,200 a week, one of the most rapid internal migrations in world history. This era created the black Brooklyn neighborhoods we know today. In those three decades, the borough saw an increase in black population exceeding 600 percent, or over half a million people, while the total Brooklyn population actually fell.

*   *   *

After Wright got off the train in Chicago on a cold December day in 1927, he soon found himself shocked and discouraged. Nearly the entire black population was squeezed into a section of the South Side that was hazardously overcrowded, rife with disease, and stricken by petty crime. It very much resembled the slums of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, but with black people rather than immigrants as the newcomer underclass. The policy of the city’s white establishment appeared to be: contain and ignore. White home owners established contractual agreements called racial restrictive covenants, which constrained owners from renting, leasing, or selling to black people. Courts enforced these covenants. Closer to the poor parts of town, such contracts did not take hold; there was money in housing “the Negroes” who couldn’t go elsewhere. Block by block, the dangerously simmering black ghetto spread, but not fast enough to keep up with the influx of people.

Despite their numbers, ghetto residents were kept in check politically all over the North, partly by the clout of pre-existing and opaque patronage machines. (Richard J. Daley–era Chicago is the pre-eminent example.) A people accustomed to powerlessness exercised little power. As David Bradley puts it, “Who would complain about police brutality and biased justice when in the South any group of white men could be cop, judge, jury and executioner?” All around Richard Wright, the lure of heavy drinking and illicit quick cash was dragging people under. In a cruel irony, freedom from southern subjugation brought a new sense of license that led many people astray.

Even the most savvy and ambitious met with closed doors. Low-level work in the North began to dry up as the Depression pushed white immigrant groups back down into that job market. This held true in New York City and especially in Brooklyn, where white desperation spelled the end to “the old preserve of ‘Negro jobs,’” as the historian Craig Steven Wilder explains in A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (2000). Twenty-four unions barred blacks entirely in 1931, with work becoming scarce. The New Deal helped matters, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt devoted WPA money to projects in black areas and put some locals on the federal payroll. Still, the northern sky no longer seemed so wide as it once had. “The only difference between the North and the South is, them guys down there’ll kill you,” one Wright character says, “and these up here’ll let you starve to death.” The nearness of prosperity, generally absent in the South, fostered “a taunting sense of possible achievement,” in Wright’s words, that paved the path to chronic resentment. Income stagnation brought with it a close relative, the loss of hope. In the poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes later posed the devastating question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” The poem famously closes with an ominous suggestion: “Or does it explode?”

In the case of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, it explodes. But the reasons why are complicated.

When Richard Wright wrote his breakthrough novel, making him the country’s first black literary celebrity and among the most famous black men in the country, he had spent over a decade in the urban North. In that time he had not only done all he could to absorb a whole people’s experience; he had also gained a deep familiarity with the literary canon (overwhelmingly white though it was) and had become embroiled in the intense political storms of the era. Among nonfiction writers, the gadfly H. L. Mencken topped his personal pantheon. Wright also found inspiration in writers like Zola, Dreiser, and Stephen Crane (whose novel of the New York underworld, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, was a lodestone). Wright felt a desire to bring a naturalistic realism to bear on the lives of people more like him. It was an instinct shared by many of Brooklyn’s writers, including Whitman, Henry Miller, and those products of the thirties who moved “the hiring halls into literature,” as Kazin put it.

But Wright’s literary aspirations subsisted on little in the way of money or time, as he cycled between bad jobs and the welfare rolls. Like Thomas Wolfe, he had been cynical about politics and had remained uninvolved in his youth, but the Depression gave him a newfound sense of how widely shared was the suffering of certain segments of society. A sense of kinship grew. When the relief system sent him to dig ditches in Cook County, he wrote, “I rode in zero weather for miles in open trucks, then spaded the frozen earth for eight hours, only to ride home again in the dark, in an open truck. A strange emotional peace had come to me now. I knew that my life was cast with the men with whom I worked, slow, plodding, inarticulate men, workers all.” For all of Wolfe’s financial woes, he had been merely a sympathetic observer of the Depression underclass; Wright was living in it, and his color meant that he was likely to stay there.

In the autumn of 1933, at age twenty-five, Wright discovered to his shock that several of his white friends from his job at the post office (the only white friends he had) were members of the Communist Party. But when one introduced him to an organization of “proletarian” writers and artists, the John Reed Club, he grew intrigued, badly in need of intellectual company. The members introduced him to publications that gave voice to the concerns of the kind of common men not generally found in the gentlemanly pages of the leading magazines; one was New Masses, which was regularly publishing Langston Hughes and later published Wright. So began Wright’s tangled relationship with Communism, which lasted into the forties. It helped lead him to New York and made its presence felt in the ideas running through Native Son. Abe Aaron, the man who introduced Wright to the John Reed Club, was twice taken to task by his employers for having a black man, Wright, visit him at the hotel where he lived and worked. Aaron didn’t back down or keep Wright away and he soon found himself fired and evicted, but for decades he hid the real reason. “I would never have told Dick,” he said in an interview in the 1980s. “He would have been furious that I lost my job over him.”

Many of the people in Wright’s Communist circles were Jews, often with an extremely similar social profile to young Depression-era intellectuals like Kazin, Malamud, and Fuchs. They had grown up in “low company,” as Fuchs’s book title had it, and were now putting their education to use. Wright’s upbringing had left him with an “antagonism or distrust toward Jews,” as he frankly admits in Black Boy, adding that this attitude was “part of our cultural heritage.” Now, as he grew close to Jews both male and female, a sea change in his thinking was under way, just as it was in so many other areas of his mental life.

Wright first visited New York City in 1935 and attended a stirring, interracial May Day rally he re-created in his story “Fire and Cloud.” Back in Chicago, Wright got himself hired by the Federal Writers’ Project, a creation of the WPA, and was appointed as a supervisor—probably, Rowley says, the most prestigious job for a black man in the whole city. On the South Side, he formed a black writers’ group that distanced itself from the Harlem Renaissance and—despite an embrace of left-wing ideas—from Marxist dogma as well. “No theory of life can take the place of life,” Wright said, sounding a lot like Daniel Fuchs. This group, with Wright as a keystone, produced a great deal of literature over the next fifteen years. Nevertheless, one year in, Wright was itching to join the fray in Harlem, the hot center of black culture, and saying of Chicago, “Most of the young artists and writers with a tinge of talent flee this city as if it were on fire.” A year later, he did, too.

Harlem, when Wright came to live there in June 1937, at the age of twenty-nine, was crowded with a huge proportion of New York City’s black population. Yet it had not a single public high school. Police brutality ran rampant. The ground was fertile for protest culture, and Wright plunged back into the life of the Party, using its network to get his feet on the ground. He began working as the Harlem correspondent for the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker. He soon tired of the demanding job and of Harlem, which for all its cultural and intellectual life was still a place, he felt, that specialized in entrapping the poor. Wright penned an essay called “Blueprint for Negro Writing” that dropped a bomb on the Harlem Renaissance, which he considered “parasitic and mannered.” Its authors, he wrote, had “entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility.… For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks.” These were not the words of someone who wanted to join the club, whether the club was Harlem, the Communist Party, or even the black literary tradition in its existing form.

Success helped fortify his position. In 1937, Story magazine was seriously considering his short-story collection in a nationwide competition for a book contract with Harper & Row. At this point, two men who played pivotal roles in the life of Thomas Wolfe fatefully entered Wright’s. Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel winner whose fulsome praise helped launch Wolfe into fame, served as a judge on the magazine’s panel and came down firmly against Wright’s work, calling it “dreadfully repetitive” and “essentially false.” Edward Aswell of Harper sided with several others in overruling Lewis without hesitation. It was a bellwether moment in Wright’s life. The black man from the South made a great impression on Aswell, who was often, in his daughter’s words, “quite conservative politically and rather narrow minded.” According to his biographer Hazel Rowley, in 1941, the year after Aswell published Native Son, he wrote in his class report to Harvard’s alumni association, “The best-read man I have ever met, the most thoughtful and courageous, and the one who seemed to me most truly ‘educated,’ was not a college professor, nor even a college graduate, but a young Negro, son of an itinerant day-laborer, whose formal education was limited to the grade schools in—of all places—Mississippi.” The respect ran both ways. In 1957 the author wrote to Aswell, “I would rather die than let you down.”

Soon Wright impetuously got engaged to his landlady’s daughter, making an unromantic decision that it was time he got married. (He had very recently proposed to a black woman in Brooklyn and been roundly rejected by the father for having poor prospects.) Getting a marriage license involved blood tests at the time, and when Wright’s fiancée tested positive for syphilis, he became enraged and coldly cut off the relationship. He left the Harlem rooming house to move in with a couple he was close to, Herbert and Jane Newton. Prominent Communists whom Wright had known in Chicago, they lived in Fort Greene, in an apartment in a charming house that still stands at 175 Carlton Avenue, a stone’s throw from Fort Greene Park. Herbert had been the only black member of the “Atlanta Six,” who were jailed in 1930 for distributing anti-lynching leaflets. According to Rowley, Newton faced a possible death penalty if convicted. Long before the nation was calling for civil rights, the Communist Party showed a willingness to break down color barriers, a fact that plays a role in Native Son. Jane Newton was a white woman. She and her black husband were a very early progenitor of the many interracial couples now living in Fort Greene. It hardly needs saying that it caused problems. When they were arrested in Chicago for resisting eviction, her race put an unusual spin on the couple’s case; an attorney recognized her and told the judge she came from a “good family.” The judge put her husband in jail and sent her to a psychiatric hospital.

Wright took a liking to Brooklyn immediately, writing to a friend, “I’m staying in Brooklyn for good now, that is, as long as I’ll be in New York.” The recent release of his award-winning collection Uncle Tom’s Children, in March 1938, had launched him and spurred him to new achievement. He applied immediately for the “creative work” program of the Federal Writers’ Project, and approval now allowed him to write full-time. Even before coming to Brooklyn he had begun working at night on a novel set in Chicago. This was Native Son, which was soon coming into its own in Fort Greene Park. After writing in the morning hours, he would return to the house and ask for Jane’s opinions about the book. Frequently they disagreed, raising their voices over the din of the Newtons’ children. Jane warned him about how some scenes would be received. Usually he stubbornly stuck to his approach.

*   *   *

Although Wright was now a rising star and could feel justified in a more optimistic outlook, Native Son bears the stamp of “the full weight of his anger,” as Irving Howe put it. It was an anger that stretched back to Wright’s fatherless childhood, to poverty and humiliating jobs, and to the frustration of a northern promised land that reneged on its promises. The uneducated and bitter protagonist is a young black man in Chicago named Bigger Thomas. To Bigger, Wright later said, America and the South Side “contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded,… a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses.” Something old-fashioned and even conservative underlies that thoughtful sentence. It is a strain of thinking that runs through Kazin and Malamud and Wolfe and all the way back to Whitman. For them, a belief that survives all anger is the belief that culture is a life-changing force, that the shared struggle for meaning, accreting over decades and centuries, provides an irreplaceable “spiritual sustenance.” Wright, buoyed by this idea, created a novel about his rage instead of turning his back on the country in disgust.

In Black Boy, Wright offers a thought that might be surprising from a man who could so easily have rejected the nation’s cultural heritage: “Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they had lived somehow in it but not of it.” The sentiment is just the same as Saul Bellow’s when he spoke of the rise of midcentury Jewish writers: we only want to join a great tradition.

Nevertheless, for Richard Wright, to join the tradition meant providing a shock to it. After Uncle Tom’s Children appeared in print, he once said, “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”

And indeed Native Son is a hard and unconsoling book. It opens with Bigger Thomas coldly laying waste to a rat in his family’s filthy apartment. Bigger, a young man adrift in the South Side, hates his family because “he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them.” He is known for being “always in trouble” and has been in reform school. His only plan is to pull another burglary with his buddies, but struck by fear he punches one of his would-be accomplices to escape committing the crime. At his mother’s incessant urging, Bigger goes to see about a job possibility arranged by the relief system. Somewhat improbably, a Mr. Dalton, a wealthy man who likes helping the poor, decides to hire him as a driver. Bigger’s first task is to chauffeur for the man’s daughter, Mary. Unbeknownst to her father, Mary asks Bigger to take her to see her Communist lover, a man named Jan. Then Mary and Jan begin to make out in the backseat, plying each other and Bigger with alcohol all along as he drives them round and round a park. Bigger winds up carrying a senselessly drunk Mary up the stairs to her room back at her home. In a moment of panic that he’ll be discovered in her bedroom, he puts a pillow to her face to quiet her and accidentally kills her. This sets off a grizzly and unnerving attempt to get rid of the body and escape the consequences Bigger knows he will suffer.

On one level the book is a crime novel that becomes a courtroom drama, moving along speedily, imbued with a stomach-churning anxiety and a dark feeling of inevitability. On another it is a social novel about the place of the black man in northern urban life, and the climax comes with an impassioned speech about the moral forces that create the Bigger Thomases across America. We can imagine Wright creating the world of the novel as he sat at the peak of Fort Greene Park. On two sides were lovely brownstones with entrances for servants, while spread out nearby was a five-block slum nicknamed the “Jungle.” The slum was a potent symbol of the decay that was beginning to spread through Brooklyn’s black community. After the drafty rooming houses and seething poverty of Harlem, Fort Greene had won him over in part because in general it was not a ghetto, as Hazel Rowley told me. He could find a good black barber there. While Harlem had much the same character as the “black belt” of the South Side, Fort Greene remained multicolored and therefore less condemned to neglect. The black population was not as segregated in Brooklyn and was still relatively small, though Bedford-Stuyvesant was gaining a significant black presence.

Integrated neighborhoods would soon become a rarity in Brooklyn, too. During precisely the period when Wright moved to Brooklyn, the New Deal–created Home Owners’ Loan Corporation made a simple but highly influential map of the borough, similar to others drawn up nationwide. The object was to codify the relative risk of giving out mortgages in various neighborhoods, in order to stem the Depression tide of foreclosures and bank failures. The methodology behind the map contributed to disaster for many communities in Brooklyn, which is to say many families, many children. The grading scale explicitly took account of an area’s ethnic and racial makeup in assessing its suitability for investment, as Wilder writes. Jews were derided as “Communistic type of people”; Italian neighborhoods were downgraded for their “mixture of low grade races”; but, most of all, the creators of the map put up a wall around black areas, neighborhoods that already faced an uphill struggle. Fort Greene, though mixed, escaped a failing grade as HOLC staff approved of its “British” ancestry. Bedford-Stuyvesant of course garnered the lowest grade, a D, and Clinton Hill was judged harshly despite a relative lack of problems. Not one of the eighteen neighborhoods that received a B− or better had any black presence.

To receive a D grade was to be judged unfit for mortgage investment. Grade D places were often colored red on these maps, a practice that gave rise to the term “redlining” for the resulting financial boycott. The federal government had officially approved the notion that it was safer not to take any chances on aiding black neighborhoods.

When Wright was working on Native Son on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, the lives and hopes of black men in Brooklyn were festering in grim areas that saw few police or social services. Craig Steven Wilder tells us that at the edge of Wright’s neighborhood, on Fleet Street (which today skirts the edge of Long Island University), the Brooklyn Urban League went house to house and found among them a single one with an indoor bath. Meanwhile, as Marianne Moore once described, in the brownstones of Fort Greene the lives of whites and blacks intertwined in an arrangement that could be seen as mutually beneficial but that cast a dark shadow of historical familiarity: wealthy home owners had whole staffs of domestic servants, many of them black. What went on between owner and servant inside those houses? What might happen if things went badly? Enter Bigger Thomas.

Native Son is more valuable as a document and a literary landmark than it is as a fully realized novel; Wright said while working on the book that plausibility was not as important as getting across what he wanted to say. But black literature has resonated ever since from the force of Native Son’s example. Among the notable books to follow in its footsteps was Claude Brown’s hugely popular autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). It chronicled without self-pity Brown’s Harlem youth in the forties and fifties, when he racked up a rap sheet beginning before his tenth birthday and got himself kicked out of numerous schools before dramatically turning himself around. In Wright’s time, it took a lot of temerity to create as his “hero” a black man who is violent and unlikable. Viewed from that perspective, Native Son flies in the face of political correctness. In writing it he had to “steel himself to go against accepted ideas,” as Rowley writes. Many black readers were outraged by how closely Bigger Thomas resembled a racist’s view of a young Negro man. Wright had vigorous arguments with people who read the manuscript in progress and wondered if Bigger had to be so hard to respect. Many whites wished that the book had not skewered even those whites who meant well, as the Daltons do in the story. Wright said, “The average moral-minded American simply does not want to believe that his attitude toward others can breed personalities so thwarted and twisted.”

Native Son also sounded an alarm about the worsening conditions in the black ghettoes and suggested that not all young men trapped within them would simply lie down and accept their fate. Such a notion now appears unremarkable but was a prescient and needed warning at the time. Granted, racial troubles had already been brewing, including in New York. A serious race riot shook Harlem in 1935 and by the 1940s Bedford-Stuyvesant, where most of Brooklyn’s blacks lived, was a known problem area with very poor health and housing conditions. But comparison with the South was a convenient way to make the bad look good. As Nicholas Lemann poignantly illustrates, few people of any color could see that with the Great Migration would come such crippling urban problems nationwide—that the “inner city” would become a phrase with such dispiriting connotations. Northern cities were objects of black desire. A saying among young southern boys, Rowley says, was “Lawd, I’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the President of Miss’sippi.” The common perception was that northern industrial centers would mean less bigotry and better access to solid jobs—in infrastructure projects, in stockyards and the post office (Chicago), in auto factories (Detroit), and on the dockyards and in manufacturing plants (Brooklyn). Many blacks believed that life in the North represented a huge step up and would keep getting better—and in many respects that was true. Aside from higher wages, with the migration came the Harlem Renaissance; the flourishing of jazz; black-owned companies and cultural organizations; black political leaders like Brooklyn’s Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress; and a black middle class. According to Harold X. Connolly’s A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn, by 1970, 43 percent of Brooklyn’s blacks were employed in white-collar fields. Success began to spread to the South, too. Well-meaning whites focused on such advances and didn’t pay much attention to more ominous developments.

As late as 1962, twenty-two years after Native Son, when Michael Harrington woke up readers with his book on poverty called The Other America, a persistent denial was keeping America from taking a hard look at urban slums. (The 1963 Dwight Macdonald review in the New Yorker that put the book in the spotlight was aptly titled “The Invisible Poor.”) At that time, as Lemann says, hearing the word “poor” would cause most Americans to form a rural white image, probably from Appalachia. Even in The Other America, black poverty takes up only one chapter. When the federal government began battling entrenched poverty in the cities during the John F. Kennedy and especially the Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, insiders committed themselves to it because they felt they could win. Senator Robert F. Kennedy spearheaded an important project in 1966 to rehabilitate Bedford-Stuyvesant, which created a model for many other programs and inspired hope. With the country in a prosperous postwar run and liberalism in ascendancy, the government felt strong. In the ensuing decades, reality proved stronger.

Chicago’s South Side; Gary, Indiana; downtown Detroit; Harlem; and Brooklyn’s Brownsville, East New York, and Bedford-Stuyvesant—these places were supposed to offer a promising future. By the seventies or eighties, for many they were synonymous with crime and social breakdown, despite attempts at government intervention. Numerous success stories happened, but as Lemann points out, success often meant leaving the ghettoes rather than improving them, just as it had in Kazin’s Brownsville and Fuchs’s Williamsburg.

*   *   *

After his time on Carlton Place in Fort Greene, Wright moved several times along with the Newtons, who’d become very dear friends. He lived with them at 552 Gates Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant and 101 Lefferts Place in Clinton Hill in 1938–39, all the while revising Native Son. These neighborhoods were more dark-skinned, and the interracial makeup of the household caused trouble from various quarters; Rowley writes that the landlord on Lefferts Place, a West Indian black man, asked them to move out because he didn’t like all the “mixing” going on in their apartment. Wright joined the Newtons again at 343 Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill in 1940 after a peripatetic year in which he impetuously married a dancer named Dhimah Meidman. They quickly separated. Soon he reconnected with Ellen Poplowitz, a lovely woman he had met through the Newtons. She dropped by one day, ostensibly to see Jane, and everything changed. Richard appeared at the top of the stairs and called Ellen’s name. Suddenly there wasn’t any question what the future held. “It was a really eerie thing,” Ellen said. “I knew immediately that my family counted for nothing.… I just moved in with Dick right in that house.”

Ellen came from difficult beginnings in a Jewish family who lived on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, and her upbringing carried echoes of the Jewish writers emerging at this time. Studying at P.S. 178 and at Girls’ Commercial High School left her isolated from her uneducated and distant parents. At seventeen she ran away from home and soon joined the Communist Party, eventually heading the branch on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Ellen’s parents disapproved of Richard, famous or not, but the young couple moved together to 467 Waverley Avenue, married very quietly in March 1941, and later settled in a four-room apartment at 11 Revere Place, in Crown Heights. A daughter, Julia, was born at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn in April 1942, and Ellen heard nurses gossiping that, as Rowley puts it, “somebody had had a black baby.” Immediately enveloping his child with love and worry, Richard sought out a new, more desirable place to live.

Wright soon moved his family into a house on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights that was chock-full of well-known writers. George Davis, a magazine editor who had published Wright’s story “Almos’ a Man,” had invited him to join the household. The Wrights’ time there brought its own difficulties, and after about a year they moved back to Clinton Hill, to 89 Lefferts Place, where they lived for two years. It was there that he finished writing the autobiography that became Black Boy. While living on Middagh, Wright took a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, to give a speech to a racially mixed audience at Fisk University, a historically black school. He spoke informally about his experiences with race in both the South and the North, and in the middle he noticed that the audience was “terribly still.” It became clear to him that no one there had heard someone talk so frankly about race. Wright knew he was on to something. Making people uncomfortable was a specialty. At the end of the debate with Dorothy Canfield Fisher of the Book-of-the-Month Club the following year, Wright would write to her, “I think it is significant that those American writers who influenced me were all rebels of a sort.”

Wright also told her that he was much influenced by the “springs of thought” found in foreign countries. Within two years, Wright and his family moved to Paris for what was supposed to be a temporary stay, but there he felt an acceptance of blacks that gave him pause. Soon the family moved to Europe permanently. Wright published a number of books thereafter, including the novels The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream, and the nonfiction books Black Power, The Color Curtain, and White Man, Listen! None of these was as well received as Native Son and Black Boy, and the reviews, particularly in the States, were mixed and sometimes even hostile.

Many of Wright’s followers believed then, and believe still, that in Europe he declined as a writer because he had removed himself from the environment that had stoked his best material. The problem of race in America was no longer so near at hand, which was, of course, part of the reason he made the move. In any case, it is regrettable for American literature and for Brooklyn literature that Wright did not stay. Very much like Fuchs, Malamud, and Kazin, who grew up in the same era, Wright dramatized what happens when the American desire for better comes up against a wall built by others. For those who could not understand it or did not want to, they showed what happens in a “closed-in canyon,” where suffering becomes accepted, where dreams get deferred.