Notes of a Native Son

“Everybody’s Protest Novel” was one of the first essays that Baldwin published. A burgeoning civil rights movement in the 1940s and 1950s US had grown out of the anti-fascism of World War II. In this context, Baldwin’s criticism of Stowe’s famous novel was safe territory. On the other hand, his extension of this criticism to Richard Wright’s equally popular book was not. Wright was the leading figure of African American letters between the 1930s and the 1950s. Wright, followed by novelists William Attaway, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry, had led a departure away from the style associated with the New Negro movement of the 1920s. Also referred to as the Harlem Renaissance (although not exclusive to Harlem, New York City), the New Negro movement did not have a uniform ideology, nor did it express unified artistic aims or methods. In general terms, it sought to recreate the meaning of Blackness away from the racist stereotypes imposed by White society that negatively impacted how Black people saw themselves, their heritage, and their future. By the 1930s, Wright was leading the call for a more socially engaged realism in literature that sought to confront the degraded environments that Black people had to cope with in America.

With “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” then, Baldwin announced a shift underway in the 1950s away from the realism style associated with Wright. Baldwin was critical of the protest novel’s tendency to categorize humanity in stark dichotomous terms at the expense of the “beauty, dread, power,” in which humanity actually lives (33). This critique is fairly self-evident with respect to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other nineteenth century protest literature (at least since the Harlem Renaissance). By linking Stowe’s novel to Wright’s, however, and situating Native Son within the lineage of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin made his insights about Stowe considerably more formidable.

For Baldwin, although Stowe and Wright give us different visions of American society, the protest novel genre is the lineage of a paradox. “Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress,” writes Baldwin (31). On the one hand, Stowe is compelled by what Baldwin sees as a fearful and passionate anti-slavery spirit. According to Baldwin, she “sought to exorcize evil by burning witches” (30). In her case, the evil was slavery and the witches were slaveholders. Baldwin points out that this anti-slavery frenzy is “not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob” (30). The problem in either case is the binary opposition, the division of humanity into good and evil, right and wrong, White and Black. This dichotomous thinking—all that is human is White, while all that is non-human is Black—is carried forward by abolitionists, such as Stowe, who find new ways of elevating Whiteness through their opposition to slavery.

On the other hand, Native Son inhabits the binary opposition in reverse. Bigger Thomas, the main character in Wright’s novel, still relates to Stowe’s character:

[He] is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses (33).

Herein lies the paradox of the racist problem: it presupposes humanity in hierarchical terms, in which White-over-Black can only be replaced by Black-over-White. Nobility and savagery as two sides of the same binary coin do not permit for more complex, let alone fluid, realities.