Racism and spatial dimensions in Richard Wright’s Native Son

Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in 1930’s South Side Chicago, is struggling to compromise his identity and aspirations with the limitations placed on his race. The psychological damages that Bigger suffers as a result of confinement to one role prescribed to him by society result in a dangerous, aggressive state of Bigger’s mind. His personality is split in two, and he sees the world around him as that of irreconcilable extremes. The space within which Bigger exists is racialized and oppressive, closing in on him until he strikes back and, what it seems to him, breaks free.

It is the aim of this essay to explore how race in Richard Wright’s Native Son regulates the experience of space and to answer the question of who defines and dominates space in the novel.

In the novel, space appeals both to sense and feeling. First and foremost, space serves as a foundation for the narrative. It defines the setting of the story, the place of action. The main character, Bigger Thomas, lives on the South Side of Chicago in an area called the Black Belt. The Black Belt is a black neighborhood separated from the rest of the city by an invisible ‘line’. Its residents cannot move beyond that line because rental agencies would not allow a black person to hire a place in a white neighborhood. Blacks are forced to «live like pigs» in tiny rooms of old crumbling buildings infested with rats and disease. Yet, although disgusted and angered by being trapped in «this corner of the city tumbling down from rot» and thinking of it as a prison, Bigger also sees it as a safe space. When he comes to see the Daltons, a rich white family, who wish to hire him as a chauffeur, he realizes that their world is very different from his own. He feels intimidated and only manages to relax in the back of the house, traditionally designated for the help. The white neighborhood where the Daltons lived made him feel exposed and vulnerable when walking its quiet and spacious streets with huge buildings to either side of him: «Suppose a police saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody». This world was carefully guarded against him, and he was expecting to be thrown out of there because his presence, a black presence, was seen as threatening to the other side of the ‘line’, treated like an attack or invasion. Bigger wishes he’d stayed «among his own people and escaped feeling this fear and hate». This description of the two major areas of Chicago serves to show the difference in the quality of life of blacks and whites and to indicate that black life is closely watched and moderated, contained in a space where people do not live, but survive. A white environment is a hostile environment, where this hostility is for white people a means of containing blackness, even on a subconscious level driving people like Bigger away.

The constricting and conditioning powers of whiteness manifest themselves also in Bigger’s interactions with white people, particularly when he comes into physical contact with them. Here, space encompasses not only the physical surroundings but also the abstract realm of possibility. Both these aspects reveal themselves during Mary and Jan’s evening with Bigger, who’s unexpectedly friendly attitude startles him. To Bigger, there can be no connection with a white person where he would be standing on equal ground with them, where

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