Mislabeling Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas

Here is how Claudia Roth Pierpont described Richard Wright's Native Son protagonist, the ill-fated Bigger Thomas, in an essay on James Baldwin--"A Negro rapist and murderer" who "raped and murdered a white woman." (The essay appears in her book, American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016.)

Anyone who has ever read Native Son knows that Bigger Thomas murdered but did not rape the daughter of his white employer. (He also killed his girlfriend.) In fact, the murder of the daughter was unintentional, caused by fear rather than malice. (He later incinerates the body to cover up the killing.)

I would advise Ms. Pierpont to re-read the book.

The Return of "Native Son" (On Screen)

Another screen version of Richard Wright's 1940 best seller, Native Son, is scheduled for release, per Entertainment Weekly ( Fall Movie Preview, Special Double Issue, August 17/24, 2018). It stars newcomer KiKi Layne, who presumably plays Bigger Thomas's girlfriend Bessie and Ashton Sanders (Moonlight), who presumably plays Bigger. No other information about the production was provided.

Previous versions came out in 1986 and 1950. The latter version starred Richard Wright himself as Bigger Thomas. (Clips from that film appeared in a public television documentary about Wright.)

Of the 1986 version, Leonard Maltin's 2006 Movie Guide called it "an OK melodrama" and criticized its "deliberate alterations and softening of some of the novel's key plot points and themes." (Oprah Winfrey appears as Bigger's mother.)

The new film will probably be more graphic in its depiction of Bigger's accidental killing of Mary Dalton, the daughter of his white employer and the subsequent disposal of her body in the basement furnace.

A Writer's Dream

This unpublished interview fragment was found in a manila folder. It was written on August 12, 1980. It was intended for inclusion in a Q & A interview that I did with Professor Addison Gayle, Jr.:

Professor [Addison] Gayle's most recent book is the literary biography, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980).

It seems as though the professor was destined to be a Wright biographer. In Wayward Child [his autobiography], he writes that of the many black writers his father encouraged him to read as a child growing up in the South "...Richard Wright was [his] favorite." He goes on to say, "...instead of imaging myself as one of Richard Wright's characters, I imagined myself as Richard Wright. I imagined people looking up to me as a famous writer, asking for my autograph, seeking me out."

Professor Gayle's early identification with Wright was probably due to similar experiences in their young Southern lives.

Richard Wright's Literary Odyssey

In 1945 Black Boy, Richard Wright's searing, no-holds-barred account of his youth in racist, apartheid Mississippi, was published and became a runaway bestseller as well as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Fifty years later, in 1995, New York's Thirteen/WNET commemorated that event by telecasting Richard Wright: Black Boy on September 4 (on what would have been his 87th birthday). The 90-minute film is the first full-length documentary on the life and career of the late writer.

A co-production of Mississippi Educational Television and the St. Paul, Minnesota-based Independent Television Service, Richard Wright: Black Boy was three years in the making. Its producer, Madison Davis Lacy, whose previous films include Eyes on the Prize II and Paris Is Burning, "was initially interested in pursuing Wright's expatriation (to France), and the phenomenon of expatriation as a dynamic in African-American culture." But that plan changed when Lacy "discovered (in Wright) a self-taught literary genius of tremendous political conviction. At 19 years old," continues Lacy, a longtime veteran of the documentary form, "Wright told a friend 'I want my life to count for something.' Somehow he was able to crystallize that determination and his understanding of racial oppression into a reason to write on behalf of himself and his people."

Narrated by film actor J. A. Preston (Body Heat and Two-Minute Warning), Richard Wright: Black Boy chronicles Wright's 52-year odyssey that began in 1908 in rural Mississippi and ended prematurely in 1960 in France through dramatic excerpts from his work, historical footage, and on-camera interviews with his daughter Julia (the film's consultant), historian John Henrik Clarke, poet/playwright Amiri Baraka, novelist/Wright biographer Margaret Walker Alexander, literary critic Michael Dyson, among others.

The film was the recipient of a 1994 Southwest Regional Emmy.

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News, September 2, 1995.