Censored: A Literary History of Subversion and Control by Matthew Fellion & Katherine Inglis

Author:Matthew Fellion & Katherine Inglis [Fellion, Matthew & Inglis, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, History
ISBN: 9780773551893
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2017-09-04T14:00:00+00:00

Richard Wright, photographed in Harlem by Gordon Parks in 1943.

The tale made the world around me be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow.

Wright’s grandmother cut the story short, calling it the ‘Devil’s work’.2 Years later, she would burn the books Wright brought home to read. But fiction had sparked something in him: ‘I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway.’ Wright read what he could get his hands on (‘tattered, secondhand copies of Flynn’s Detective Weekly or the Argosy All-Story Magazine’) and began to write, publishing a tale called ‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre’ in a local Black newspaper, to the baffled disapproval of his family and schoolmates.3 In 1925 he moved back to Memphis, where he would buy and resell used books and magazines so that he could read them. Because Jim Crow laws barred him from using the public library, Wright prevailed on an Irish Catholic, himself a target of hatred in the South, to lend him a library card, with which he would borrow books under the pretence of running errands. In this way Wright discovered realist and naturalist fiction, including Theodore Dreiser’s novels, which gave him a ‘sense of life itself’, and laid the foundation for his own career as an author.4

Wright wrote in his journal that the central question of his life was ‘How can I live freely?’5 His struggle did not end when his career began. In 1938, living in Harlem and now free to read, he wondered to what extent he was free to write. He had conceived a novel that readers would not ‘read and weep over and feel good about’, but which would ‘be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears’.6 This novel was called Native Son, and featured a Black antihero named Bigger Thomas. Out of fear of being caught in a White woman’s bedroom, Bigger accidentally suffocates his employer’s daughter, Mary Dalton. He later rapes and murders his Black girlfriend, Bessie Mears, before being sentenced to death. In planning this novel, Wright struggled with self-censorship, a sense that he could not get away with writing what he wanted to. In ‘How Bigger Was Born’ he describes the internalized voice of his White readers, a censor ‘draped in white’ like a member of the Ku Klux Klan:

Like Bigger himself, I felt a mental censor—product of the fears which a Negro feels from living in America—standing over me, draped in white, warning me not to write. This censor’s warnings were translated into my own thought processes thus: ‘What will white people think if I draw the picture of such a Negro boy? Will they not at once say: “See, didn’t we tell you all along that niggers are like that? Now, look, one of their own

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