Big Black Good Man
Richard Wright was writing in a segregated America and died four years before the Civil Rights Act. Best known for Native Son, Wright's work possesses a melodramatic dimension equal to his life, when as a boy he was beaten unconscious after accidentally setting fire to the family home. Unlike two other great black writers of post-war American fiction, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, he didn't live to see the changes his literature demanded: a sense of respect and justice that whites could take for granted and, more importantly still, the escape from a fear that would be constantly present based on who he was: a black man living in the US. He became a French citizen and yet continued writing about the oppressive American experience, one that was of the mind as well as of the body. "Men can starve from a lack of self-realization", a character says, "as much as they can from a lack of bread." (Native Son)
In Big Black Good Man, Wright reverses the fear and shows it from an older white man's perspective, a multi-lingual, well-travelled Dane, Olaf, a former sailor who works as a night porter in a hotel by the waterfront in Copenhagen. It is a popular haunt amongst sailors and the sort of place that takes all-comers. But will it take a six-foot-five black man, with skin so dark it takes on a bluish tint, and who has rocklike and humped shoulders. "The big black cloud of a man now lumbered into the office, bending to get its buffalolike head under the door frame."
It is important to note that if Olaf seems racist it isn't because he is naive; more perhaps because he at last sees a black man as a threat, as if all the other blacks he will have seen on his travels, which included a decade living in New York, weren't quite adequate to a racial fear, or one that had previously been conquered. It isn't that this fear wouldn't have been there; it just wouldn't have been so openly manifest, and along comes this enormous figure, Jim, equal to his feelings of inadequacy: "the black nightmare of terror and shame that he had hoped that he had lost forever was again upon him..." Much is made of Olaf's height (he is five feet and seven inches) and his paleness: his "pasty-white features". When Jim returns a year after humiliating Olaf so badly that Olaf lost control of his bowels, Olaf this time has a gun close to hand. What happened was the year before as he was leaving the guest house Jim had asked him to stand up and then put his hands firmly around Olaf's neck, gently massaging it before releasing him though not before Olaf lost control of his reflexes.
Why wouldn't someone who had suffered such shame refuse to allow it to happen again, even if we might wonder if this humiliation wasn't only the product of what seems like a cruel joke on Jim's part; it was also a set of prejudices awaiting its manifestation on Olaf's? One might understandably be a little scared and uncomfortable if a man, who is six-foot-five and built like a brick khazi Olaf could have benefitted from, puts his hands around one's neck. Yet nothing in Jim's behaviour suggests an aggressive figure except Olaf's perceptions. It appears that for all Olaf's travels, for all the languages he picked up and the people of colour he met over the years, and often in the very hotel in which he works, he hasn't eradicated what we might call primal fears. Yet to call them primal is troublesome, suggesting an innate racism that can't be eradicated, only perhaps alleviated. This would leave differences as fundamental and where no racial integration would be possible. This wouldn't only be the stance adopted by white nationalist groups but black groups too, including Louis Farrakhan's The Nation of Islam. Farrakhan believed "White people are potential humans..." (Guardian), while Mohammad Ali insisted that it was as unnatural to expect blacks and whites to live together as it would be to expect humans to live with wild animals. "I don't hate rattlesnakes, I don't hate tigers I just know I can't get along with them," he said. "I don't want to try to eat with them or sleep with them." (Boston Globe) When Olaf dreams of avenging Jim, he thinks of a freighter Jim is on that "would sink slowly to the bottom of the cold, black sea and a shark, a white one, would glide aimlessly...until it found that swollen, rotting, stinking carcass." During these fantasies though Olaf feels a bit guilty: "about all the many innocent people, women and children, all white and blonde, who would have drowned in watery graves..."
Racism cuts both ways, without at all suggesting that it is a fair divide. As Franklin Hugh Adler would say, "if Black Power has evolved into an anti-white campaign or a class struggle...it is because the black masses are bitter, hungry, and unemployed; further, they realize who has been responsible for their oppression." (Black Power) Richard Wright reckoned: "will the Negro, in the language of Andre Malraux, find meaning in his humiliation, make his slums and his sweat-shops his modern cathedrals out of which will be born a new consciousness that can guide him toward freedom? Or will he continue, as he does today, saying Job-like to the society that crushes him: Though it slays me, yet will I trust in it?" (Black Power)
However, let us look again at this notion of primal fear. According to psychologist Karl Albrecht there are five of them: fear of death, fear of abandonment, fear of mutilation, loss of autonomy, fear of separation and ego death. During Wright's young life as a black American, these fears would have surely been more politically evident for blacks than for whites. But that doesn't mean they are at all racially specific and that a white man fearing a black person won't potentially share some of the same fears. This is vital to Wright's reversal as something in Jim's presence activates a racism that would seem to have been only latent in Olaf before. "To Olaf, men were men, and, in his day, he'd worked and eaten and slept and fought with all kinds of men. But this particular black man...Well, he didn't seem human." Or perhaps Olaf feels all too human, vulnerable, small, pale and old; he might believe all he has left is racial superiority when his primal fear has been activated. He fears death when Jim puts his hands around Olaf's throat, fears potentially being abandoned by his partner Karen if he were to tell her of his shame (he keeps it to himself), and his identity, autonomy and meaning look like they have been made fragile by this figure he can't stop describing except in hyperbolic terms. "The black nightmare of terror and shame"; "the black giant", "the flesh of the black mountain", "the black mass of man". We only know Jim's name is Jim because he says it is. He asks Olaf to put some money into the safe for him and to put his name on it.
By shifting the problem of primal fear from a racial assumption to a more general set of fears, we can understand why someone might panic at a person of a different race without arriving at too quick a dismissal of this person's anxieties. If someone admits they have a fear of foreigners then need we see this as racist (or at least xenophobic), or as a justifiable primal reaction that has too hastily looked for a representative outlet? In other words, what everyone may agree is a justifiable threat to self (a loss of identity, a fear of death, a sense of abandonment) may only for some be a threat they see taking racial form. It can be one of the representational options available to comprehend these primal aspects. Anyone who claims that racial difference is a fact isn't only or especially being a bigot, they are practising what we might call the representational fallacy. They are crediting an image with a cause, insisting that if only the race in question was eradicated, deported or incarcerated, the problem would go away.
This is perhaps what Olaf thinks when he reckons if Jim returns he will kill him but we must know that murder won't not solve Olaf's problems, with the crisis more internal than this. At various points in Wright's third-person story, Olaf speaks or thinks to himself. Sailors, "...what they wanted was almost always women and whisky...Nothing could be more natural." "Maybe I could of got rich had I stayed in America...Maybe. But I'm satisfied." He seems to have ideas about himself and ideas about others and also believes that, since he has no children of his own, the tenants he checks in are his offspring. "Almost all of his children were in their rooms now..." But along comes Jim and instead of another child to whom he gives a room, Olaf is childlike in the presence of this black giant. Olaf becomes aware of his limited height and his "frail body" as he believes "this man had come here expressly to remind him how puny, how tiny, and how weak and how white he was." Killing Jim isn't going to make him any taller, stronger or less white. Olaf may be able to acknowledge that he was "being irrational and foolish", but this irrationality is more a misdiagnosis. What matters is to understand his inadequacies; not to assume he can get rid of them by too categorical a representation.
Speaking of Wright's work more generally, Kadeshia L. Matthews says, "from a certain perspective we may see that the story isn't especially about race. It seems to me that, beginning with Native Son, Wright's novels, unlike most other African American fiction, are unconcerned with the question of black subjectivity." Matthews adds: "indeed, to the extent that Wright's work equates blackness with limitation, terror, and submission, black subjectivity tends to become a contradiction in terms, particularly for his black male characters. Thus I claim that Wright's project is constructing not racialized subjects, but gendered ones." ('Black Boy No More? Violence and the Flight from Blackness in Richard Wright's Native Son.') Such a claim is at least half-valid when we think about 'Big Black Good Man', as the title invokes both gender and race, especially if we see the story as about Olaf's inadequacies rather than just his bigotry. While it might be said two wrongs don't make a right, two negations can: "It was not that the hotel did not admit men of colour", the story tells us, as Olaf usually does permit black people to stay. After all, "to Olaf, men were men" and we may notice in the tautology that this is where the story's meaning chiefly resides.
It isn't that whites are whites and blacks are blacks but that men are manly. A double negative can make something a positive, but the tautological failure is more important still, as Jim's blackness may bring out Olaf's feelings of whiteness but above all it generates a crisis in his masculine identity. During his stay, Jim sleeps each night with a woman, Lena, one that Olaf lines up, while Olaf's bodily spasms aren't those of orgasmic pleasure but of an involuntary evacuation. He is also, to put it mildly, not very good at talking about his feelings. He couldn't talk to Karen because she was above the sordid goings-on in the hotel, and couldn't talk either to "the hard-bitten old bitch who owned the hotel", who Olaf thinks is only concerned with money. But we will see unequivocally in Olaf's comment a misogynistic man, someone who draws on that old dichotomy of mothers and whores, with Karen above such things and Lena and the hotel owner existing in and around a guest house Hades.
Yet perhaps to insist the story is about gender over race is to commit another representational fallacy (to move from the fear of the black Other to fear over one's gender). Better to see this as a story about vulnerability, and how it becomes manifest when one person comes up against another and recognises how quickly their world can fall apart. However, neither should we underestimate its specificity. If Richard Wright was seen as so important a writer of the forties and fifties, it was linked to his colour and his exploration of being a black person in a segregated country that he would end up exiling himself from. But this wasn't only a militant literature of black oppression; it also explored how racial division is a more general blight. Unlike the central character Bigger Thomas in Wright's Native Son, who every time he thinks of a white person Bigger reckons something terrible will happen to him, Olaf isn't someone who every time he thinks of a black man need feel that terror. Yet he does when faced by the Big Black Good Man of the title, even if his fears prove unfounded. Jim gives him a handful of shirts and that was why he had on his previous visit put his hand around Olaf's neck. He was sizing him up, so to speak, but not the way Olaf's inadequate self-imagined, as questions about race and gender do indeed dissolve into a problem of primal fear, one that turns out to be no more than a misunderstanding.
© Tony McKibbin