end when he says that it is not survival, but survival whole, that is the key to being and meaning. Gaines's old men rise from a lifetime of survival by means of subjugation and passivity to a stance for personal wholeness; in a concerted front of resistance and autonomy, they seize control of what is left of their lives and, with guns in hand, confront not only the white power structure but also their own past acquiescence to it.
Unlike these later configurations of the possibilities of black Southern existence, Wright emphasized neither survival nor wholeness within the lifetime of his characters. Like Bigger Thomas, the scared colored boy from Mississippi in Wright's Chicago novel Native Son (1940), they more often die without the recognition that their actions are integrally connected to that of their people and progeny, which is -432- Grange's final achievement. Yet it is clear that even a Grange or the old men are similar to Wright's characters in that they suffer from the malformations that the environmental factors of the South create as pressures and restrictions on the lives of African Americans and that their own consequentially dehumanized and demoralized acts partly account for the shame and the humiliation of their lives.
Wright's parables in the novels Native Son, The Outsider (1953), The Long Dream (1958), and Lawd Today (1963) ultimately strike out at the white world, by taking revenge for the ills suffered through generations, and breaking the boundaries of codes and laws that would legally and practically circumvent the ambitions and the dreams of blacks. Bigger Thomas kills for what he ultimately believes is a valuable but inexpressible part of himself. The intellectual Cross Damon exists outside the parameters of societal law, and from that alienated position he explores a murderous, raceless freedom, but acknowledges 'it was…horrible.' Jake Thomas, the protagonist of Wright's posthumously published first novel, Lawd Today, reacts in a naturalistic manner to his entrapment in the urban environment. These men all become indifferent to violence in the process of rejecting external authority over their lives. In representing their attempt to alter the power relationships that determined them impotent, Wright circumvents the dominant discourses on African American subserviency and creates a different reading of power, its manifestations and its limits.
Wright identifies women with codifying the behavior of blacks according to the dictates of whites. He understands the strategies and concessions devised to exist within the oppressive and restrictive world of the South, as indicated by his essay 'The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,' his fictionalized autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, the short stories collected in Uncle Tom's Children (1938; 1940) and Eight Men (1961), and particularly his novel The Long Dream. More pronounced, however, is his understanding of the legacy of paralyzing wounds to the psyche of succeeding generations that functions in his texts as a gap between generations that can neither be removed nor bridged. Divisions between fathers and sons might be expected, given the integral relationship of Wright's biography as a son of the segregated South to his fictional vision. The absence of the father in Native Son is not surprising, and -433- the deceptive, obsequious father feigning power in The Long Dream is equally predictable; however, the division between mothers and their sons is also present, and, unexpectedly, the mother is often more of a liability than the father, because she cannot be protected by the male son and her motives and her methods of protecting her offspring are even more detrimental than those of the father.
In this aspect Wright is similar to Faulkner in Light in August, in which the character Joe Christmas comes to expect the cruelty and the strict discipline of male father figures, but cannot fathom or tolerate the seeming weakness of the female mother figures, who seem impenetrable, incomprehensible, and, above all, unpredictable, which is the main key to the mothers in Wright. Paradoxically, though the mothers stand by the sons to the best of their ability, they are often held more responsible than the fathers for the conditions under which the sons exist and come to manhood. The situation is the same in Savage Holiday (1954), Wright's 'white' novel in which Erskine Fowler's damaged psychological state is attributed to the mother, whose promiscuity and neglect of the son in favor of lovers is the memory that the adult Erskine must confront and that he must unravel in order to understand his rage against a young woman and his identification with her son Toby; he kills the son accidentally, but predictably so in the context of his having to call up the memories of his own childhood and youth in order to exorcise the ghost of his mother and his literal and symbolic childhood illness.
A comparable childhood illness figures prominently in both Black Boy and The Long Dream. In Black Boy, it is brought on by a beating inflicted by the mother on her son for fighting with white youths instead of deferring to the codes of survival that she and her kind insist upon in order to 'save' the lives of black youths, but in the process she and they severely damage the internal life and psyche of their male children. As maternal figures, they resultingly do not emerge as loving individuals who teach the sons to be strong and to be men, as does the mother in Ernest Gaines's short story 'The Sky Is Gray' (from Bloodline [1968]). In Gaines's representation, the mother acknowledges her son's manhood and teaches him by her example, rather than with her words, what it means to be a black man in a hostile environment. Similarly, in The Long Dream, the illness, brought on by Fishbelly's brief imprisonment for a transgres-434- sion that is not unlike that of Big Boy and his cohorts in 'Big Boy Leaves Home,' but brought on also by the father's response, marks the indelible strain between the mother and the son, who is no longer able to respect his mother or to submit to her authority. His manhood means that she becomes irrelevant to his existence and that she can teach him nothing that he feels he needs to know. Mothers who leave sick children for whatever reason, whether the rationalization is positive, that is, to visit the sick or to attend church or to go to work, are somehow guilty of abandoning their sons to nightmares, literally and symbolically. Their waking reality will thereafter have the marks of the dream, dark and threatening, frightful and debilitating. The break in the relationships between mothers and sons is crucial for understanding the generational conflict underscoring Wright's subtexts and permeating his thinking about the maturation processes of his Southern black youths. The break is long remembered and little understood, but it is paradigmatic of the alienation from family and heritage, from comfort and kin, from childhood innocence and adult awareness, all of which combine to mark the unhinged maturity of the Southern black male child.
Wright's novels pointed the direction for Ralph Ellison in his major work, Invisible Man (1951). Ellison re-visioned the ground of Wright's fiction and, concomitantly, the history of modern African Americans. He charted a fresh course for making race a viable metaphor for the condition of the human being entrapped in circumstances beyond individual comprehension and yet moving toward a full realization of self and significance. In the background of Invisible Man is Booker T. Washington, whose Tuskegee Institute figured prominently in discourses on racial uplift and progress in the early twentieth century and whose autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), set an agenda for individual success to overcome racial barriers. Ellison's oratorical novel responds to the notion of the separation of the races and to the ideology of racial cooperation popularized by Washington. In speaking for and to the problematics of race, Ellison envisioned that, despite Washington or perhaps because of him, in the early decades of the twentieth century, resolutions to raciality as a basis of individual identity were not yet apparent. Economic self-sufficiency was no guarantee of racial acceptance or cultural assimilation for African Americans. He also foresaw, as Wright -435- had, no immediate reconciliation of the private and the public in matters of racial identity or of the relationship between race and region.
Race and region, once considered inseparable in the case of the South, are now two distinct and discrete areas of inquiry. Yet the association of the two in novels during the early modern period gave rise to much of America's major writing.
Thadious M. Davis
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