Thrusted Between His World: Essaying on Richard Wright’s Use of Point-of-View, Symbolism, and Setting

The enslavement of Afrikan people provided the core states of West civilization the primitive accumulation of capital which was parlayed into the current monopoly of wealth and power into the hands of a powerful few. At the center of slavery stood the value of the absolute subordination and domination of Afrikan males and the cumulative social masculinity of Afrikan people by white society that was, of course, in turn dominated by white males. Thus the foundational dialectic of the West, the United States in particular, is white power vs black powerlessness. This relationship between white power vs black powerlessness is the motive social force that provides Western civilization with its emotional tone, collective behavior, and cultural framework. In the words of Nana Marimba Ani, it is the utamaroho. The utamaroho is revitalized and reinvigorated by ritual and ceremony. The ritualized massacre of the Helots was used to reinvigorate the Spartan utamaroho. Likewise, the American elite, who drew inspiration from Spartan society, used lynchings as ritual and ceremony, and rite-of-passage to revitalize theirs. In the early 1900s, an effort to document these lynching-rituals was underway Ida B. Wells. Lynching also captivated the literary imagination as writers from various literary movements grappled with a America that in many ways was changing and in many ways staying the same. Among the many literary activists stood one Richard Wright who through his narrative journalism documented and critiqued this “original American social contract.” In his eerie 1935 poem “Between the World and Me” Wright documents, in grim detail, the lynching-ritual and its relationship to foundational American values. In this poem, Wright seeks to expose the centrality the lynching-ritual as a psycho-spiritual institution that revitalizes and reinvigorates the ideological and institutional fabric of “whiteness” in the Western/American social context, thus reinforcing the “original social contract” of this society that is the subordination of the Black male to the White male. Thereupon, Wright sets out to uncover these truths wielding a creative blend of point-of view, symbolism, and setting.

Throughout the poem, Wrights uses the symbolism of skulls and bones to evince the desolation suffered by the victim of the lynching-ritual, as well as the irrevocability, the finality, of the mobs’ dispensation of justice. The desolation of the victim, which is psychic food to the perpetrators and spectators, along with the ability of the mob to exact an unchecked will, are important aspects of the lynching-ritual that reverberate on the collective consciousness in dynamic ways. In the second stanza the narrator describes a set of bones “slumbering forgottenly” in the woods. The dead body of someone connected to a people with power and self-determination would not be “slumbering forgottenly.” The reason the bones are described as forgotten is because the author wants the reader to comprehend that the mobs’ justice, ensured by Jim Crow himself, is final. The family of the slain have no way of getting justice under the American rule of law because rule of law does not exist outside of the rule of the white anglo saxon protestant majority. Under those circumstances it is better if the person getting lynched accepts their fate and if the family and loved ones of this person (humans exist in a social context) just forget and accepts their place. Like so many cases, even if the assailants were brought before a court, they would only be acquitted. There are many instances where men held in jail were busted out by an angry mob of white men.​​ To criticize the mob meant death. This is seen in the case of Mary Turner:

According to the Equal Justice Initaitive, founded in 1989, “On May 19, 1918, a white mob from Brooks County, Georgia, lynched Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, at Folsom’s Bridge 16 miles north of Valdosta for speaking publicly against the lynching of her husband the day before.” The website goes on to describe what the mob does to the 8-months pregnant woman. It says “The mob bound her feet, hanged her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her, and burned the clothes off her body. Mrs. Turner was still alive when the mob took a large butcher’s knife to her abdomen, cutting the unborn baby from her body. When the baby fell from Mary Turner, a member of the mob crushed the crying baby’s head with his foot. The mob then riddled Mrs. Turner’s body with hundreds of bullets, killing her.”

In short, the mob became the law, and helplessness (although not all the time per Robert F. Williams, kwk) became the verdict, as the community was subject to the tyranny of white indiscretions. In this moment of helplessness many people rationalized “forgetting’ lest they were to cause more “trouble.” Judith Lewis Herman explains that “denial, repression and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level” when the “knowledge of horrible events … intrudes into public awareness.” The narrator becomes subject to the mobs’ will personified by his voice being “drowned in the roar of their voices,” and without help from a mob of his own, an assemblage of his own people to protect his interests, is cornered and eaten.

Wright isolates the narrator to magnify this element of the lynching-ritual and the black experience in this country. On a micro level isolation is a frequent tactic used by the white power structure to nullify undesirables within the Afrikan population. Geopolitically speaking, the state has gone to considerable efforts to isolate the Afrikan population of the United States from identifying and forming meaningful socio-political relationships with other groups of Afrikan people. The right to assemble is a basic principle of self-determination. This right to assemble in large numbers, which can be assumed to presuppose power-play and molding, to exact the will of a body – an obvious symbol of self-determination – was and is also systematically denied to black people. Many slave codes spoke to black folks not being allowed to gather without the supervision of a white person. For example, an 1833 Alabama black code stated “It shall not be lawful for more than five male slaves, either with or without passes, to assemble together at any place off the proper plantation to which they belong.”

After the narrator is subject to the violence of the mob first-hand, he describes himself as “dry bones” and a “stony skull” that was transformed from a “black wet body.” This comparison is intended to expose the attenuation caused by the mob, used to feed the psycho-social bonds of the American fabric. In essence, the body was stripped of its vitality and promise, its nutrients and virility absorbed by the violence of the mob. Indeed, the nutrients of the body was consumed by the mob, just as the labor of generations of black bodies were consumed by the planter-industrial alliance for centuries; or as the bodies of black men are consumed to feed the prison-industrial complex; or, as the milk of the black woman was consumed by the white baby, while her own children, her own people went malnourished; or, as Africa itself, its resources and people, are betrayed by the internal comprador bourgeois and indigenous intellectual strata to the interests of industrializing the West, Russia, and China while Africa herself starves and withers away.

Wright also alludes to a castration in the second stanza. In the poem, the narrator tells of a “pair of trousers stiff with black blood.” He intended to show another important aspect of the lynching-ritual. That being the anxiety that exists in the American imagination over the sexuality of Afrikan people, particularly Afrikan males. In other things that Wright authored he implemented a similar theme. In the “Ethics of Living Jim Crow” Wright records memories of a black bell boy that was “caught in bed with a white prostitute” and summarily “castrated and run out of town.” On the contrary he presents a scenario where a “negro maid was sexually accosted by a white nightwatchman while the toy of them were walking home. He also tells of a white landlord and his son who “half dragged and half kicked a negro woman” into a store where she was asaulted and emerged “bleeding, crying and holding her stomach.” All under the watchful eye of a “policeman standing at the corner” who “looked on … twirled his nightstick.” white men having unmitigated sexual access to Afrikan females. Assaults and rapes would go unpunished and often times socially required for white manhood. On the other hand White men, especially in pursuit of protecting the honor of the “white ewe,” superseded the authority of the state’s monopoly on violence. Exposing the true nature of the American experiment, the oppression of one nation by another.

Wright uses first person singular to establish a primary account of the gory description of the lynching-ritual, thereby ensuring the credibility of the description. In addition, the author needs to build an intimate relationship with the reader in order to transmit the disruptive shock of a new day, a new understanding, a new insight into his world represented by the narrator coming upon the scene “one morning.” Wright intends for the reader to see and feel the horror and pain being caused to the “life that was gone” much in the same way the narrator went from being a spectator to the victim himself as the dry bones “stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones.” Conversely he wants the reader to see the festive-like magnitude of the lynching-ritual for the “thousand faces” whose mouths drank gin, smoked cigarettes, and applied lipstick like they were attending a Michael Jackson concert. When, in the same stanza, Wright adds “and a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that my life be burned” to complete his masterful presentation of the central dialectic. Simply put, white joy is black pain. In like manner, the development of the entire Western civilization is premised on this relationship.

The narrator endeavors to make the reader understand the dialectic of Black pain and white exhaustion as fundamental through a first hand account of the “sooty details” that he stumbled upon. These details eventually alienated the narrator both from his literal body as the insatiable mob “clamored that [his] life be burned” and his worldview, as the stark reality of the original American social contract thrusted, or imposed, itselves “between the world and [him]” and left him but a “dry bones” and “stony skull” left in “yellow surprise” at the sun of a new day. This relationship, or social contract, is fundamental. After all, as Minister Farrakhan sang in 2017 “white man’s heaven is black man’s hell.”

This social contract, that ensures the prosperity of America and Western civilization at the expense of the collective masculinity of Afrikan people, can be traced to the 1660s where the fabric of what became this nation began its metamorphosis from a religion-based indentured servitude to a race-based chattel slavery system, thereby ensuring a steady pile of wood to be used as fuel for the American experiment, which was only just solidifying itself. The euro-nationalist experiment in “whiteness” needed a stronger adhesive if it was going to be the launching pad of an aggressive capital accumulation. The Afrikan proved to be a formidable test. It caused the euro-nationalism of whiteness to be thick on mainland North America. Outnumbered, the Afrikanisms of Afrikan people were best extinguished here. And when the Transatlantic Slave Trade was outlawed an industry of “negro-breeding” would abound. Thus, Wright exclaims “my voice was drowned in the roar of their voices.”

Finally, Wright uses the setting to explain the relationship between the use of white mob rule , the lynching ritual and the alienation of Afrikan people within the American social context. He also has the poem take place in the woods to draw parallels between the West’s alienation and dehumanization of Afrikan people and their domination, and ultimate destruction, of the environment. In essence, Wright critiques capitalism. That is to say, the current climate challenges the planet is facing, which upon initial investigation can be said to be the result of a particular mode of production gone haywire, upon closer inspection presents itself too as founded on subjugation of the Afrikan male, who in the Western imagination is the human embodiment of nature. Just as Kunta Kinte was set upon by toubob while in the forest looking for wood to make a drum to be taken away to work and come into a new understanding of what the world is, so too was our narrator in the woods when he “stumbled suddenly upon the thing.” To put it in other words, a stark reality was thrust upon the narrator that forever changed his idea of the world. The author draws parallels between the subjugation of Afrikan males by white males (or as Nana Welsing calls it white power vs black powerlessness) and the white males domination to nature and the environment. In the second stanza, the narrator refers to a “charred stump of a sapling …. torn tree limbs, burnt leaves, and … trampled grass.”

The narrator unwittingly “stumbled” upon the “design of white bones” in a “grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.” Again, in the third stanza, Wright describes the narrator frozen with fear as the “woods poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds.” It is in these woods that the narrator is stripped and battered. He is forced to drink his own blood. He is forced to reckon with the sun of a new day as but a mess of “dry bones” and a “stony skull.” In the imagination of the European, as described in works like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, nature represents the untamed, primal side of humanity that need to be controlled and subdued. This process, for the European, always begins with penetration into the deep unknown. Similarly, the people who intentionally foster close relationships with nature, marked by a worldview that ascribes consciousness to the inanimate, are in the European imagination “savages” who also need to be either killed or civilized in the positivist sense.

Considering the idea that the American social experiment was triggered by the expulsion of Afrikans from the Iberian Peninsula, and other parts of what is now known as Western Europe helps us to understand the womb that birthed the most vicious, rapacious systems of exploitation this planet has ever seen. In its infancy, it required the subordination of a nation of people. Now as it further develops and concentrates power into a technocracy it has outsourced its deathcamps to places like the Congo and Central Africa, where children are devoured to produce the police state needed to maintain control in the imperial core. This central dialectic of white power vs. black powerlessness, however, grows out of a wider contradiction inherent within the birth, development, maturation, decline, and transformation of the Afrikan historical trajectory. There are contradictions internal to traditional Afrikan civilization, exacerbated by our enemies upon penetration, that allows for the development of contradictions between Afrikan people and non-Afrikan groups. The non-Afrikan’s strategy is not "divide and conquer” but “exploit divisions that already exist.” In any case, a system so voracious and predatory as this is now a danger to itself. Begging the question: how can Afrikan people escape euro-normative behavior and worldview and escape from this “American social contract?”