Apartheid,Crime,and Interracial Violence in Black Boy

Background

The word apartheid is normally associated with the system of racial discrimination that was practiced in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. However, for the purposes of this article, the word has been appropriated to subsume Jim Crow, a similar system that was practiced in the Deep South from the 1890s through the 20th century. The word apartheid is preferred in this study because of the way it seems to embody the core values of institutionalized racial discrimination. Steve Clark (1994, p. 79) notes that apartheid literally and figuratively means “apart-hate.” Like the Jim Crow system of the American South, apartheid was founded on strong sentiments of racial hatred and separatism. Historians David Brown and Clive Webb (2007) argue that “dilemmas of race and racism have afflicted modern nations, but in the twentieth century, only the South African apartheid regime was built on the same fundamental rationale of racial inequality as the American South” (p. 1). In an essay titled “The Making of the Apartheid Plan: 1929-1948,” historian Hermann Giliomee (2003) argues that

in introducing the apartheid legislation, the Nationalist leadership made it clear that their point of reference was the American South. Piloting through parliament the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Bill of 1949, Eben Donges, Minister for the Interior, justified it by reference to the existence of a similar law in 30 states in the United States of America. (p. 377)

Giliomee also notes that Valerie Strydom, one of the architects of apartheid in South Africa,

was also influenced by segregation in the USA and the idea of black separatism expounded by some black leaders in South Africa. In 1937 he addressed a North Carolina audience and, after his return, wrote of “the policy of apartheid here in our land and the United States of America.” He held up the American South, with its segregated schools, churches and suburbs, as a model to be emulated for both colored people and Africans in South Africa. (p. 382)

Wright’s Black Boy (BB) is written against this historical background as a counterdiscursive response to the deeply entrenched effects of what I henceforth call apartheid.

Jim Crow is a political strategy of racial segregation that was designed by White America after the withdrawal of federal troops and the ending of Reconstruction; it was, however, formally endorsed in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling. Its mandate was to stratify the American South on racial lines and consequently subordinate African Americans physically and psychologically in the same way that apartheid South Africa would designate and relegate Blacks to a position of inferiority in all spheres of life. Given the deeply entrenched effects of apartheid on African American society, the representation and critical reading of interracial crime and violence has been characterized with controversies. In African American works of fiction, particularly in the works of Richard Wright, the representation of crime and violence in the context of apartheid has culminated in what has been termed the race-crime debate. This debate has been largely centered on the criminalization of the Black race and the racial composition of “criminals” in America. In this article, I wish to interrogate the intercourse of crime, violence, and apartheid as represented in BB.

Theoretical Underpinnings

The study is informed by selected criminological and postcolonial theories: that is, subculture theory by Edwin Sutherland (2002), Bhabha’s (1994) notion of hybridity and third space, and Ashcroft’s (2001b) postcolonial transformation. Subculture theory has been selected for this study because it explains criminal behavior in terms of the social environment in which it arises. On the other hand, Bhabha and Ashcroft have been appropriated because they reflect on the various ways adopted by the colonized to navigate colonialism, thus allowing us to interrogate the intersection of crime and violence in the context of colonial and/or racial domination as presented in Wright’s BB. Clive Glaser (2000) has used subculture theory to study the emergence of gangsters in apartheid South Africa. While subculture theory conceptualizes crime and violence as embedded in subcultures, Bill Ashcroft’s postcolonial transformation focuses on subtle forms of resistance embraced by colonial subjects to transform colonial culture, which, in many ways, was a criminal culture.

According to Sutherland (2002), a subculture is a set of values and norms parallel to conventional culture. It upholds a way of life that is normally considered criminal or deviant, and social groups that subscribe to a subculture are often stigmatized by those who subscribe to the dominant culture. The relationship between subcultures and dominant cultures resonates with the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, for the latter is often criminalized even when he or she exhibits the violence embedded in the culture of the colonizer. Evidently, the idea of a subculture recognizes difference and seeks to empower minority cultures the way Bhabha’s concepts of the third space and hybridity accommodate cultures of the vanquished. “The use of violence in a subculture of violence is not necessarily viewed as illicit conduct and the users therefore do not have to deal with feelings of guilt about their aggression” (Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 2002, p. 95).

Subculture theory is slightly different from Bhabha’s hybridity because hybridity seeks to harmonize, rather than divide, cultures. Bhabha’s (1994) hybridity “reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (in Young, 2004, p. 189). Sutherland’s (2002) subculture theory, which I have adopted in this article, was influenced by the Chicago school of criminology. The theory proposes that “a person is more likely to offend if they have frequent and consistent contact with others involved in such activities” (Cote, 2002, p. 26). Thus, criminality according to this theory is learned through association with criminal tendencies. Albert Cohen (1955) modified Sutherland’s theory and noted that juvenile offending was not necessarily motivated by material needs, rather adolescent gang members stole for the fun of it and took pride in their acquired reputations of being tough and hard.

Theorizing the postcolonial, Bill Ashcroft argues that contrary to the Manichaean conception of resistance as opposition, colonized subjects do not necessarily confront the colonizer with open political violence; rather, they use various subtle means of resisting domination. Subcultures challenge hegemonic regimes through subtle means rather than direct confrontation. Bhabha (1994) concurs:

Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention nor is it the simple negation or the exclusion of the “content” of another culture . . . [but] the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference. (p. 24)

Bhabha and Ashcroft see the minor crimes committed by the colonized, for example theft and lying to the White employer, as ways of translating the imperatives of colonial domination.

Navigating Apartheid: Crime and Violence in BB

Wright was born in 1908 in Natchez, Mississippi, “one of the most destitute and racist parts of the Southern American states of the twentieth century” (Fabre, 1985, p. 77). His experience of racial violence and White domination inspired most of his writings from Uncle Tom’s Children to Native Son and through BB, an autobiographical narrative that is the subject of this article. Because Wright depends on personal experiences to represent the racial hostility of the Deep South, most critics have read his works as sociological studies of the plight of African Americans. Michel Fabre (1985) has found it handy to read BB alongside Wright’s nonfictional work 12 Million Black Voices, which trace the history of African Americans in the South with specific emphasis on folk culture and its role in mitigating the imperatives of racism. On the other hand, Hakutani (2006, p. 85) intimates that BB “though not intended as such is a convincing sociological study. Like sociology, it not only analyses a social problem but offers a solution to the problem it treats.” What is explicit in such readings is a conceptualization of Wright’s work as an artistic reflection of problems affecting the society of his time. The social problem that Wright addresses in BB is that of racial violence and crime as it interjects and translates Jim Crow repression. This article looks at racial violence and crime in BB from the perspective of subculture and postcolonial theories. Tracing the life of Richard, the protagonist of Wright’s biography, the article draws parallels between the selected theories and argues that African Americans, like their counterparts in Africa and the rest of the colonial world, devised subtle strategies of interjecting, navigating, and transforming the system of apartheid in order to inscribe their own subjectivity.

BB traces Wright’s plight for freedom and self-realization against the White supremacist ideology of the South that intended to fix the African American to a position of docility and obsequious servitude. While Wright is skeptical about the possibility of escaping the hegemonic structures of White supremacy in Native Son, in BB he sees the appropriation of discourse as a possible leeway to self-liberation. Wright’s reading and writing deepen his inward life, broaden his vision, and empower him to see his own life in salvific terms (Butler, 2009, p. 52). His life is a testimony to the challenges endured by African Americans denied a living space in the racist South. The autobiography is Wright’s way of authoring himself into existence against the exclusive discourse of the Deep South and also “witnessing” the stunted existence of other “Negro boys” of the South in the same way that writers in similar contexts, for example Athol Fugard in South Africa, witnessed the lives of the victims of apartheid. His personal experiences thus exemplify the challenges encountered by those who attempted to rebel against southern White hegemony. BB, like Native Son, is a counterdiscourse of resistance that interrogates established representations of the African American other.

The novel opens with the protagonist’s restless yearning for adventure, which culminates in his burning grandmother’s house. Apparently, this act of petty criminality is a way of resisting the suffocating environment of the South metonymically embodied in the values of grandmother’s home. Philipson (2000, p. 156) asserts that “BB portrays Wright’s inability to become a part of the black community as it has been constructed by the dominant white ideology. The tyrannical narrowness of his granny’s household keeps him from any kind of social intercourse.” Richard’s domestic space is small and restrictive, and as a young boy he has a yearning for adventure that the environment of grandmother’s home and the South in general cannot allow. Grandmother is a staunch Seventh-day Adventist who does everything strictly according to the letter. The house is like a prison for the young, adventurous Richard, who wants to express himself. Adventist doctrine functions as a repressive discourse that colludes with racist America to further confine and silence the Black child, which is reminiscent of Althusser’s ideological state apparatus that includes the church.

Richard’s search for a voice echoes the postcolonial plight of the colonized to appropriate discourse (knowledge/power) in order to inscribe a sense of agency within the colonial system. His guardians, particularly his grandmother, are unconscious agents of the discourse of apartheid because they deny him a voice, the only way he can register his thoughts and feelings. They are, in a sense, appendages of the larger oppressive system. In restricting Richard, they perpetuate the southern legacy of inculcating fear and docility among African Americans. Ngugi Wa Thiongo (2000, p. 122) points out that once the mind has been colonized, the colonizer does not have to be physically present to inculcate colonial values, naturally the colonized allocate themselves an inferior space. Although authoritarian religious practices are found even in nonracial societies, the repressive nature of Adventist doctrine in a society that is already racially polarized worsens Richard’s situation. Richard is inferior not simply to the colonizers, but also to other folks in his family. This is clearly shown in the incident when grandmother gives him a telling blow for interrupting elders’ conversation. Richard’s itching for space and speech is a subtle act of resistance that attracts violent reactions from his conformist grandmother. It is probable that grandmother is executing a genuine responsibility of inculcating values into the young Richard. Yet the values she inculcates are obviously “over determined from without,” to borrow a phrase from Fanon (2004, p. 6). She is a vehicle (consciously or unconsciously) of the culture of silence and fear that is endemic in Jim Crow, the same culture that limits Bigger Thomas’s world in Native Son. At this early stage in the text, we can see that the socioeconomic atmosphere of grandmother’s home is a center for what Spivak (2006) has theorized as structural domination.

Like his protagonist, Wright likes

to see himself as an individual who happened to be born in a poor black Natchez family and had to carve for himself not only his identity through rebellion but to seek a chosen place, a place of freedom versus servitude, knowledge versus cultural void, action versus apathy. He is a man seeking a place where he could be fully human from Mississippi to Memphis, to Chicago, to New York. (Fabre, 1985, p. 77)

In BB, Wright views the environment of the South as particularly unsupportive of individual nourishment. Philip Anger (2000, p. 4) observes that “the black culture that Wright addresses is one that is effectively disenfranchised by the dominant discourse of white racism of the early twentieth century,” what Wright (1991a) in his essay “How Bigger Was Born” calls “a whole panoply of rules, taboos and penalties” designed to “keep blacks in their place.” Southern culture is clearly exclusive, totalitarian, and hostile; however, Black culture is “no supportive environment by itself” (Fabre, 1985, p. 81). The culture of the South, White and Black, is comparable to the authoritarian attitude of the British middle-upper-class family of Dickens’s novels that is later transported to the colonies. The claustrophobia of the South is symbolized by grandmother’s house—small, overcrowded, and run on strict religious principles. Due to the limiting atmosphere of the house, Richard ends up burning the curtain and consequently the house in search of more space and something to do. As a metaphor of resistance to apartheid oppression, Richard’s approach at this point resonates with Bill Ashcroft’s notion of postcolonial transformation because it challenges the system from within.

The violence in grandmother’s house is a microcosm of the violence of southern apartheid. When Richard burns the house (which is a way of transferring his own frustration to his immediate environment), his mother beats him unconscious, with the approval of the rest of the family including grandmother, in spite of her religious disposition. Implicit in grandmother’s response is Wright’s conviction that Christianity is just as authoritarian as communism, “a dangerous fantasy for oppressed people, the opiate of the masses, because it dissipates their energies and distracts them from understanding and reforming the real world” (Butler, 2009, p. 58). The conflict between Richard, the unbelieving “heathen,” and grandmother, the Adventist, is a struggle for power. Grandmother represents the dominant discourse that is responsible for setting the rules and constructing others. Richard’s petty acts of resistance are statements of insubordination in the eyes of grandmother’s ruling Adventist ideology—thus showing that “ideology is simultaneously a strategy of domination and a terrain of struggle” (Fiske, 1996, p. 212). Like communism in The Outsider, the racial ideology of the South in general and the Adventist ideology in particular seem to thrive on the exercise of absolute power to crush their enemies. Richard testifies thus:

I was beaten so hard and long that I lost consciousness. . . . I was beaten out of my senses and later I found myself in bed . . . my body seemed to be on fire and I could not sleep. Packs of ice were put on my forehead to put down the fever. (pp. 8-9)

After the beatings, Richard experiences a nervous breakdown and plunges into a delirium that keeps him abed for a week. Grandmother’s exercise of violence on Richard is not only a way of disciplining a naughty grandchild but also a complex way of negotiating her frustration within the hegemonic structures of the South. In that sense we realize that she is not only an agent of southern repressive culture but also a victim, opening her own spaces for survival. At face value, Richard’s grandmother is a staunch Adventist who sees the world in Black and White, the good and bad, self-consciously trapped in the binary of religion. From this perspective, she is so blinkered that she does not see anything beyond the confines of religion. Worldly pursuits like reading and critical self-reflection are taboo in her world. She is, from this perspective, White America’s ambassador in the Black community, helping to further restrict the African American: “I want none of that devil stuff in my house. She bared her teeth and slapped me across my mouth with the back of her hand” (p. 39). Nevertheless, grandmother’s predicament seems to be much more complex than that.

We are told that grandmother is so white in complexion that she could have passed for White, yet she is classified as colored. To be classified as colored in a world where skin color is a mark of privilege and a criterion for determining one’s station in life, is a nerve-racking experience. We see it through Zechariah, the dark-skinned brother in Athol Fugard’s play The Blood Knot, who, because of the color of his skin, feels estranged from his blood brother, Morris. Grandmother’s violence is a response to the way she has been fixed by the racialized discourse of the South. She embraces religion for strategic purposes like Father Seldon in Wright’s novel The Outsider. The postcolonial theorist Bill Ashcroft (2001a) argues that there is no discourse that is totalizing in its exercise of power. The oppressed capitalize on certain fractures or points of weakness within dominant regimes of power. Richard’s resistance to domestic violence comes when he realizes that those who unleash violence on him, particularly grandmother and Aunt Addie, do so not to right a wrong but to relieve their own personal strain. Wright’s point is that Richard’s relatives have exceeded what he is willing to take as discipline. Thus, on realizing this, he resorts to violent ways of interpolating the ruthless exercise of power by his guardians. When Aunt Addie threatens to beat him for eating in class, Richard defends himself with a knife, a response that reflects an emerging generation gap between him and other family members, particularly grandmother, Aunt Audie, and Uncle Tom. Richard “proves to be a very active individual who desires to change not only his life, but also his surroundings” (Sasa & BenLahcene, 2011, p. 29).

In BB, as in most of Wright’s works, religion has an ideological function. It seeks to control by exercising the power of the supernatural. “Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God” (p. 130). Violence also emanates from the desire to control as exhibited by Uncle Tom, who threatens to beat Richard because he has “never heard a sassier black imp than [him] all [his] life.” Uncle Tom is angry with Richard because he perceives his conduct as disrespectful. In the brawl that ensures, it is evident that besides being a frustrated retired teacher, Uncle Tom has internalized the language and behavior of his White masters. In beating Richard, he is metaphorically disciplining a sassy nigger as any White man would do (p. 150). Uncle Tom is thus a reincarnation of Beecher Stowe’s obsequious Uncle Tom who survived through “a bow and a hat in hand,” a typical patriarchal man who has also embraced the values of the colonial master.

Fanon (2004) gives a comprehensible analysis of this behavior:

Whereas the colonist or police officer can beat the colonized subject day in and out, insult him and shove him to his knees, it is not uncommon to see the colonized subject draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another colonized subject. (p. 17)

Testifying about the misunderstanding with his aunt, Richard says, “I leaped, screaming and ran past her and jerked open the kitchen drawer . . . I grabbed a knife and held it ready for her” (p. 104). This violence is a vicious cycle that circulates among the oppressed. It is “a state of rage” as Fanon (2004, p. 17) calls it, that the colonizer instills in the colonized and prevents from “boiling over” through maintaining internecine feuds. These conflicts are not progressive because they divert the attention of the oppressed from the disease (the oppressor) to symptoms (other victims of oppression). At one point, grandmother tries to assault Richard for expressing his mind, but Richard dodges the blow; we are told that “the force of her blow was so strong that she fell down the steps, headlong, her body wedged in a narrow space between the fence and the bottom step” (p. 128). Dodging his grandmother’s blow is a survival strategy for Richard, a way of “shrewdly coping to live with and at the same time struggling against his oppressive society to obtain the sense of selfhood he desires” (Sasa & BenLahcene, 2011, p. 32).

Internecine feuds of this nature are in the interest of White America or at least that part of White America that profits from the suppression of Blacks. A case in point is that of Richard and Harrison, who are made to fight for the pleasure of White men. “We were not really angry with each other; we knew that the idea of murder had been planted in each of us by the white men who employed us” (p. 228). The White employers on this occasion use their economic power to plant hostile relations between the two boys. Both Harrison and Richard desperately need money to survive, so they allow themselves to be used as objects of White recreation. This can be interpreted as a version of the neocolonial predicament whereby the Third World is torn between adopting dictations from the West in return for financial handouts (Harrison’s option) or holding on to national pride and languishing in poverty and underdevelopment (Richard’s option). Harrison needs the money to buy clothes. He says, “I wanna make a payment on a suit with that five dollars” (p. 227). The question that comes to mind is whether survival is possible in this sense. Where do we place values of self-worth, identity, and personal integrity in the pursuit for survival? Is survival so urgent that one can forfeit one’s very humanity for it? While Richard and Harrison fight for the $5, their White employers smoke and yell obscenities (p. 231).

It is explicit in this incident that the White employers and their compatriots enjoy the spectacle of Black people fighting among themselves. Yet the question remains as to why it is in their interest to see African Americans fighting. In fact, in this story, Richard’s employer goes so far as to purchase a knife for him so that he could “protect” himself, but when we discover that Harrison has no intention to fight Richard, we come to the understanding that the fight is a creation of the White employers. Perhaps, this is a system of divide and rule designed to divert Black people from serious issues that affect their lives to petty conflicts among themselves. Fanon (2004) maintains that such behavior “reinforces the colonist’s existence and reassures him that such men are not rational” (p. 18).

Thus in leaving the South, Richard takes the proverbial African American journey to the North, a journey that symbolizes a quest for freedom: “I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if I could grow differently, if I could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps bloom” (Fabre, 1985, p. 82). Travel is a self-liberating enterprise that, however, smacks of escapism and selfishness. In traveling to the North, Richard is preoccupied with individual freedom, yet this freedom is treacherous in that while it is “new,” “cool,” and “warm,” it is also “strange.”

Richard’s restlessness is a metaphorical exposition of his longing for broader horizons of self-expression and imaginative freedom. “There was the teasing and impossible desire to imitate the petty pride of sparrows wallowing and flouncing in the red dust of country roads” (p. 9). The sparrows are an enviable sight because they are exercising the kind of freedom that Richard needs. We see a similar kind of longing in Bigger’s admiration of the bird’s freedom to fly—to go wherever it wishes to go. One aspect of the apartheid South is that it physically restricts mobility among Blacks. There are areas where Blacks are not allowed to venture unless they are servants or in the company of a White man. The Black boys of Wright’s novel are barred from crossing over to the White section. As a result, Richard and his friends team up to fight and protect their territory from trespassing White boys. Ideological fundamentalism, epitomized in these childish conflicts, compartmentalizes society and generates violence on the basis of group prejudice.

Wright tells us in his introduction to Native Son that the protagonist in BB represents “the voiceless Negro boys of the South.” Richard is alienated from his family and the rest of the Black community, not because he is educated like Cross (The Outsider), but because he is not satisfied with the space that society has been carved out for him. Like Bigger Thomas, he feels a need for a whole life, and he acts out of that need (Wright, 1991a, p. 871). Wright considers the African American society as having accepted the values of the White society, perhaps for fear of the ruthless violence of apartheid that seeks to eliminate the Bigger Thomases and Black boys of the South. In an interview on his novel The Long Dream, Wright argues that the novel

deals with a Black human plant that has to draw its nourishment from abnormal conditions of life. Men not only take their cultural and economic values from the society in which they live, but they also take the direction and the pitch of their sexual attitudes and drives. (Fabre, 1985, p. 85)

Similarly, the violence in BB is nourished by the circumstances of racial discrimination in the South. If anything, the African American community colludes with the larger White society to break the African American and keep him in his place.

Taking a leaf from Fanon’s (2004) The Wretched of the Earth, the explanation for this behavior is twofold. First, Black southerners have imbibed the values of the colonizer. Second, Black-on-Black violence may, in a psychological sense, be the colonized subject’s way of negotiating the trauma associated with the “fact of Blackness” or what it means (socially, economically, politically, etc.) to be Black in a White world. In theorizing the postcolonial, Bhabha (1994) argues that colonial discourse represents the other as fixed, knowable, and predictable. In the same way, apartheid constructs an essentialized social place for the African American. Wright’s “How Bigger Was Born” informs us that Bigger Thomases were “often shot, maimed, broken, lynched or generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken” (Wright, 1991a, p. 856). Being Black means being satisfied with the given. However, Richard emerges from the hell of American racism to experience a kind of salvation through the exercise of will and spirit. He transcends a world that imprisoned the soul of his father and crushed the spirit of his grandfather, achieving a liberating “new life” as a major American writer (Butler, 2009, p. 57). Fabre (1985) observes that if he “had stayed in the South, Wright, the great writer could have ended up a sharecropper like his father” (p. 80).

If burning the house is Richard’s first childish quest for adventure, killing the cat is indeed his first attempt at outright rebellion. No wonder why this criminal act, petty though it may appear, is taken seriously and receives a harsh punishment. Richard is forced to bury the cat and suffer a guilty conscience as if he has committed murder. In a sense, this incident is an initiation that prepares him for bigger crimes. In fact, when Richard kills the cat, the intended victim is his father, who, in his sleepiness, had told him to kill the cat. Metaphorically, killing the cat is an act of killing his father. “I knew that he had not really meant for me to kill the cat but my deep hate of him urged me toward a literal acceptance of his word” (p. 12). Richard hates his father, first, because he is irresponsible and, second, because the father has imbibed the fear instilled by the South, and therefore he is not a good role model. This explains why Richard is “deeply satisfied” (p. 13) after killing the cat.

By killing the cat, Richard has challenged his father’s authority and by implication the authority of the South. “He could not punish me now without risking his authority” (p. 13). Killing the cat and burning the house are forms of resistance against not only the despotism of his father but also the values of his guardians. “I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me” (p. 14). What comes out clearly through Richard’s destructive adventures is a confirmation of Bill Ashcroft’s assertion that “no subjective body has a special existential quality fundamentally distinct from its signification.” In other words, we become what the world has made of us. “In a real sense,” Ashcroft (1998, p. 209) argues, “the body is not only the site of sensate access to the world, but is an extension of the textuality of that world—an extension of the fabric, the tissue of quotations that make up that world.” Richard’s behavior is thus an extension of the textuality of his world. His behavior is a result of the psychological displacement that culminates in his absurd gestures of wanton destruction.

Killing the cat is Richard’s first act of insubordination that prevails. It gives him the courage to confront bigger challenges. Although he bears the moral guilt involved in the act of murder, White people engage in more hideous acts of violence (e.g., pushing Richard off a moving truck) without bearing any moral guilt. In fact, when Richard is thrown off a moving truck, the perpetrators make it a subject of laughter. Eldridge Cleaver (1968, p. 73) intimates that “the racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder, really, unless the victim is white.” Richard’s mother accuses him on moral grounds, the way the apartheid state uses religion to “call [Blacks] not to the ways of God but to the ways of the white man” (Fanon, 2004, p. 7). Grandmother orders Richard to “go out into the dark, dig a hole and bury the kitten’” (p. 14). “The kitten dropped to the pavement with a thud that echoed in [his] mind for many days and nights” (p. 15). Again we realize that Richard is being tormented by his own people and not by Whites. His mother forces him to make a prayer asking God to forgive him for killing the cat. Although we cannot absolve Richard for killing the cat, the fact that he bears a guilty conscience gives us a picture of how the racial ideology of the South functions. White violence in the South is sanctioned by religion, which functions as an ideological state apparatus.

Wright’s departure from the racist South is thus a rejection of religion that is characteristic of his existentialist thought. He is deeply hurt when his sick mother is denied medical treatment because of her skin color. The suffering that he sees through his mother’s sickness (felt life) and the uncaring attitude of White America make him distrust everyone and everything. His mother’s perpetual sickness “set the emotional tone of [his] life, colored the men and women [he] was to meet in the future, conditioned [his] relation to events that had not yet happened, determined [his] attitude to situations and circumstances [he] was yet to face” (p. 18).

Wright’s analysis of the racial problem in the South is influenced by his own experiences of hunger, unemployment, and poverty. When his father deserts the family, he is plunged into a life of hunger and desperation, as he says “now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly” (p. 30). Hunger is presented as an accomplice to Richard, a reality he has to live with. He and his brother spend the whole day on “a loaf of bread and a pot of tea.” “I knew hunger, hunger that made my body aimlessly restless, hunger that kept me on edge, that made my temper flare, hunger that made hate leap out of my heart like the dart of a serpent’s tongue, hunger that created in me odd cravings” (p. 98).

Some critics have thus argued that Wright became an existentialist through “felt life” rather than through the influence of Sartre and Camus. Although Richard is only 12 years old, the racism of the South compels him to question the status quo. “Why could I not eat when I was hungry? . . . I could not understand why some people had enough food and others did not” (p. 30). Hunger keeps him restless and potentially a criminal. “I now found it irresistible to roam during the day while my mother was cooking in the kitchens of the white folks” (p. 30). The more he patronizes the streets, associating with morally decadent adults, the more he becomes corrupted. “I was a drunkard in my sixth year before I had begun school” (p. 23). Richard comes to realize that Whites eat well and are never hungry, while Blacks are always hungry and envious of White people. Following behind his mother to White folks’ kitchens, Richard feeds on occasional scraps of bread and meat from White tables. The implication is that poverty and desperation may force one to engage in criminal activities. Richard himself makes a resolution to do with “something unclean” (p. 34) because of the naked reality of his life. His father has deserted the family; the money earned by his mother is not enough for him to eat and attend school. She ends up sending him to an orphanage, where he is once again subjected to hunger. “Many mornings I was too weak to pull the grass; I would grow dizzy and my mind would become Black” (p. 28). The fact that Richard is separated from his mother too early in life and subjected to the ruthless environment of apartheid makes him a stranger to his own people, an outsider, “rapidly learning to distrust everything and everybody” (p. 30).

Apart from the hunger that has become a part of his life, Richard is psychologically devastated by his father’s decision to desert the family for another woman. It is after this incident that he resolves to do with “something unclean” (p. 34). In the court session that culminates in divorce, his mother is crying while his father is laughing, and this makes him hate his father permanently. “If someone had suggested that my father be killed, I would perhaps have become interested” (p. 29). The fact that Richard’s father is allowed by law to abandon his family shows that the legal system is being manipulated to destroy the African American family. Richard’s father is also a victim of the slave system: “From the White landowners above him; there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition” (p. 35). These values could not be passed on to Richard’s father because he has been brought up in the legacy of slavery.

Owing to the hardships of life arising from the father’s desertion of the family, Richard is initiated into the violence of the streets. Surprisingly, it is his mother who initiates him into street violence as if violence in the Black community has become a kind of subculture, a way of life. As Richard narrates the story of his encounter with street gangs, we see that gang life in the Black belt is a subculture one must embrace in order to survive. “The gang of boys grabbed me, knocked me down, snatched the basket, took the money and sent me running home in panic” (p. 18). Instead of cushioning her son in motherly care, his mother gives him a stick and tells him not to come back into the house without the groceries. This is a subculture of violence that is triggered by abject conditions of poverty in the African American community. It is after engaging in a bloody fight with the boys that Richard graduates into the world of delinquency.

Richard attacks the boys as if his whole life depends on winning the fight. “I fought to lay them low, to knock them cold, and to kill them so that they could not strike back at me. I flayed with tears in my eyes, teeth clenched, stark fear making me throw every ounce of my strength behind each blow” (p. 19). The way he fights suggests that this is a test to be passed if he is to be part of this society. Thus by winning the fight, he graduates into “adulthood” even though he is still a child. “And for the first time in my life I shouted at grownups, telling them I would give them the same if they bothered me” (p. 19). Following this incident, Richard is co-opted into a gang to protect the Black belt “their territory” from White boys. “Whenever we caught a white boy on our side we stoned him; if we strayed to their side they stoned us” (p. 20). The White and Black gangsters are formed against the background of racial segregation and interracial hatred.

Fanon (1967, p. 144) notes that the kind of social curricula a child is exposed to has a bearing on the child’s behavior and attitude to life. Although Richard promises his mother that he will not fight again, he cannot stop because he is bound by allegiance to the values of his gang. “I promised my mother that I would not fight, but I knew that if I kept my word I would lose my standing in the gang, and the gang’s life was my life” (p. 80). On this juncture, Wright’s interpretation of criminal behavior reflects the influence of the Chicago sociologists of the 1930s to 1940s. Chicago sociologists analyzed crime within the context of the social environment that supposedly bred criminals. In this case, Richard’s environment compels him to engage in violence, for example, when Uncle Clark takes him to school, he has no choice but to fight his way into the subculture of the school. He confesses thus: “I fought tiggerishly, trying to leave a scar, seeking to draw blood as proof that I was not a coward that I could take care of myself” (p. 88).

It is explicit, however, that Richard’s tragedy is, from the onset, directly influenced by racist America. Apart from his childhood adventures, which are perhaps “normal,” his real predicament starts when he stumbles upon the racial divide through the story of a White man who beat a Black boy. In his childhood innocence, Richard takes the story for granted, thinking that the Black boy is the White man’s son. “I felt that the ‘white’ man had the right to beat the ‘black’ boy, for I naively assumed that the ‘white’ man must have been the ‘black’ boy’s father” (p. 24). The visit to Granny’s place further exposes Richard to the realities of Jim Crow society. “When I boarded the train I was aware that we Negroes were in one part of the train and that the whites were in another. . . . I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched, it seemed, except in violence” (p. 46). Richard’s traceable degeneration from an innocent boy to a drunkard and a thief cannot in any meaningful way be attributed to his personality. What Wright clearly articulates is that the more Richard becomes acquainted with his society, the more he becomes delinquent. Thus, he consciously decides to liberate himself through engaging in criminal violence. Richard resorts to theft because all the legitimate means of self-realization are closed: “Southern whites would rather have Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew however dimly the worth of their humanity” (p. 191).

Some critics, particularly Ralph Ellison, have criticized Wright for being pessimistic about Blacks in the South. Although the South was racist, Ellison argues, African Americans “survived” through cultural activities like the blues. However, Wright maintains that

what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure. . . . Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of Negro life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of western civilization; that they lived somehow in it but not of it. (p. 37)

Critics such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin celebrate Black culture, especially the blues, which they say help to sustain Blacks in difficult times. However Wright articulates the trauma of living “in-between,” as Bhabha and Fanon have conceptualized the predicament of the colonized. The experience of “living in” but being “not of” is implicitly responsible for the African American’s desperation that unleashes itself as open violence, theft, and internecine feuds. As Wright has argued in “How Bigger Was Born,” the Black boys of the South respond to this nervous shiftiness of “being in” but “not of” in different ways. Some take to drugs, alcohol, and women, while others go for religion, “a fatalism which relieves the oppressor of all responsibility since the cause of wrong doing, poverty and the inevitable can be attributed to God” (Fanon, 2004, p. 18).

In fact, almost all the characters in BB are inclined to violence one way or the other because they are all frustrated and unable to find conventional modes of expressing this. Compared to other forms of colonial exploitation, the African American experience is exceptional particularly because Black Americans are not being exploited by an alien. James Baldwin argues that racial relations in America are complicated in that the African American is tied to his slave master in a blood relationship. “The relationships . . . are not merely oppressor versus oppressed or master versus servant, they are relationships of blood and these relationships contain the force and anguish and terror of love” (Baldwin, 1985, p. 42). The same applies to apartheid South Africa, where coloreds are segregated in spite of their blood relationship with the colonial masters.

The real trouble with Jim Crow is that it denies the very humanity of the African American. “I would have agreed to live under a system of feudal oppression, not because I preferred feudalism but because I felt that feudalism made use of a limited part of a man, defined him, his rank, his function in society” (p. 253). Although this is a clear overstatement on Richard’s part, the point he is making is that the system does not allow Blacks to express their relevance to society. Since African Americans are excluded and treated as subhuman, they also begin to hate themselves. “Hated by Whites and being an organic part of that culture that hated him, the Black man begins to, in turn hate in himself that which others hated in him” (p. 253). The violence of the Black man is therefore the struggle within himself triggered by his rationalization of the way he has been constructed.

Wright argues that America is

aggressive because it is afraid, it insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the black and the white, our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of self-righteousness. (p. 260)

The tension between White and Black is therefore lodged in the binary construction of “Black and White.” The same binaries are also evident in colonial discourse as articulated by Fanon, Bhabha, and other postcolonial theorists. In other words, American society degenerates into violence because it has embraced a Manichaean conceptualization of the world and thus is obsessed with othering.

Violence in African American literature has always been associated with the colonial system of subjugation, stereotyping, and exploitation. Beginning with the historic abduction and transportation of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean as so vividly portrayed in Alex Haley’s (1976) Roots, to the forced labor of the slave era, as presented in the slave narratives, through the systematic dehumanization of Jim Crow, racial violence has always emanated from the White man’s attempt to define the African American and subject him to the condition of that definition. In BB, we see tension emanating from Richard’s refusal to abide by the White man’s representation. On two occasions, Richard narrowly escapes being lynched for failing to present himself as “a docile Negro” in the presence of his masters. At one point he is thrown off a moving truck for failing to say “sir” to a White man. White America has constructed the African American as a servant, and to that end he engages in violence.

Bill Ashcroft (2001b), in his book Post-Colonial Transformation, argues that the concept of place is capable of being transformed, and it is in the process of transforming the given place that the African American is victimized. This is the reason why one of Richard’s employers tells him that he will never become a writer and on another occasion Richard laughs when his prospective employer asks him if he was a thief. The White employer says, “Now look, we don’t need a sassy nigger around here” (p. 139). A sassy nigger is one who thinks or expresses his mind and thus moving away from his designated place. A sassy nigger is one who rationalizes his prescribed identity, while a good nigger is one who affirms the image of the White man’s fabrication like Shorty who bares his “tough” ass for a White man to kick and laugh.

Since the White world has essentialized the African American, Richard’s aspiration to become a writer is a wild dream. When he tells his White employer that he wants to write stories, she says, “You will never be a writer . . . who on earth put such ideas into your nigger head” (p. 141). A “nigger head” is one incapable of innovation and creative thinking. The White woman speaks about Richard’s destiny with finality because she believes she knows the “Negro.” On the other hand, Richard tells us that he “faced a wall in the woman’s mind; a wall that she did not know was there” (p. 142). The wall refers to the falsehoods and stereotypes behind which both Blacks and Whites hide and dramatize false roles. Richard’s boss at the mill also salves his notions of racial supremacy by emphasizing the perceived difference between Blacks and Whites. “A dog bite can’t hurt a nigger” (p. 156), he says, the implication being that a nigger is not human enough to suffer any harm from a dog bite. This reminds us of the conviction of most colonial rulers that Blacks will never rule themselves, otherwise there will be chaos. Ian Smith in then Southern Rhodesia vowed that Blacks would not rule Rhodesia in a thousand years. Similarly, Margaret Thatcher in 1987 firmly pronounced, “Anyone who thinks that the ANC is going to run the government of South Africa is living in Cloud Cuckooland” (Bonynton, 1997, p. 18).

Fanon (1967) argues that colonial violence is double-edged because it dehumanizes both the oppressor and the oppressed. Richard witnesses an incident when two White men beat a Black woman until their hands are bloody, and as they wash the blood away, they break into laughter saying, “That’s what we do to niggers when they don’t pay their bills” (p. 172). What is apparent in this bloody incident is that racial violence does not only objectify and dehumanize the victim; it also upsets the White man’s claim to racial supremacy. The act of washing away blood and chuckling at the same time is undoubtedly sadistic, although these White men seem to be consumed by a callous, inhuman materialism.

The story of Bob, who is killed for flirting with a White prostitute at the hotel, echoes White America’s fear of the “Negro” he has created, a fear that is akin to Bhabha’s (1994) conception of stereotype as fetish. Bob’s behavior is both an affirmation and a deviation because while the “Negro” is a child, the fact that he has slept with a White woman makes him a different kind of child—a monster. Taking after Freud’s assertion that “affection and hostility in the treatment of the fetish . . . are mixed in unequal proportions in different cases,” Bhabha observes that the stereotype takes a wide range of forms, “from the loyal servant to Satan, from the loved to the hated; a shifting of subject positions in the circulation of colonial power” (p. 76). The White man’s fear of the “Negro” is also aptly captured through Pease and Reynolds, two White men who refuse Richard the opportunity to learn a trade: “I heard that a nigger can stick his prick in the ground and spin around on it like a top” (p. 180).

Bob is killed particularly because he has overstepped the limit. As one character in Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) puts it, the White woman is an ogre “that has its claws buried in the core of [his] being and refuses to let go” (p. 159). Cleaver himself is enraged when a prison guard pulls down his White pin up girl. “I was shocked and enraged to find that the guard had ripped my sugar from the wall . . . it was like seeing a dead body in a lake” (p. 7). Apparently, the White pinup girl, a mere object of fantasy, has become an emblem of his aspirations. The White woman is a temptation because the dominant machinery of representation has portrayed her as the acme of beauty, and for the African American, falling in love with her is an irresistible temptation. “All our lives,” observes Butterfly, Cleaver’s inmate, “we have had the white woman dangled before our eyes like a carrot on a stick before a donkey: look but don’t touch” (Cleaver, 1968, p. 9). This ambivalent collocation of beauty and death draws Bob to his own death.

Stereotyping assures White America of its humanity while at the same time emphatically fixes the African American. This is clearly depicted in the story of Uncle Hoskins, a thriving Black business man who is hunted down and shot dead by racist Whites. The logic is that if a Black man is less human, then he should not venture into business and do better than Whites, otherwise he threatens the White man’s perceived and actual sense of security. Richard tells us that he “learned afterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who had long coveted his flourishing liquor business” (p. 53). Aunt Maggie, his wife, is not allowed either to see the body of her dead husband or even to claim his assets. Every time Richard gets a new job, he has to find a way of fitting into the straitjacket of the White man’s “good nigger.” Songs such as “Bloody Christ killers / Never trust a Jew / Bloody Christ killers / What wont a Jew do?” (p. 59) may seem innocent since they are being sung by little children, but they are based on stereotype and may as well constitute the cultural bedrock of genocide.

Through his autobiographical narrative, Wright shows that resistance is about not only direct opposition but also moving the center (to borrow a phrase from Ngugi Wa Thiongo) or defining oneself from one’s own way of seeing the world. Bill Ashcroft (2001b) has argued that this is the way most societies subjected to colonial domination managed to use the values of the colonizer to transform themselves in their own way. We are told that “one afternoon hunger haunted [Richard] so acutely that [he] decided to sell [his] dog, Betsy and buy food” (p. 67). A White woman offered to buy the dog for 97 cents, but Richard refused because he did not want to sell his dog to White people. Richard refuses to sell the dog to the White women because she does not want to buy the dog at the actual price. Her assumption is that someone who is desperate would take any offer. On this occasion, Richard refuses to live within the confines of the idealized African American, to be knowable and therefore exploitable. Refusing to take the 97 cents in place of a dollar could symbolize decolonization, a process of stepping outside the limits of the colonizer’s episteme. Richard says, “Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen from within” (p. 70).

Making things happen “from within” is perhaps the strategy that Shorty uses to get money from White people. He manipulates the fallacy of the nigger with so tough an ass that he cannot feel any pain to get money for subsistence. Similarly, Richard uses the White man’s stereotype to cheat the system and educate himself. We see this when he forges a note to the library, asking for books by H. L. Mencken. “Dear Madam, will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H.L. Mencken” (p. 235). It is through Mencken that Richard realizes the power of words as weapons of self-liberation.

African Americans also negotiate White violence at a discursive level through formulating discourses of resistance in the form of stories, true and false, that celebrate Black resistance to the system. This discourse, like the story of Mrs. Green, who is said to have told her White mistress “if you slaps me, I will kill you and go to hell and pay for it” (p. 76), is a way of mitigating fear for the oppressor and thus ensuring survival. It imaginatively captures the violence that the African American wishes to unleash on the White world in revenge. In addition, the story of the African American woman who pretends to be humble and subservient to the White folks so as to revenge the death of her husband also celebrates African American resistance, thus in some measure boosting self-esteem. “The woman, so went the story, knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the sheet; and, before the White men realized what was happening, she had taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shooting at them from her knees” (p. 71). It is from these fables that resistance is constructed to counter White oppression.

Unlike Bigger Thomas in Native Son, who takes a confrontational approach, Richard transforms hegemony through “controlling discourses, having some power over language and thus having the power to define the self” (Anger, 2000, p. 3). Reading is, for Richard, an attempt to escape the frustrations of his environment and discover an alternative life; it is a way of re-creating oneself.

I would go to my room and lock the door and revel in outlandish exploits of outlandish men in faraway, outlandish cities . . . and I was claimed by it. I loved it. Though they were merely stories I accepted them as true because I wanted to believe them, because I hungered for a different life, for something new. (p. 123)

Reading is therefore an alternative to strife and violence. “In his act of creation, the creation of the novel itself, Wright reproduces hope, opening more discursive space for future acts of black male self-determination” (Anger, 2000, p. 3).

Richard’s “outsider” consciousness is deepened as he begins to read and write. Seemingly, reading gives him an opportunity to explore other worlds, thus distancing him from the world of his people. In fact Richard’s attitude to the Black community becomes more and more judgmental as he finds his way through the labyrinths of Western civilization. Although he has imbibed Western cultural tools, and “he now speaks like a book,” Richard remains an outsider—torn between the world of his people and the world of Western civilization. When Richard visits the Protestant church where most of his classmates fellowship, he also remains aloof. “I liked it and I did not like it, I longed to be among them, yet when with them I looked at them as if I were a million miles away” (p. 145). Bill Ashcroft (2001a) insists that the tools of domination, particularly the White man’s language, can be appropriated for purposes of liberating the colonized.

Throughout BB, Wright sees the environment of the apartheid state as fertile ground for the proliferation of violence and other forms of antisocial behavior. Richard tells us thus:

My reading in sociology had enabled me to discern many strange types of Negro characters, to identify many modes of Negro behavior, and what moved me above all was the frequency of mental illness, that tragic toll that the urban environment exacted of the black peasant. (p. 271)

Implicit in this assertion is the naturalist perception of the individual fighting to circumvent social restrictions. While writers like Theodore Dreiser tended to end their narratives in despair, with the protagonist failing to overcome social laws, Wright takes an existentialist inclination that gives a sense of agency to his protagonists. The novel ends with the protagonist’s desire to “build a bridge of words between [him] and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal” (p. 365). Wright uses discourse to link the oppressed African American with the outside world—to make the world know the problems of the South.

Conclusion

This article has argued that crime and violence, in the context of Jim Crow/apartheid, may be seen as a way of actively engaging hegemony and manipulating fractures and fissures within the dominant discourse. It is in negotiating these spaces that subcultures of violence emerge as individuals seek to survive on the borderlines or in between cultural poles as Bhabha (1994) argues. Where race, society, and legislation are stumbling blocks to self-realization, as in the case of Richard in BB, criminal violence is committed as a way of perpetuating self in response to prevailing sociopolitical conditions. Crime and violence are not only abhorrent social vices but also strategies used by some individuals to undermine and/or evade authority and ensure survival. Moreover, resistance to cultural domination is not only oppositional but also subtle and tactical. Elaborating Bhabha’s concept of the liminal space, Ashcroft (2001b, p. 32) observes that “if resistance is sometimes ambivalently situated, it is also open to a wide horizon of possible forms, forms which often look very different from resistance but which stem from the desire for indigenous self-empowerment.” These “possible forms” of “indigenous self-empowerment” include tactics of beating the system and masking identity.