SECTION F: NON – AFRICAN PROSE
NATIVE SON – RICHARD WRIGHT
What have you learned about black life from the conversation between Bigger and Gus at the entrance of the pool room?
Explanation
Bigger leaves home that fateful morning to avoid his mother’s incessant nagging about the family’s poor living conditions and his not being able to be of any help. She warns him against his continued involvement with the gang and prophesies doom for him if he disregards her warning. He heads for the pool room where he feels more at ease. He meets Gus, a member of the gang at the entrance and they drift into a conversation.
Their conversation reveals much about the living conditions of the black people. It exposes their forced segregated lives, theft exclusion from participation in the political, military and commercial life of white America, as well as their bottled up frustration which stir up anger in some of them.
We learn, for instance, that blacks live under very poor conditions. As Bigger and Gus observe and 3 appreciate nature, i.e., the warm day, both reflect on the poor heating system in their homes. Though their landlords ‘don’t give much heat, they always demand r rent. They reflect also on their segregated lives, which bother them a lot. Bigger observes that whites live “over across the line, over there on Cottage Grove Avenue”. Explaining the source of their bitterness, e he intones: “We live here, and they live there, we black and they white. They get things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t.” Accounting for his feeling, he says. ” I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in the fence
Bigger and Gus refer also to the power structure in American society, from the presidency to the military, business and commerce. Their simulation of a telephone conversation between the president of the United States and his secretary of state on the one hand, and J.P. Morgan, a business mogul and someone else is also revealing. It is revealed that the president’s secretary of state is more ready to attend a cabinet meeting about ” the niggers raising sand all over the country” than one involving Germans. And J.P. Morgan is prepared to “sell twenty thousand shares of US steel, a mind-boggling figure. What kinds of business transaction is way beyond blacks to do. These show the extent to which whites suppress to put blacks in their place.
Blacks are also prevented from aspiring to do anything worthwhile, “They get the chance to do everything”, but ” they don’t let us do anything.” Whereas the whites, like the pigeon, can go wherever they want, the blacks are restricted in their movements.
The conversation reveals two contrasting attitudes of the blacks towards their situation in the novel. Some blacks, like Gus, are resigned to their fate. Others, like Bigger, breed anger in themselves against the system.
Thus, the conversation gives a microscopic view of black life in the novel.