Redeeming Bigger Thomas: Rashid Johnson and Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Woke” Native Son

Abstract

Redeeming Bigger ThomasRashid Johnson and Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Woke” Native Son Charles I. Nero (bio) Rashid Johnson’s HBO production of Richard Wright’s Native Son is a “woke” adaptation of the classic novel. By “woke,” I refer to the use of the term as a metaphor for being alert and/or aware of systemic racism. The term “woke” became popular in African American culture at the end of the twentieth century as can be seen quite spectacularly in some of Spike Lee’s films, notably in his 1988 School Daze, set in Atlanta over homecoming weekend at the historically Black Mission College. The film presents gendered practices such as fraternity hazing, colorism, and hair texture bias as the fallout upon Black people of systemic racism. In Lee’s film, these practices result in acts of profound cruelty that African American students commit against each other, often for the sake of social mobility and in-group solidarity. The film ends at dawn on a Sunday morning when the film’s protagonist yells “Wake up!” while ringing the school’s antique bell to summon the college residents to the college’s quad. Once all have gathered, the protagonist breaks cinema’s “fourth wall,” to directly address the viewing audience by stating calmly “Wake Up!”1 The film insists that combating systemic and institutional racism, including its internalization by people of color, requires that one be “woke.” Rashid Johnson and the screenplay writer Suzan-Lori Parks use this idea of being woke in the adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son broadcast on HBO in 2019.2 Johnson and Parks use wokeness to redeem Bigger’s toxic masculinity in their adaptation of the novel. We recall that Wright’s Bigger Thomas is not likable or a character with whom a reader relates by any stretch of the imagination. Wright’s Bigger is violent, sadistic, and cruel. Bigger murders a white woman, and although it was not his intention to do so, he decides to dispose of the body by dismembering [End Page 99] it and putting the remains in a furnace. Upon realizing that he cannot take his African American girlfriend Bessie with him to escape the police, Bigger rapes her, smashes her head with a brick, and throws her barely living body through an airshaft onto the snow-covered ground. Because Bigger is such an unsavory character, your attention as a reader gravitates toward what produced him and his version of masculinity. His grim behavior causes the reader to ask themself, “How did Bigger come to exist?” Is this a character who has not known love and affection? What circumstances have led to someone so devoid of empathy? Of course, these are questions whose answers point to the novel as an example of “naturalism,” the literary movement begun in the late nineteenth century that argued that environment, social forces, and even heredity shaped the actions of a character. Wright’s Native Son is an example of naturalism with its unsparing attention to the details of Bigger’s impoverished environment, defined through signs of lack: an absent father, a mother whose love for him is in doubt, no privacy for four people in a cramped one-room apartment, and little chance for upward mobility. All of this lack points to the near absence of any civilizing tools that might redeem Bigger and his performance of masculinity. Wright’s Native Son and its emphatic description of Bigger’s lack is an indictment of America and its commitment to white supremacy. It cannot be lost upon the reader that the lack of civilizing tools—family, love, employment, and the prospect of upward economic mobility—in Bigger’s life is a consequence of white supremacy that demands a disposable underclass of people. The United States racializes that class of people with a permanent group of African Americans to fulfill its need for cheap, unskilled labor. Wright’s Bigger is an alien to civilization, so he is an unsuitable character for Johnson’s “woke” adaptation. Redeeming Bigger requires that he be a civilized member of society. Civilizing Bigger through Social Class Changes In the film...