Uncle Tom’s Daughter: Sarah versus the Enduring Misogyny of Wright’s “Long Black Song”

Abstract

Uncle Tom’s DaughterSarah versus the Enduring Misogyny of Wright’s “Long Black Song” Sondra Bickham Washington (bio) Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic. —Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning Richard Wright begins his 1938 collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, with an epi-graph declaring the death of the eponymous “cringing type who knew his place before white folk.”1 Because this brief manifesto is “a new word from another generation,” Wright immediately primes his readers for depictions of African Americans who resist the age-old constraints and oppressions of enslavement, racism, poverty, and Jim Crow life, and largely, he fulfills this commitment. Yet, Wright’s declaration falls short because he imagines Uncle Tom’s children, at least those purposely or fortuitously integral to resistance and racial progress, as a purely patriarchal lineage. Even when he attempts to add depth to his female characters, such as Sarah in “Long Black Song,” who contemplates her life, daydreams about alternate realities, and appreciates her sexuality, all of which suggests a progressive representation of a Black woman, Wright still limits her capacity to lead change. Thus, Wright’s patriarchal strategy is apparent and detrimental to the larger idea of Uncle Tom’s revolutionary children despite the many other examples of radicalism in his collection.2 Rather than empowering women, Wright’s phallocentric leanings underestimate the ability and necessity of Uncle Tom’s daughters to contribute productively to the resistance and activism of younger generations and minimizes their complex lives.3 Considering Wright’s tremendous contributions to the African American literary canon [End Page 35] and his towering influence in literature and cultural studies, Sarah’s story is an opportunity and outlet for devising the gender and race-specific resistance of a Black woman facing multiple simultaneous oppressions in the Jim Crow South. Nevertheless, Wright defaults to the timeworn misogynistic representation of the sexually promiscuous jezebel. Not only does such a flattened characterization fall into a timeless trope that minimizes Sarah’s agency and power, it also justifies and extends the tradition of misrepresenting and belittling Black women and deeming them one of Black men’s problems. As a literary giant, Wright’s depiction of Sarah, Silas, and the couple’s predominant marital issues—her supposed disloyalty and infidelity—is impactful and enduring, apparently even more so than the racism and white violence they experience. It is so influential that sixty years after the novella’s publication, director Kevin Rodney Sullivan, producer Danny Glover, and screenwriters Ron Stacker Thompson and Ashley Tyler seemed to have internalized and exaggerated Wright’s perspective to misogynoir4 in their 1996 HBO adaptation of “Long Black Song.” Although Wright and the filmmakers fashion works that feign sincere consideration of a Black woman and her tenuous intersectionality, especially at that time, they are bewildered by Sarah’s sensuality and centrality, and she bears the full weight of this limitation. Rather than conceding that Sarah is a sexual individual who could be both aroused and resistant to expressing that interest extramaritally, or at all, they craft works that instead ask readers and viewers to ponder whether she is a rape victim or a willing participant in the ensuing sexual encounter.5 In the case of the adaptation, filmmakers both mis-characterize Sarah and misread Wright’s text, intimating the possibility and ease of her falling in love and cheating on her devoted, long-suffering husband in a day’s time. Both representations shape, fuel, and justify persistent misogynistic readings and negative perceptions of Sarah, and by extension future generations of “Uncle Tom’s daughters,” which still impact Black women today. Over the years, many scholars have documented the problematic depictions of women in Wright’s oeuvre,6 and Sarah’s characterization certainly aligns with various tenets of these critiques. Clearly, Wright knows how to craft an impressive story about radical people, but he fails to imagine that those characters might also be women. In a collection designed to challenge the status quo and highlight progressive, revolutionary African Americans, Sarah exists as one of Wright’s unloved, misogynistic stereotypes that “place him at the extreme edge of the tradition in a position that...