“This Is a Man’s World”: Richard Wright Just Won’t Give a Sistah a Break in “Long Black Song”

“This Is a Man’s World”1Richard Wright Just Won’t Give a Sistah a Break in “Long Black Song” Neal A. Lester (bio) Introduction In much of his work, Richard Wright is trapped in a time and polemical mindset concerned primarily with the lived experiences of Black men struggling against a system created and controlled by white men. This view of white supremacy as a struggle between Black and white men is on vivid display in his short story “Long Black Song,” from Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)2—the tale of a sexual encounter between a young Black mother and farmer’s wife, Sarah, and an unnamed white traveling salesman, and the results of this indiscretion. When husband Silas returns home from business in town and discovers the marital infidelity, he begins whipping Sarah and kills the white man. This essay explores the extent to which Wright’s short story and the HBO short film based on this story mis-characterize Sarah as the source of Silas’s death and downfall, and by extension, reveal the ways in which Black women, according to Wright, have no leading role to play in Black liberation from US racism. Contextually, my perspective derives from over thirty years of teaching this short story—and others in this collection of stories—to undergraduate literature students at two different universities who are, like myself, consistently confused and disappointed by Wright’s poor treatment of Sarah, in both the print and filmic formats. Such class discussions of Wright’s presentation of Sarah make for fertile critiques of patriarchy, feminism, Black liberation, race, gender, sex, and violence. More specifically, my teaching of “Long Black Song” comes after having studied other stories in Uncle Tom’s Children—“The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937), “Big [End Page 50] Boy Leaves Home” (1936), and “Down by the Riverside” (1938)—that all unapologetically center Black male experiences and marginalize Black women as a metaphorical drag on Black liberation and Black revolutionary leadership.3 While a more nuanced reading of this story would hold Silas accountable for his toxic masculinity, Wright undermines Sarah to uplift Silas, who dies allegedly protecting his property and avenging all that white people have taken from him. He rises to martyrdom because he is doing what real Black men stereotypically do—wage war against the alleged source of his and his community’s racial oppression, the white Man. My students and I ponder why neither Silas nor Sarah neatly qualifies as Wright’s philosophical and critical mouthpiece. While both are flawed characters, Wright seems to excuse, forgive, and even authorize Silas’s violent threats against Sarah and his killing of this white man, condoning Silas’s words and actions as justified, while Sarah is held entirely responsible for all that happens after her marital transgression. What emerges uncontested in student discussions is that Wright’s attention to this Black female character is deeply problematic, attention hinging primarily on Wright’s presentation of the “sex scene” between Sarah and the salesman. My students and I conclude that Wright refuses to write about Black women with agency. From Wright’s perspective, Sarah is a naïve young Black woman dependent upon her husband’s paternal leadership. She is also easily exploited by both her own physical desires and the alleged coercion of a white male stranger. Contemporary readings of consent, gender, sexuality, race, and class make this “sex scene” especially controversial when any feminist reader grants Sarah agency in this moment of “intimacy” with the white man, despite history, personal testimony, and literature revealing that a lack of opportunity to give consent is part of the common narrative of Black female exploitation by white men. For Wright, however, Sarah is a convenient stereotype of Black female sexual insatiability that ignites Black male revolution, the stereotype made even more concrete because, as readers, we experience the story primarily through her mind, thereby normalizing what Wright presents as her seemingly inherent limitations. Because Wright’s work is of inarguable literary and sociopolitical significance, I want to see multidimensional personhood and autonomous power in his female characters, which he fails to deliver. Students’ intense interest in whether Sarah...