Revisioning Richard Wright’s Bessie

Revisioning Richard Wright’s Bessie Tara T. Green One of the most degraded, but potentially intriguing, characters in American literature is Bessie of Richard Wright’s classic novel, Native Son. The novel is set in Depression-era Chicago and features Bigger Thomas, the twenty-year-old African-American son of a single mother who lives with her two sons and daughter in a one-room, rat-infested tenement on the South Side. Bigger reluctantly takes a job as a driver for the Daltons, the white owners of the tenement. By the end of his first night in the position, he has killed the owner’s daughter, arguably by accident, and soon thereafter is chased down by the police and arrested. Bigger’s girlfriend is Bessie Mears, a working-class woman who becomes reluctantly intertwined in Bigger’s plot to extort money from the Daltons and is eventually raped and murdered by Bigger. My focus here will be on Bessie as a character who evolves through film adaptations and necessarily transcends the trap of the protest novel to embody optimism. While I note here that an Afro-pessimistic perspective can certainly be applied to Native Son, my intent is to offer an alternative reading. Yvonne Robinson Jones observes, “Wright has garnered a place in history by establishing his protagonist, Bigger, as the prototype, the archetype of the angry, rebellious, disenfranchised, dispossessed militant, and even revolutionary African-American male, too often victimized by a racially divided American society that historically has targeted African-American males via lynching, police brutality, and, in most recent years, racial profiling.”1 Wright’s Bigger follows that of the protest novel described by James Baldwin as the genre’s shortcoming: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”2 Baldwin’s condemnation is of Bigger’s acceptance of the “theology that denies him life” or perhaps his inability to define himself beyond the oppressor’s assessment of [End Page 18] his life as undeserving because he is Black. Tenets of Afro-pessimism intersect with, if not emerge from, the protest novel’s premise: Afro-pessimism scholar Frank Wilderson III reveals that “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.” Indeed, the violence inflicted on Bessie places her in the category of a non-human prop. Revisioning Native Son, then, becomes necessary for achieving the transcendence proposed by Baldwin. Inspired by a Black feminist lens, I want to expand Afro-optimism studies of Africa to analyze the trajectory of the adaptations of Wright’s novel. Afro-optimism strives to propose an idea where “representations of Africa in the present” are “positive” and “project a better future.” As such, this way of imagining Africa is a form of “resistance to stereotypical representations of Africa in Hollywood” (6).3 Whether representing African life and culture through a lens of hope rather than a homogeneous place of savagery and despair is debatable, I argue this resistance to oppression is present in the work of African-American artists as well. Bessie’s representation from page to screen over an eighty-year period shows potential for growth—from a figure who wallows in self-pity and sadness to a figure who insists on living a life that is not restricted by her geography or her social status as a Black working-class woman. Through Bessie, we might consider the long history of Black women in the US as perceived by the limits of a Jim Crow society to a twenty-first century where Black women have more education and economic opportunities. Bessie’s evolution presents to an audience of Native Son fans a myriad of possibilities for further debate. From one iteration to the next, Bessie gradually rejects a sense of powerlessness, seeking to rise above the restrictions put in place to hinder Black folks. In other words, Bessie shows us the “audacity of hope”—that action that can be done without the permission of...