Native Son
But in Native Son, published in 1940, Richard Wright makes every character revert to type: all of us are as society has shaped us. Starting with the title–“native” meaning “natural” or “primitive” as well as “suitable to the environment” and “in his element”–Wright argues that injury and conflict lay bare the self. Bigger Thomas’s half-latent violence becomes patent when he finds himself nearly trapped in the bedroom of his employer’s daughter, Mary. Mr. Dalton, the employer, brandishes the power of his money as soon as he suspects his daughter has been kidnapped. Mary can’t help reverting to her spoiled, petted self when she’s drunk and lonely; her communist boyfriend, Jan, must go on believing that Bigger is part of the revolutionary vanguard, not just a murderer trying to make Jan his scapegoat; Bigger’s mother can’t help going down on her knees to the Daltons, and by proxy the entire white world, when Bigger is condemned to die even though otherwise she’s a woman of proud independence. Native Son illustrates the inevitable car accident at the intersection of all these can’t-help-its.
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Lionel Gentle gives a fine performance as Bigger–as long as the character has anything to do. Gentle has some of Vincent D’Onofrio’s weird, unpredictable energy: even when D’Onofrio plays a cop it seems he’s about to commit murder or expose himself. Gentle’s sudden turns to violence have a similar volcanic quality. Jeannette Blackwell makes Mrs. Thomas–whose lines scream “standard long-suffering mother”–the moral center of a howling universe, so that when she goes down on her knees the audience too feels stripped of dignity. Her parallel is the gracious Mrs. Dalton (whose physical blindness too neatly highlights the moral blindness of others), played perfectly by Carolyn Bowyer. Appearing only briefly, Denise Marunowski makes the doomed Mary so self-indulgent we’d like to kill her ourselves. With the exception of the appalling Tom Camacho, utterly out of his depth as the DA, the supporting cast measures up to the central players.
