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Uncle Tom’s Children: A Guide for Readers and Teachers Copyright
©2007
by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. This guide is designed both for those whom Virginia Woolf called “common readers” and for teachers who will help students navigate the challenges of Uncle Tom’s Children. Discussion questions which might provoke emotion-laden responses from adults of a certain age have not been separated from the more dispassionate ones that are germane in classroom settings. Adults often bring long views of history to their discussions, but many contemporary students may not have knowledge of the Southern history that informs the five stories in this collection. Nevertheless, students often demonstrate uncanny sophistication in dealing with the primal issues Richard Wright illustrated in his fiction. Students ought not be denied the intellectual stimulation of weighty questions. The special resources section of the guide is addressed to teachers, but all readers can profit from sampling the items listed. Richard Wright (4 September 1908-28 November 1960): An
Overview Richard
Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a plantation some twenty
miles from Natchez. Given that his
father’s family had a long history of being farm workers, Wright was exposed during
his childhood and youth to the relentless, dream-shattering demands that
working the soil made before mechanization reduced the intensity of labor. For the first nineteen years of his life, his
curiosity and powerful imagination led him to discover, both in rural and urban
environments, the terror implicit in the system of Jim Crow as well as the
nobility of the human being who resists oppression. In his early stories, Wright displaced the
fantasy of the black man as “the cringing type who knew his place before white
folk” (epigraph for Uncle Tom’s Children) with the reality of the
defiant type who took the initiative of defining his own place. In 1937,
Wright’s story “Fire and Cloud” won first prize in the Story Magazine contest,
and it along with “Big Boy Leaves Home,” “Down by the Riverside,” and “Long
Black Song” was published by Harper and Brothers as Uncle Tom’s Children:
Four Novellas (1938). In 1940, the
same year his masterpiece Native Son appeared, the enlarged edition Uncle
Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories was published; this edition included
“Bright and Morning Star” and the autobiographical sketch “the Ethics of Living
Jim Crow” as an introduction. As
Mississippians read Uncle Tom’s Children, they should be prepared to
engage stories, as James T. Farrell remarked, which contain bitter truths and
bitter tragedies. Nevertheless, they will also discover moments that illuminate
the human will to endure. To be sure, our perspectives on the book are
sharpened by Zora Neale Hurston’s comment that Wright “serves notice by his
title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the
Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live” (Saturday Review of
Literature, April 2, 1938). Hurston
justly noted that the young Wright did not have a good ear for dialect,
although his book did contain “some beautiful writing.” Attention to the beautiful writing can
produce shocks of recognition. The stories
were published near the end of the Great Depression and only a few years prior to
America’s entering World War II. It is
to expected that they raise important questions about everyday life in the
South, a South that was more like Faulkner’s The Hamlet than
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.
Romance was not on Wright’s agenda. Cutting to the chase was. As an
anti-pastoral novella, “Big Boy Leaves Home” invites us to explore loss of
innocence, gender and taboos, and harsh reasons for migration from the South to
the North. “Down by the Riverside” is a
poignant tale of Darwinian imperatives in the context of the Mississippi River
flood of 1927. “Long Black Song,” one of Wright’s most accomplished short
stories, forces us to contemplate economics (the Protestant work ethic) and
violation of what is sacred in marriage when searing emotion overthrows cold
reason. “Fire and Cloud” depicts the trials and moral challenges that were
faced by an atypical black preacher in the Christ-haunted South. “Bright and Morning Star” is a compelling
elaboration of a folktale about a Christian mother’s ultimate sacrifice for the
cause of social justice. One should
read “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An
Autobiographical Sketch” (first published in American Stuff: WPA Writers’
Anthology, 1937) before exploring the stories, because the essay establishes
the provenance of Wright’s vision of Southern life in rural areas, cities and
small towns during the early years of the twenty-first century. The essay
provides clues about why Wright was attracted to naturalism and realism,
proletarian fiction, the power of social criticism and Marxist ideas. As he explained at greater length in Black
Boy, the Communists in the 1930s had a program that exposed certain flaws
in the American democratic experiment, but they oversimplified the life
experiences of common people; “they had conceived of people in too abstract a
manner. I would make voyages, discoveries, explorations with words and try to
put some of that meaning back” (HarperPerennial 1998, 320). Doing things in and with words is
crucial in Uncle Tom‘s Children, and one begins to understand why Wright
is so concerned in his fiction with people’s salvaging “a slender shred of
personal pride” by listening to the words of the characters and the narrator in
each story. The meaning
of Wright’s themes is grounded in the specific dynamics of Southern life black
and white, but the significance of those themes prevail outside what is topical
and limited. When Mississippians have
read Uncle Tom’s Children, many of them may agree that the issues and
aesthetics of the stories still confront Mississippi, the South, and the world
in the twenty-first century. **For additional overview information, see “Richard Wright:
Mississippi’s Native Son” by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. at MISSISSIPPI HISTORY NOW
http://mshistory.k12.ms.us Extensive information about Wright’s life and works can be
found in the biographies by Michel Fabre, Hazel Rowley, and Margaret Walker
that are listed under “Special Resources for Teachers” Uncle Tom’s Children: Discussion Questions
‘Down by the Riverside” 1. What is the moral
conundrum in this story? 2. Does the story seem
to have unusual significance if we compare reactions to the Mississippi River
flood of 1927 with those evidenced in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita and the breaking of the levees in New Orleans in 2005? 3. Why are the
military officials so insensitive to Mann’s grief over the death of his wife? Why is Mann addressed as “boy”? 4. Why does Mann
rescue Mrs. Heartfield and her two children when he knows they will identify
him as the person who murdered Mr. Heartfield? 5. Why does Mann
decide to die before the agents of justice can kill him? What is the significant difference between
his decision and the one Silas makes in “Long Black Song”? “Long Black Song”
“Fire and Cloud” 1. What is the importance of Christianity in the story? How do Old and New Testament allusions give
shape to Reverend Taylor’s thoughts? How
do they serve as elements of characterization?
Why must Reverend Taylor be “enlightened” by a “baptism of fire”? 2. How does the
structure of the story illuminate the folk saying about being between a rock
and a hard place? 3. Does Wright use
situational irony by having the Communists wait for Taylor in the Bible Room
and the Chief of Police wait for him in the parlor? 4. What do comments by
Reverend Taylor’s son Jimmy suggest about a new generation of Uncle Tom’s children? 5. What roles do the
black church and the black minister play in social movements in the South? How should we deal with the political
principle of separation of church and state in our interpretations of the
story? “Bright and Morning Star” 1. Why does Wright borrow
the title from a hymn? 2. What aspects of
Southern life were threatened by cooperation between black and white Communists
in the 1930s? 3. what is the nature
of the new faith that Aunt Sue learns from her sons Sug and Johnny-Boy? 4. “If in the early
days of her life the white mountain had driven her back from the earth, then in
her last days Reva’s love was drawing her toward it….” How does the white mountain function as a
metaphor? What does the passage reveal
about Aunt Sue’s conception of self? 5. Why does the
sheriff not hesitate to brutalize an old black woman? What does his action reveal about racial
hatred? Is Aunt Sue’s reaction to her
beating similar to or different from Reverend Taylor’s reaction to his whipping
in “Fire and Cloud”? How does gender
function as a determining element in their responses? What does Aunt Sue’s suffering and ultimate
sacrifice for her son Johnny-Boy suggest about a woman’s determination? Books Bone’s study
provides information about the kind of fiction Wright criticized in “Blueprint
for Negro Writing” (1937) for being “prim and decorous ambassadors who went
a-begging to white America.” This classic
study of black and white life in the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia,
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) provides invaluable about the new
social system which replaced the old system of master and slave relations, the
one depicted in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Just as Wright’s stories make notable
distinctions between the docility of Stowe’s Uncle Tom and the assertiveness of
literary descendents, Deep South helps to explain the topics of
intimidation, lynching, class solidarity, segregation, “legal” inequities, and
resentments in terms Wright knew from his experiences. Davis, Allison. Leadership, Love & Aggression. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937; New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1949; New York: Doubleday, 1957. Dollard’s
discussion of caste and aggression can be enlightening as one deals with the
complex layers of meaning in “Long Black Song.” Fabre,Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright.
2nd Edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Chapter 4
“The Signs of Hard Times” yields rich insights about American ambivalence
regarding the Depression, the style and techniques of Farm Security
Administration photographs used in Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941),
and, indirectly, the erosion of strict segregation as represented in Uncle
Tom’s Children. One of the most compelling visual images of the Southern
landscape that is so important in Uncle Tom’s Children is Marion Post
Wolcott’s photograph of “Farm with eroded land near Wadesboro, North Carolina,
1938 (page 119).
Videos This video
also contains “The Boy Who Painted Christ Black” by John Henrik Clarke and “The
Reunion” by Maya Angelou. The teleplay
of “Long Black Song” by Ron Stacker Thompson and Ashley Tyler so revises key
elements in the story that Richard Wright’s original intentions are
obscured. The video should be used if
and only if students have discussed Wright’s text thoroughly. “Almos’a Man.” The American Short Story Collection ISBN 1-56994-030-4. “Almos’ a
Man” (from Eight Men, Wright’s second colletion of short fiction)
complements “Big Boy Leaves Home,” because the story of Dave, the 15 year-old
son of sharecroppers, involves some humor.
Like Big Boy, Dave discovers that a gun, a symbol of manhood, changes
his young life. See
www.montereymedia.com for details. Websites
http://memory.loc.gov/ammen/fsowhome.html Images from
the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Collection ,
1935-1945 160, 000 black and white
photographs;1,600 color photographs. Related sites are Photographs of Sign
Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentaries by Farm Security Administration
- Office of War Information Photographers
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/085_disc.html and the Farm Security Administration
http://memory.loc.gov/ammen/fsahtml/fsainfor.html
It is important to use the FSA photographs as optical proof that Uncle
Tom’s Children has a great deal of literary truth-value. The Mississippi Writers Page
www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/wright_richard National Humanities Center Teacher Toolbox
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org Use the
Toolbox Library link to access “The Making of African American Identity, Volume
III, 1917-1968, “a collection of primary resources…thematically organized with
notes and discussion questions.” Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration “Richard Wright, the South, and the World,” 2008 NLCC Richard Wright Centennial
http://richardwrightat100.ku.edu Richard Wright Papers
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke What is Race?
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/race.html This site
contains very concise descriptions of the biological and social constructions
of race and several chapters that cast light on historical racial dynamics in
the United States. |