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Richard Wright
Uncle Tom’s Children
With an Introduction by
Richard Yarborough
The Restored Text Established by the Library of America
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Is it true what they say about Dixie?
Does the sun really shine all the time?
Do sweet magnolias blossom at everybody’s door?
Do folks keep eating ’possum, till they can’t eat no more?
Is it true what they say about Swanee?
Is a dream by that stream so sublime?
Do they laugh, do they love, like they say in ev’ry song?…
If it’s true, that’s where I belong.
—Popular Song.
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction to the Perennial Edition by Richard Yarborough
The Ethics of Living Jim Crow
I Big Bou Leaves Home
II Down by the Riverside
III Long Black Song
IV Fire and Cloud
V Bright and Morning Star
Note on the Text
About the Author
Other Books by Richard Wright
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction to the Perennial Edition
I hold that, in the last analysis, the artist must bow to the monitor of his own imagination; must be led by the sovereignty of his own impressions and perceptions; must be guided by the tyranny of what troubles and concerns him personally; and that he must learn to trust the impulse, vague and compulsive as it may be, which moves him in the first instance toward expression. There is no other true path, and the artist owes it to himself and to those who live and breathe with him to render unto reality that which is reality’s.
—Richard Wright to Antonio Frasconi, 1944
In a 1939 article entitled “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer,” the black critic Alain Locke hailed the publication of Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children the previous year as “a well-merited literary launching for what must be watched as a major literary career…. With this, our Negro fiction of social interpretation comes of age. ”1 Roughly a decade and a half earlier, Locke had heralded the advent of another dramatic watershed in the Afro-American literary tradition: the New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance. But this latter phenomenon had involved many black artists working in a wide range of fields.
Accordingly, one might suspect that Locke’s grand characterization of Wright’s relatively thin collection of four novellas may have been tinged with nostalgia on his part after he had witnessed the precipitous subsidence of white interest in things black that followed the heady 1920s when, as Langston Hughes put it, “the Negro was in vogue. ” We are left with the question: Did
Uncle Tom’s Children truly merit Locke’s rich praise?
With the hindsight of over half a century, we must answer “yes. ” Indeed, the confidence with which one would respond itself testifies to the tremendous impact of Richard Wright’s arrival on the American literary landscape and the extent to which the aftershocks of his work continue to be felt even today. His first published book, Uncle Tom’s Children marked the beginning of what might be termed modern black “protest” literature; furthermore, at the time it constituted the most unrelenting and rage-fueled critique of white racism ever to surface in fiction written by blacks directed toward a mainstream American readership. Native Son aptly deserves acknowledgment as the most influential African-American novel of the twentieth century. However, it was Uncle Tom’s Children that brought Wright to the attention of white critics and readers, many of whom had never encountered a black text that so moved and challenged them, thereby preparing the ground for Native Son, the book that changed the course of American letters.
