This is what I imagine Bigger Thomas would look like if Native Son was a movie.
Okay, so Native Son is divided up into three books, the first book being FEAR. It takes up the first 100 or so pages.
SYNOPSIS:
Bigger, a 20 year old black loafer living with his mother, sister and brother in a one room apartment, gets a job as a chauffeur for a rich white family. On his first job, he drives Mary, the daughter, to pick up her boyfriend, Jan, a Communist and then out for some Soul food on the wrong side of the tracks. Mary gets really, REALLY drunk and when Bigger gets her home, she needs help up to her bedroom. Things get out of hand and when the blind mother walks in, Bigger freaks out and covers Mary’s face with a pillow so the blind mother will not know he is there. In the process of covering her face with the pillow he smothers her and kills her. Not wanting to go to jail, he stuffs Mary’s body in a trunk with the intent on taking it to the train station which he was supposed to do in the morning anyway. However, he decided that it would be better to burn her up in the furnace in the basement to hide the evidence. She was supposed to be going on a trip in the morning to Boston for a couple of days anyway. No one would miss her right away. Bigger shoves her in feet first, but she doesn’t quite fit, her head left hanging out of the door. He tries to hack Mary’s head off with his pocketknife to no avail so he finishes the job with a hatchet and throws the head in after the body, dumping coal on top to hide it.
It’s about 4 in the morning, when he decided to go home and go to bed.
This whole first part sets the stage for the rest of the novel. Racism is apparent where ever Bigger turns and in part, is responsible for his actions – SORT OF. I know a lot of you will disagree with this statement, but it is the crux of the novel later on. I know the novel was set in the 50’s so racism is prevalent, but it is just as shocking to know that racism still exists today, maybe not as prevalent, but it is still there.
They say everyone has a little racism in them. I will agree with that statement. When I see a black man dressed like a gang banger, I am prejudiced against him. I will walk on the other side of the street to avoid him. That man might not even be a gang member, but the mere fact that he is dressed the way he is, makes me afraid. On the flip side of this, however, I have had the same reaction to the WHITE kids dressed the same way. They make me nervous too. So I am equal opportunity prejudice, I guess.
The one thing I have never been is prejudiced against someone because of their race. I live and grew up in a suburb of LA and LA has been a melting pot of all races since FOREVER!!! I have never known a classroom without black kids, white kids, Chinese kids, kids from Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis etc. Normal stuff for me. So, racism, seems like a foreign concept to me. I really didn’t think anything of it until I took a trip to Alabama with my husband for work. We stayed at a hotel in Alabama where all the staff was black. In fact, it seemed like everywhere we went, all the service staff were black. This “coincidence” was not lost on me.
There was actually a black couple staying at the hotel where we were staying in Alabama. They looked like they were feeling out of place. They stuck to themselves and kept their eyes down in the all white (very white – no other nationalities) dining-room where we were all eating our continental breakfast. The black man bumped into me on the way back from the buffet line and was overly apologetic like I was going to have him lynched or something. It was crazy. I told him “No worries,” and meant it. But I found his reaction very strange. This was my first exposure to the Deep South. When I got back to California, I coincidentally read a little tidbit on CNN.com that reinforced my reaction to Alabama. I read that the first EVER integrated prom happened just that year (2002 or so) and it wasn’t a result of the adults getting together and deciding that it would be a good idea. It was the kids who decided that they were going to do this. I was appalled that this could be happening in this day and age. I was clueless to all of this. Living in my own little multicultural bubble in California, I really had no perception that attitudes like this still existed. I was cognizant of these attitudes, but thought “Aren’t we done with that. Didn’t Martin Luther King settle some of this in the 60’s??” Gave me something to think about.
It was eye opening to say the least.
SYNOPSIS:
Bigger, a 20 year old black loafer living with his mother, sister and brother in a one room apartment, gets a job as a chauffeur for a rich white family. On his first job, he drives Mary, the daughter, to pick up her boyfriend, Jan, a Communist and then out for some Soul food on the wrong side of the tracks. Mary gets really, REALLY drunk and when Bigger gets her home, she needs help up to her bedroom. Things get out of hand and when the blind mother walks in, Bigger freaks out and covers Mary’s face with a pillow so the blind mother will not know he is there. In the process of covering her face with the pillow he smothers her and kills her. Not wanting to go to jail, he stuffs Mary’s body in a trunk with the intent on taking it to the train station which he was supposed to do in the morning anyway. However, he decided that it would be better to burn her up in the furnace in the basement to hide the evidence. She was supposed to be going on a trip in the morning to Boston for a couple of days anyway. No one would miss her right away. Bigger shoves her in feet first, but she doesn’t quite fit, her head left hanging out of the door. He tries to hack Mary’s head off with his pocketknife to no avail so he finishes the job with a hatchet and throws the head in after the body, dumping coal on top to hide it.
It’s about 4 in the morning, when he decided to go home and go to bed.
This whole first part sets the stage for the rest of the novel. Racism is apparent where ever Bigger turns and in part, is responsible for his actions – SORT OF. I know a lot of you will disagree with this statement, but it is the crux of the novel later on. I know the novel was set in the 50’s so racism is prevalent, but it is just as shocking to know that racism still exists today, maybe not as prevalent, but it is still there.
They say everyone has a little racism in them. I will agree with that statement. When I see a black man dressed like a gang banger, I am prejudiced against him. I will walk on the other side of the street to avoid him. That man might not even be a gang member, but the mere fact that he is dressed the way he is, makes me afraid. On the flip side of this, however, I have had the same reaction to the WHITE kids dressed the same way. They make me nervous too. So I am equal opportunity prejudice, I guess.
The one thing I have never been is prejudiced against someone because of their race. I live and grew up in a suburb of LA and LA has been a melting pot of all races since FOREVER!!! I have never known a classroom without black kids, white kids, Chinese kids, kids from Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis etc. Normal stuff for me. So, racism, seems like a foreign concept to me. I really didn’t think anything of it until I took a trip to Alabama with my husband for work. We stayed at a hotel in Alabama where all the staff was black. In fact, it seemed like everywhere we went, all the service staff were black. This “coincidence” was not lost on me.
There was actually a black couple staying at the hotel where we were staying in Alabama. They looked like they were feeling out of place. They stuck to themselves and kept their eyes down in the all white (very white – no other nationalities) dining-room where we were all eating our continental breakfast. The black man bumped into me on the way back from the buffet line and was overly apologetic like I was going to have him lynched or something. It was crazy. I told him “No worries,” and meant it. But I found his reaction very strange. This was my first exposure to the Deep South. When I got back to California, I coincidentally read a little tidbit on CNN.com that reinforced my reaction to Alabama. I read that the first EVER integrated prom happened just that year (2002 or so) and it wasn’t a result of the adults getting together and deciding that it would be a good idea. It was the kids who decided that they were going to do this. I was appalled that this could be happening in this day and age. I was clueless to all of this. Living in my own little multicultural bubble in California, I really had no perception that attitudes like this still existed. I was cognizant of these attitudes, but thought “Aren’t we done with that. Didn’t Martin Luther King settle some of this in the 60’s??” Gave me something to think about.
It was eye opening to say the least.
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