Should We Be Laughing?

From the beginning of The White Boy Shuffle, I’ve been laughing, but oftentimes I’d instantly look back and be like, “wait, should I be laughing at that? I don’t think I should.” It’s undeniable that the novel in general and Gunnar Kaufman are incredibly funny. But there’s something that seems a little off with that conclusion - for one, Gunnar’s humor is quite dark. For another, he doesn’t exactly want to be known for his comedic prowess. 

From the very beginning of the novel, Gunnar has us laughing. He references very dark people and events yet he still has us cracking up. Even when he’s in the third grade, he’s hilarious. (It does help that his teacher’s name is “Ms. Ceginy”.) Yet his comedy never ceases to be quite dark, and it just gets darker as the novel progresses. In middle school, when some kids beat him up, he refers to it as “getting his overbite fixed”, and remarks that his doctor said “she couldn’t do a better job if she tried”. As his own father, a police officer, is beating him brutally during the L.A. riots, he says his father “transform[ed] into a Senegalese drummer beating a surrender code on a hollow log”. By college, he’s internally poking fun at his and Scoby’s depression, and we’re expecting these amazing one-liners and out from his mouth spills, “let’s all kill ourselves,” or “America is Satan,” and we’re all like, “heh heh hehhhh…?” We love a funny narrator. But by the end, it’s like, should we have laughed in the first place? 

During a basketball game in high school, Gunnar dresses as a blackface minstrel character - white gloves, cold cream on his lips, bent forward snapping and whistling “Old Gray Mare”. The whole gym is rolling on the ground laughing. His coach is furious. We, meanwhile, are cracking up, but inside unsure if we should really be laughing. Gunnar’s performance is a pretty clever callout, but throughout his life, he’s been seen as a performer rather than an actual human being. From the “funny, cool black guy” to the “basketball star” to the “street poet messiah”, it’s never left him. By the end of the book, it’s clear he’s through being the performer, but can’t find a way for any of his to see him otherwise. By making us laugh, then saying ‘ha! This is actually serious’, Paul Beatty is really making us think.

Schoolteacher's view

I don’t know about you, but I was totally expecting for this scene to go as the rest of the book up to that point; narrated in third person, told primarily from Sethe’s viewpoint. But this chapter starts to sound different after a few paragraphs. We don’t hear any names of familiar characters, instead, they’ve been replaced with the title “crazy old n” and “and old n-woman with a flower in her hat. Crazy, too.” 

As we transition to the shed scene, we realize that these “crazy old n’s” are none other than Stamp Paid, the surrounding black community’s pariah, and Baby Suggs, the ultimate maternal figure. It angered me to realize that these men who stormed into Baby Suggs’ yard aren’t going to give any of the residents there even a touch of decency. Since when is Stamp Paid ‘crazy’? And Baby Suggs is the ultimate caretaker of all, not just some crazy woman who wears flowers in her hat. She grows flowers just as she grows children and mothers and life. As we came to realize, this section was narrated from the viewpoints of the slave catcher and schoolteacher. 

Given the context of the time, this isn’t the most terrible shock, but it’s quite disturbing nonetheless. As kids we learned about slavery and how bad it was and how Abraham Lincoln was a great man for freeing the slaves but in our young age we never delved into the deep psychological aspects of slavery. We didn’t comprehend that these white semi-elite men truly believed that doing what they did was what was best and religiously justified, nor did we comprehend the traumatic effects of being treated and viewed as nothing more than property.  

What’s more disturbing is schoolteacher’s view on the bigger situation at hand, as he realizes he won’t be taking Sethe and her children back with him. He’s expecting to retrieve his property. Upon seeing Sethe’s trauma-stricken “insane” state and Beloved’s dead body, he doesn’t ponder over or sympathize with the horrific loss of life, he just sees it as a teaching moment for his nephew. As if Sethe was some sort of tool that nephew handled a bit too rough or too wrong and now doesn’t work properly. While Stamp Paid is wrapping his head around the fact that he just saved Denver’s life and Baby Suggs is retreating to her room to contemplate color, schoolteacher is thinking, “snap, would’ve been a great catch. Oh well. Just gotta tell nephew to do better next time.”

We didn’t expect it to be, but this was our introduction to the pinnacle scene of the book, which is all the more harrowing. The deeper and deeper we analyze the language and the context, the more chilling it becomes how these psychological factors of race and inferiority have become second nature to some characters. Truly, no one can write and yank at your heartstrings like Toni Morrison.

Love

In the eyes of Janie, from the moment she kissed Johnny Taylor under the pear tree, love has been this powerful, gorgeous, awakening experience. She had “pollen” in her eyes as she saw the long, lean Johnny stroll up the street to her, and as she kisses Johnny she feels this pure yet enticing rapture inside her. That is, until Nanny calls her in the thwart her plans. In Janie’s world, the ideal for marriage is what she experienced with Johnny that day under the pear tree. Even before he comes bumbling along, she looks up at the tree and sees a simple yet captivating phenomenon. “She saw the dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!” (11) Janie sees marriage as something that naturally comes with love and the wonders of nature, but in her first two marriages, she finds it to be quite different. 

Logan Killicks isn’t a bad guy, but he isn’t the type to marry. Old and ugly, Logan is a farmer who’d rather berate Janie for not helping him with chores than speak any sort of “poetry” to her. He throws Janie off quite a bit, and despite the early signs, she assumes that naturally, she will learn to love him as she found love under the pear tree. When she doesn’t, it crushes her, until she gets her wits about herself and leaves him for Joe Starks. 

Joe Starks isn’t a bad guy, either, but he’s more of a salesman than a genuine human. He was fun to talk to Janie first met him, so it makes sense why Janie would consider him a much more likely candidate for her expected love experience. It seems quite promising at first, until always strong-willed and independent Janie is forced to stay inside and be an idle housewife. When she brings her concerns to him, he passes her off, insisting it’s her “job” as the mayor’s wife to not impose herself on any major tasks but rather, basically, sit still and look pretty. 

Tea Cake Woods is different. He’s “not like other boys”. He listens. He likes Janie for her personality, not just her beauty or physicality. He wants to know her for her, not put her on display or use her as a working mule. We as readers are quite skeptical of Tea Cake, now that we’ve seen Janie go through two unsuccessful relationships with men who ended up being bland and self-serving. Through Tea Cake, though, Janie finds love and pleasure in life. He includes her in his adventures, makes her feel like part of the group, and works with her to find a working situation that suits them both the best. And yet, Tea Cake has his flaws. He’s addicted to gambling. He doesn’t keep all his promises. While the Turners are in town, feeling the pressure to prove who’s boss in their home, Tea Cake turns to beating Janie for a brief time. This aspect of their relationship is probably one of the toughest for readers to wrap their heads around, and it was certainly hard for me. 

But did Janie capital-L Love Tea Cake? I think she did. She dressed for his funeral in overalls intentionally, as that reminded her of their relationship. When Joe Starks died, she just wanted to mourning and boo-hoos to end so she could go on with her life. She dressed up in black for show. But for Tea Cake, Janie kept him with her. She forgives herself for the tragic end of his life, it seems, but she genuinely mourns him. And during his life, Janie seemed to be quite happy with him. They would play together on the muck, and Tea Cake made her feel like “part of the group”, whether it be goofing around with her in the fields, teaching her to shoot. She calls him affectionate names, and tells the truth when she goes on trial following his death. 

Love is complicated. And in the world of early-1900s Florida, it probably wasn’t any easier, especially for a woman like Janie with her family history and circumstances. All Janie wants is to kiss a handsome man like Johnny Taylor under the pear tree and love him forever and sing and watch the bees pollinate flowers, but it takes her until she’s around forty to get something close to that. It doesn’t last her very long, but you can tell she’s grateful for the experience she had with Tea Cake, the one man she truly loved. 

Married Young

Warning: this post contains spoilers regarding Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. 

Getting married young is a touchy subject, and especially touchy when one subject (or both subjects) are
underage. Up through the early 20th century, it was rather common for teenage women to be forced into
marriage with much older men. This is the case for Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Zora Neale
Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as for Celie in Alice Walker’s renowned
1982 novel, The Color Purple. What comes from this are several internal battles and questions of the
nature of love and its role in marriage, as well as what marriage stands for in its individual contexts. 

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, a sixteen-year-old Janie Crawford is on the brink of discovering the
true potential of her sexual identity and awakening when she is whisked away by her grandmother to be
married off to Logan Killicks, a much older farmer. Much of the reasoning behind this decision is the
grandmother’s traumatic history, having been raped by her slave-master and from that conceiving Janie’s
mother, who would also end up being raped by a white man to conceive Janie herself. Janie’s
grandmother explains it to Janie by saying that it’s not in her control, but being a black woman with this
sort of sexual capability is dangerous, and Logan is a source of security, being a man of steady income
who can adequately “care for” Janie. 

In The Color Purple, fourteen-year-old Celie is abused and raped by her father, and then forced to marry
a widower who needs help taking care of his house and children. Unlike Janie, Celie wasn’t married off
for security but rather to be of domestic help to her husband, who is only known as “Mr. _____”.
Ironically, Janie too does end up being mainly a source of domestic help for Logan, of course. Celie’s
budding sexuality is much foggier than Janie’s, partially due to her abusive past and also due to her
attraction to women, which would’ve been considered very unusual at the time, and it really seems to
throw Celie off as she starts to uncover it more.

For Janie, her experience with Logan isn’t what she imagined marriage to be. She figured that,
naturally, she would love Logan shortly after they got married, as marriage seems to her as something
that should be about love. When she kisses Johnny Taylor under the pear tree, she imagines that
buzzing, excited feeling as the ideal for marriage. She just assumes that will happen to her once she
marries Logan, but instead she finds herself in an unhappy living situation with a smelly old man who
does nothing but order her to help him with chores. Discovering that she does not really love Logan
crushes Janie at first, but after some time (and meeting a certain Joe Starks), she gets her wits about
her and up and leaves him. 

Like Janie, Celie idolizes a loving, passionate relationship, although she represses the idea as she’d
been abused by her father for so long, and is terrified of men. To her, marriage doesn’t really mean
much other than domesticity and abuse, since that’s all she’s been exposed to in her short time
growing up. She only starts to discover the potential of love after meeting the blues singer Shug Avery,
who ends up becoming her lover for some time. She also doesn’t really seem to realize the possibility
of leaving Mr. ____ as even an option, while Janie confidently walks out and into Joe Starks’ carriage,
ready for a new life of true fulfillment. Celie does eventually leave Mr. ____ with some encouragement
from Shug, and by the end of the novel, Celie and Mr. ____ are friends, with Celie referring to him by
his first name, Albert. This is a turn of events that I don’t know anyone saw coming, but it’s quite
complex and interesting nonetheless. 

From these two remarkable novels, we can trace curious trends of love and the “meaning” behind
marriage in different contexts. In both cases, marriage doesn’t seem to be the choice of either Celie
or Janie - while Janie does idolize the idea of marriage, her marriage to Logan wasn’t her choice.
Celie didn’t idolize marriage, in fact, the whole idea to her was pretty much a shock. Janie, however,
expected marriage to be loving and amazing, and is surprised when Logan doesn’t speak “poetically”
or do anything remotely affectionate, but rather order her to help him with farmwork. Celie’s marriage
didn’t really have any expectations with it - it was abrupt and more of an assignment. Also in both
cases, love is a confusing topic. Janie expects marriage to naturally come with love, but is shocked
when it doesn’t, and it takes her some time to forgive herself for not loving Logan. Celie isn’t
expecting her marriage to be loving at all, and due to her abusive past, she is terrified of loving a man.
When Shug Avery comes to town, though, Celie learns some truths about herself and her sexuality
that make it seem more possible, even if not with a man.

The Invisible Correlation Between Plath and Ellison

While we were reading Invisible Man, I started noticing some eerie parallels to Sylvia Plath’s writing,
which is odd. There’s barely anything to classify Ralph Ellison and Plath as connected genre-wise or
time-wise, really, but there are many shared archetypes and themes, especially regarding the factory
hospital scene in Invisible Man. In both IM and Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, as well as Plath’s poem “Lady
Lazarus”, we see similar elements of disillusionment, oppression, and a feeling of rebirth. In the 1950s,
neither African-Americans nor women were having it all that good, to say the least, so it does make
some sense why their narratives may seem to overlap. At the same time, you can sense a bit more
intensity of oppression in Invisible Man; not to say that Plath’s struggles and writing aren’t undeniably
harrowing of course.

In both The Bell Jar and Chapter Eleven of Invisible Man, we see a correlation between the attitudes of
medical professions treating those who can’t help themselves in their dismissive, even oppressive
nature. Throughout the novel, Esther frequently experiences fear around doctors, which manifests into
the anxiety that defines much of her time at Dr. Gordon’s institution. Dr. Gordon, as many of the male
doctors and authority figures are shown to be, is also quite dismissive of her needs and concerns,
especially when it comes to her own botched shock treatments. She cannot bear to return and do more
of them, and her mother’s response to this is basically, “I knew you weren’t crazy, now let’s get back to
normal.” A lot of this is triggered by an earlier scene, where we learn that Esther witnessed a delivery at
the hospital and saw how the doctors drugged and dismissed the mother. The doctors of Invisible Man
are even more brutal. While the narrator is undergoing “treatment”, not knowing he can actually hear
him (and probably not caring), the doctors joke about performing gruesome experiments, potentially
even lobotomizing or castrating him. Then when the narrator is getting shocked, they mock him for his
induced seizing, saying things like, “They really do have rhythm, don’t they?” (235) and laughing.
Once the narrator begins to emerge, they continue to mock his vegetative state and call him “boy”,
something not uncommon to the narrator at this point. 

Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” is arguably one of the most powerful poems to be written by a modern
writer. In it, she explores her previous suicide attempts and depressive episodes and frames her
recovery in an empowering light. She frames it as a giant rebirth. At the end of the poem, she writes,
“Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” (Plath 83-84). In addition, she taunts
her oppressors with her language, saying, “Peel off the napkin / Oh my enemy. / Do I terrify?--” (Plath
10-12), and later, “So, so Herr Doktor. / So, Herr Enemy. / I am your opus. / I am your valuable, / The
pure gold baby / That melts to a shriek.” (Plath 65-71), and once later, “Herr God, Herr Lucifer /
Beware / Beware.” (Plath 79-81). In framing those who hurt her so much in life, especially male
doctors, it seems, as a brand of Nazis, she reclaims her power as a defeater of evil. She also frames
her rebirth as somewhat of a performance, with the lines, “The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to
see. / Them unwrap me hand and foot-- / The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies / These are my
hands / My knees. / I may be skin and bone, / Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.” (Plath
26-34). 

While the narrator’s rendition might not be as poetic as Plath’s, the narrator’s discharge from this
makeshift hospital is empowering nonetheless. Determined not to let them get the best of him, he
keeps his mentality on himself, as his grandfather ominously told him just before dying. When the
doctors show the slate saying “Who was your mother?” he thinks to himself, “I don’t play the dozens.
And how’s your old lady doing today?” (241). When he’s meeting with the man who declares that he’s ‘
cured’, the narrator starts rambling, and readers are confused, until we realize that the narrator is
actually messing with the doctors right back; performing in his own way. He asks if they know Mr.
Norton, as if he’s some sort of white icon, if they know “Bled”, jokes about how he has so many
friends like these men, and says as he shook the man’s hand, “And now our palaver is finished.”
(249). He then strolls off confidently, thinking about how unafraid he is now. His experience following
the shock treatments is much like a rebirth, too; he wakes up unable to say his own name, unable to
remember anything, and yet he’s also had much of his fear stripped from him. It isn’t long after this
that the narrator starts fresh and joins the Brotherhood, a phase which ends up dominating the
remainder of the novel. 

To wrap up, I don’t exactly know why I found such a connection with Ellison’s writing to that of Plath’s, but this one scene in Invisible Man really evokes memories from reading The Bell Jar and learning about Plath in Coming-Of-Age Novel class last spring. Perhaps it’s the similar dreamlike yet raw style of writing, or the similar feeling of desperation and anxiety that plagues both protagonists. One could say that Invisible Man itself is somewhat of a coming-of-age story - sure, he’s well into his thirties or even forties by the end, but this is a story of how the narrator went from being a bright naive high schooler to a shrewd, ominous, underground vigilante trope. Nonetheless, it's a strange, yet oddly philosophical bond that these texts share, whilst being from completely different times and people.

You Can Play the Game, But...

One of our Friday poetry readings that I remember quite vividly (despite the fact that we’ve only had a few so far), is the reading of “A Poem for Players” by Al Young, which Jenna so expertly read and delved into. The gist of the poem is saying, “you can do whatever you want, just not as yourself”. You can be a famous baseball player, a blues musician, a lawyer, even, but you have to “play the game”. What is this game? The answer to that is quite complicated, and it’s a notion that the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man wrestles with constantly. Constantly trying to find his place, his vocation, the naive young high school graduate spends twenty years on the run before succumbing to his “invisibility”. How this came about is pretty much the plot of the novel, but the idea of “playing the game” or expectations being blown away is a constant theme. 

In the very first chapter, we see the narrator attempting to “play the game”, and being derailed in doing so. He goes to this “battle royale” with hopes of reading a grand speech he wrote, and he ends up becoming this brutally grotesque form of entertainment alongside a bunch of other young black men. They are forced to fight each other, have coins thrown on an electric carpet to fish for, and are intimidated by a stark naked white woman. By the end, he’s finally allowed to give his speech, and no one really takes him seriously, but he doesn’t seem to care; sure it wasn’t what he was expecting, but all he had his eyes set on the whole time was giving his speech. This correlates with the line, “Finally they’ll let you play / politics if you don’t get in the way / the way some of us did and had to be / iced by conspiracy, international mystery” (Young 30-33). While the boys in the battle royale weren’t necessarily “iced”, and the narrator wasn’t necessarily involved in politics, there was still this bizarre ritual they were thrown into against their will, and they were almost expected to act as if it were completely normal. At least the narrator did - he just did as he was told so I could give his precious speech. 

In one of the most peculiar chapters of this already-quite-surreal novel is chapter three, when the narrator is driving Mr. Norton around and stop by Golden Day to find some whiskey to aid Mr. Norton’s condition. After chaos ensues, one of the calmer veterans takes the narrator and Norton into a separate room to assess Norton’s condition, and ends up giving a lengthy speech in which he feeds some brutal truth to the narrator and berates Mr. Norton for his support of a black college. He says to Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. (...) He registers his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is - well, bless my soul! Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity.” (94). 

A couple chapters later, the president of the college, Dr. Bledsoe, removes his mask of perfection and humbleness to give a similar speech about reality. In chapter six, Bledsoe berates the narrator for his actions towards Norton, and he ends up going on an intense tangent about power and race and the true meaning of the college. He jeers about his power over the “system”, saying “‘You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist - can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think - except men like me.’” (143). But then his mode shifts as he talks about the tribulations that lead him to this “secret power” - playing the part. “‘I mean it, son,’ he said. ‘I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. I had to wait and plan and lick around… Yes, I had to act the *n-word*!’” (...) “‘I don’t even insist that it was worth it, but now I’m here and I mean to stay - after you win the game, you take the prize and you keep it, protect it; there’s nothing else to do.’” (143). Later, Bledsoe continues by distinguishing what he had to give up to “win the game” - his dignity. “‘I know all about that too; ole doc’s been ‘buked and scorned and all that. (...) But you’ll get over it; it’s foolish and expensive and a lot of dead weight. You let the white folk worry about pride and dignity - you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people - then stay in the dark and use it!’” (144-145). 

The vet’s speech is quite polarizing for the narrator, Norton, and the majority of readers, and Bledsoe’s speech literally knocks the air out of the narrator and causes him to stumble out of the office vomiting and delirious. At this point in the novel, the narrator is still quite young and naive, and hasn’t really come to grapple with what it means for him to be “invisible”; he’s still under the impression that he can keep driving Mr. Norton around and work for Dr. Bledsoe and graduate with honors and eventually become Bledsoe’s assistant, perhaps. He doesn’t know that there are limits to his abilities and consciousness, as said in the lines, “but you gots to remember that / that’s all there is” (Young 18-19), which come after describing many common tropes in “white” theater and music, or the black pioneers that most white people idolized at the time, all of whom weren’t “too black”. Bledsoe speaks of playing the role leading him to a sort of power, but all without any dignity.

A lot of what we’ve read in Invisible Man is a reflection of the narrator coming to grips with the message of “A Poem for Players”. At the end of chapter one, the narrator has a peculiar dream in which his grandfather is helping bestow his award upon him, and on the note it says, “keep this *n-word*-boy running”. That’s become a common theme throughout the book - the narrator going somewhere he thinks will bring him his purpose or some sort of success, and at the end of the day, he’s back out running, as none of these vocations seem to hold what he can reasonably do. I remember learning in Race, Class, Gender about the “Fight of the Century”, a boxing match which occurred on March 8, 1971 in which two prominent black boxers, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, fought. Frazier ended up winning, and later gave a lighthearted speech on his victory in South Carolina - in a stage house that held a Confederate flag. To whites at the time, Frazier was playing his role in appeasing whites and not rocking the boat, something Ali was known to do. All of this reflects on the penultimate line of Young’s poem, “They’ll let you play anybody but you, / that’s pretty much what they will do” (Young 34-35). 

Works Cited:

Young, Al. "A Poem for Players." The Oxford Anthology of African-American

     Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.

     118-19.

*sources not marked “Young” are from Invisible Man

The Women of Bigger's World

Content warning: this blog post contains discussion of sexual and domestic violence. 

In Bigger Thomas’s story, women almost surround him, be it his mother, sister, girlfriend, employer, etc.,
and they often fall into distinct roles and with that, influence his life and every decision. Bigger, who from
the get-go adheres to a rather toxic-ly masculine role, which leads to some rather upsetting instances
involving women who he interacts with. Let’s take a look at Bigger’s relationships with the women in his
life, and how sexual and gender dynamics further define his fate. 

Bigger’s family at the time of the novel consists of himself, his mother, and his two younger siblings, Vera
and Buddy. We learn that his father was killed in a race riot, and since then, Bigger has been raised to a
standard to try to be the “man of the house”. While his mother does have a naturally commanding nature,
it’s clear that she needs Bigger to step up in his role as she can’t hold the family together by herself. It’s
interesting how much pressure is put on Bigger to be a “man”, not just because he’s the oldest but also
the oldest son. If Bigger were female, or if he had an older sister, would that still be the case? Bigger
does have a younger sister, though, and her role in the book, while rather minor, is quite telling. In the
opening scene, the sight of the dead mouse in their home scares Vera enough that she faints. Later,
Vera accuses Bigger of “looking” at her, likely in a funny way, as he had just hours ago murdered Mary
and disposed of her body. It’s clear that Vera is quite sensitive, unlike her more “hardened” brothers,
something that is clearly more acceptable. 

Interestingly, we meet Mary Dalton, the woman that Bigger will end up killing by accident, on screen
before we meet her in person. While Bigger and Jack are out at the movies, a picture about Mary comes
on, showing her beauty and doting on men, which Bigger and Jack joke about arousing themselves. She
seems like the perfect maidenly enchantress - rich, young, beautiful, and knowing of her place. However,
when Bigger meets the real Mary Dalton, she’s a lot different - outspoken, unruly, skipping school to go
out drinking with her boyfriend, and uncomfortably friendly to Bigger. She is bold in her ways and radically
supports her Communist boyfriend’s ambitions - far from this submissive figure who poses for the
camera and lets the status quo lead her. 

One of the most complex and polarizing scenes to readers is the scene at the end of Book 1 where
Bigger is helping Mary to her bed, just before he accidentally kills her. Had he just been trying to help
her, we as readers would’ve evidently sympathized with him more throughout Books 2 and 3, but he
didn’t. Instead, he proceeded to kiss her and fondle her a bit. Why was that? Throughout his night with
Jan and Mary, his discomfort was extremely evident, and why wouldn’t he want to just stick her in bed and get the hell out of there? Perhaps he found himself needing to assert some sort of power over her
that he lacked? Perhaps he found this to be the only moment where he could “safely” do so? It’s
endlessly confusing and I don’t think we’ll ever quite know why Bigger does this. If he had just put her
in bed and left, there’s a chance she would have survived the night, but of course, he had no idea that
this instance would take an abrupt and dark turn - most of which is caused by that exact stigma of a
black man and a white woman coupling, especially nonconsensually. 

Something that is also extremely hard to grapple with in this reality-soaked novel is Bigger’s
relationship with his girlfriend, Bessie, and how his downward spiral affects that. At first, Bigger and
Bessie are young lovers - getting drunk together on their occasional time off from work. As more and
more emerges about Bigger’s crime, Bessie becomes more and more distraught, and their relationship struggles and reaches a breaking point when Bigger ends up raping and killing Bessie, who has been
shocked stiff from everything that has happened (and remember, all of this has happened in the span
of two days). Before Bessie’s death, however, Bessie gets angry at Bigger, claiming he never really
loved her; he only wanted to “get her drunk so he could have her”. It’s unclear if Bigger has any
genuine feelings for Bessie, but the ending of their time together is heartbreaking nonetheless. 

Gender roles were much more defined in Bigger Thomas’s era, and toxic masculinity often drove
decisions that fueled some of the most polarizing and hard-to-read instances in Native Son.
Nonetheless, it’s intriguing to take a deeper look at. It’s clear that Bigger is driven quite intensely by
toxic masculinity, and many of the decisions that further plummet him into freefall in Book Two relate
to his relationships and attitudes towards the women in his life. Something else that is curious is how
in Book Three, when Bigger was being tried, the main focus was on Mary’s death and potential rape
when there was direct evidence that Bigger did intentionally rape and kill Bessie, but her story is put
in the background to further prove the Dalton’s narrative. Gender and race often go together in this
novel as they do in real life, another proving of the realism of Native Son and protest fiction.