Wright's first book โ published two years before Native Son made him famous โ is a cycle of four novellas set in the Jim Crow Mississippi and Arkansas of his youth, its title a deliberate challenge to Harriet Beecher Stowe: these are Uncle Tom's descendants, and they no longer endure in silence. In "Big Boy Leaves Home," a Black teenager's prank at a swimming hole ends in killings and a lynch mob, and Big Boy hides overnight in a kiln before escaping north. "Down by the Riverside" strands Mann, a sharecropper, in a flood, where a stolen boat, a drowned white family, and a rescue he is forced to perform at gunpoint close every exit but one. "Long Black Song" gives the cycle its elegiac center: Sarah, alone with her baby, takes a moment's tenderness with a white phonograph salesman, and her husband Silas's answer is a suicidal last stand against the mob that comes for him. "Fire and Cloud" ends the book politically, as Reverend Taylor, tortured by white officials, leads his starving congregation in a united march on the town hall. Together the novellas move from flight, through doomed resistance, toward collective action โ the arc of Wright's own 1930s politics.
Author: Richard Wright ยท Original publisher: Harper & Brothers (New York), 1938
