Uncle Tom’s Children: A Guide for Readers and Teachers

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

Whether an adult Mississippian asks “Who was Richard Wright?” is a function of cultural literacy. MISSISSIPPI READS has selected Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) for its 2008 program, a choice that may reduce the number of people who feel obliged to ask the question and enlarge the readership for Wright’s fiction. It is strategic that Wright’s first collection of short stories be given attention in Mississippi during his centennial year, because the stories are quintessentially Southern and provocative. They cast light on the necessity of re-examining literary renditions of rural life in Mississippi and the segregation-bound South of the early twentieth century, for they tell us much about the nexus of art and history. They reveal much about Wright’s creative imagination and his penchant for exploring the social and psychological cost of daily life.

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 are 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

“Big Boy Leaves Home”

The story opens with four black boy engaged in the banter known as “the dozens.” Why does Wright begin the story with a ritual involving verbal insults?
How does Wright use a classic taboo regarding contact between blacks and whites to activate tragic events in the plot?
What are the justifications for the soldier’s killing of Lester and Buck? For Big Boy’s killing the soldier? What point does Wright wish to make about justice and inequality? About justice and power?
How does Wright use the themes of innocence and guilt in the story?
Note the pastoral setting in which violence initially occurs. What do other acts of violence in the story lead us to conclude about the nature of violence? About the nature of the community wherein it occurs?
Is Big Boy’s witnessing of the lynching of Bobo a part of his education?
How important are issues of migration and displacement in the story? Why does Big Boy flee to Chicago rather than to another part of the United States?

‘Down by the Riverside”

What is the moral conundrum in this story?
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?
Why are the military officials so insensitive to Mann’s grief over the death of his wife? Why is Mann addressed as “boy”?
Why does Mann rescue Mrs. Heartfield and her two children when he knows they will identify him as the person who murdered Mr. Heartfield?
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”

What does the clock symbolize in the story? What is the importance of Sarah’s telling the salesman “Mistah, we don need no clock….We jus don need no time, Mistah”? How do the conflicting ideas about time symbolize conflicting ideas about what is valuable in life?
Do Wright’s very poetic descriptions of Sarah’s feelings and emotions make her actions ambiguous? What are her feelings about her husband Silas? How does she respond to the music from the graphophone? Is her act of adultery forced or consensual?
How does the young salesman exercise male and racial privileges in “seducing” Sarah? Why does Wright associate sex with economic exchange?
What kind of man is Silas? Why is his agonizing outburst about oppression and betrayal delivered over the body of the man he has killed? Is his speech one version of a “long black song”?
Why might female and male readers respond in radically different ways to the story? What questions are left unanswered in the story?
How do Sarah’s ideas about World War I and killing affect our interpretation of Silas’s statement “N them white folks beat up a black soljer yistiddy. He wuz jus in from France. Wuz still wearing his soljers suit. They claimed he sassed a white woman…”? How were ideas about patriotism reconciled with unwarranted mistreatment of black WWI soldiers in the South?

“Fire and Cloud”

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”?
How does the structure of the story illuminate the folk saying about being between a rock and a hard place?
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?
What do comments by Reverend Taylor’s son Jimmy suggest about a new generation of Uncle Tom’s children?
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”

Why does Wright borrow the title from a hymn?
What aspects of Southern life were threatened by cooperation between black and white Communists in the 1930s?
what is the nature of the new faith that Aunt Sue learns from her sons Sug and Johnny-Boy?
“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?
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?

Uncle Tom’s Children: Special Resources for Teachers

Books

Barry, John M. Rising Tide:The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Black, Patti Carr. Documentary Portrait of Mississippi: The Thirties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982.

Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginning to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975.
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.”

Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.
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.

Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
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).

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study of Literature and Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Rowley,Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001.

Thompson, Julius E. Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865-1965. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006.

Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1988.

Videos

“The Long Dream.’ America’s Dream. HBO Home Video ISBN: 0-78310-992-X.
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

Documenting America
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
www.colin.edu/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.