by Jessica Schneider

Created on: July 03, 2009   Last Updated: July 04, 2009

"Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. ... But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe's powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer."

This is what James Baldwin states in his essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel." Then he goes on to note, "Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; a confusion, a breakdown of meaning."

When thinking of two writers it is hard to imagine them being more different than James Baldwin and Richard Wright. I just finished reading Black Boy, which I found to be one of the best memoirs I've ever read, along with Loren Eiseley's All The Strange Hours, and Betty Smith's autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. Before that, I read Native Son, where one of the best depictions of PC Elitism occurs, (pre-PC of course) between Bigger Thomas and the rich white characters, Jan and Mary. What astounded me most was despite the 'good intention' these characters might have had towards Bigger, they had absolutely no empathy for him at all.

There is a scene where they ask Bigger to join them in a "Negro restaurant" and it is clear that Bigger is not comfortable with this, and yet he concurs because it is his job. There is also the scene where Mary is seated beside Bigger in the front seat of the car, and he admits to not ever having been as physically close to a white woman before, and this thereby puts him in an uncomfortable situation, which causes him ultimately to react violently.

In Baldwin's essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," he speaks of Bigger's "tragedy" as being, "not that he is cold or black or hungry... but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth."

He then goes on to say that the failure of the protest novel lies in its "rejection of life," and by life, he means the human being and the inability to transcend this "categorization" people bestow upon themselves both in life and art.

One of the things I detest about novels today is that there is an insistent need to portray black characters as mystical, or as Mystical Negroes. This really is a term, where, as Wiki says: The word "Negro," now considered archaic and offensive, is used intentionally to emphasize

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