Current Events > Did anyone here read "Native Son" in school?

(+) Yeah! (+)

So today I was cleaning out some stuff I had stored in my room. I found a bunch of books that I had taken from my high school--they were going to throw them away, so they let students take a few home.

One of them was Native Son. I never read the book before, but I had heard about it from reading James Baldwin's work. I knew a little bit about the plot, so out of morbid curiosity, I skimmed through the book and eventually found that scene. The part where Bigger kills the white girl, and then takes her to the furnace to burn the body, all the while cutting her up so that the body would fit in there.

And I'm just thinking... um... did high school teachers actually have kids read this? Am I missing the point?? My high school is literally 99% Latino (it's in East LA), so I would hope that these kids' exposure to African American literature is not a book that shows such a doomed protagonist. I know I would feel like shit if my White classmates read their first Latino book in school, and it was about a man who murders and rapes.

So I'm curious if anyone here read it in school, and if so, how was that like?

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I read it a few years ago when I found it in my grandma's basement. I didn't quite know how to process it. I read a review by Dan Schneider (not to be confused with the nickelodeon one) on Cosmoetica and it sort of gave me new perspective but it's kind of straightforward really.

http://www.cosmoetica.com/B549-DES474.htm

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I own the book, but I've never read it.

my high school was mostly white, though, and iirc, the only book that we read from a black author was Their Eyes Were Watching God

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and also consider the time wright wrote this and its setting. most US books from the first half of the 20th century seem sort of weird now but if they're still famous it probably meant something to someone.

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I like how it's common to have a copy of the book lying in your house somewhere, lol.

And I guess I don't want to come off as promoting censorship--I think it's fully okay to read the book, especially as a historical artifact. I just... would hope that high school kids are exposed to more "positive" works of fiction.

But I get what that review by Dan Schneider says, which is that the book is not so much about Bigger Thomas, but about 1930's America.

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Conflict posted...

I read that in the 9th grade

It's pretty disturbing. Not only did he kill the white girl but he raped and murdered his girlfriend

one of the points was how much more savage and deliberate one act was whereas he was punished for the accident.

we read Black Boy in school. Idk why but we read a lot of dark shit in hs. it was pretty depressing actually, looking back.

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No.

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Im 70 pages into Native Son and Im enjoying the experience. Im trying to read it with the mindset of a high school student reading it in their AP Lit class.

And also I just read this article from the New Yorker about the book and Richard Wright and wow

Some people are at home with the culture they encounter, as Ellison seems to have been. Some people borrow or adopt their culture, as Eliot did when he transformed himself into a British Anglo-Catholic. A few, extraordinary people have to steal it. Wright was living in Memphis when his serious immersion in literature began, but he could not get books from the public library. So he persuaded a sympathetic, though puzzled, white man to lend him his library card, and he forged a note for himself to present to the librarian: Dear Madam: Will you please let this *** boy have some books by H. L. Mencken? He had discovered, on his own, a literary tradition in which no one had invited him to participatefrom which, in fact, the world had conspired to exclude him. He saw in that tradition a way to express his own experience, his own sense of things, and, through heroic persistence, he made that experience a part of our culture.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/07/20/the-hammer-and-the-nail/amp

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didnt read the book, but I did sed a play of it at a theater in Glendale and it was really well done.

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i have not read it, but i own him
i have Read Invisible Man by his contemporary Ralph Ellison
which is an amazing book

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OK so Im still reading it and I actually like it a lot. Wright does an incredible job of making the reader feel as uncomfortable as Bigger, especially when he is around Mary and Jan. I had to stop reading because I know what scene is coming up and its so horrifying.

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berlyman101 posted...

Idk why but we read a lot of dark shit in hs. it was pretty depressing actually, looking back.

we never read 'Native Son' or 'Black Boy', but we did read 'Of Mice and Men', 'The Outsiders' and other similarly depressing books

I'm pretty sure HS is why I don't read much anymore

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