And he`s saying that this is perfectly natural, given the way society is structured.''įor Leon Forrest, the Chicago novelist (''The Bloodworth Orphans'') who teaches ''Native Son'' in his Afro-American literature classes at Northwestern University, the restored version clears up a mystery that has always lurked at the heart of Wright`s novel. He sets up a situation where you can see how the conditions under which Bigger lives force him to fantasies of possession, including sexual possession. ''What Wright is saying is that of course he could have raped her. And that`s what the court is most anxious about, not the murder but the rape. He doesn`t rape Mary, but he`s accused of it. I have taught the book without these scenes, and there are always questions about Bigger`s sexuality. Putting those words back into the story makes Bigger a more complete character. ''But it`s incomplete in an important way, because it removes a crucial ingredient. Her mouth was open and her breath came slow and deep.'' He kissed her again and felt the sharp bones of her hips move in a hard and veritable grind.
The thought and conviction that Jan had had her a lot flashed through his mind. ''He tightened his arms as his hips pressed tightly against hers,'' the deleted passage reads, ''and he felt her body moving strongly. The book club had another passage removed from a scene in which Bigger is helping the drunken and semiconscious Mary to bed-just before he smothers her to avoid being discovered in her bedroom by the girl`s mother. Also cut was a brief passage in which Bigger glimpses Mary`s ''white thigh'' in the rear-view mirror as she and her boyfriend, Jan, make love in the back seat of the family Buick. In one early scene that was removed, Bigger and a friend masturbate in a movie theater, then watch a newsreel that features a segment on the rebellious Mary, whose parents have just hired Bigger as the family chauffeur.
According to Rampersad, the scholar and biographer of Langston Hughes who edited the Wright volumes for the Library of America, the pay dirt was especially valuable in the recovery of the expurgated scenes from ''Native Son.'' Although these amounted to only a few pages (in one instance only four sentences), their removal seriously compromised Wright`s portrayal of Bigger Thomas, his doomed black antihero, and obscured a key psychological impulse that led to his killing of Mary Dalton, a white South Side debutante.
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