Richard Wright and the Police
Published in Post45: The Journal, 2011
Abstract
The scene of confession binds together Wright’s work after Native Son as an extended inquiry into the questions over which the Supreme Court puzzled in the forties, fifties and sixties: is there such a thing as a “voluntary confession”? What is the relationship between force and speech? How are the police related to the law? Looking at “The Man Who Lived Underground,” I show how Wright revolts against the extraction of confessions, even as he evinces a desire for kinds of human connection that confessional communication creates. The subject of Black Boy is the frightening possibility that this connection depends on violence against the self. My account culminates by considering Wright’s infrequently-read Savage Holiday (1954), in which Wright made his most complex inquiry into the possibilities of fiction construed as confession, taking into account not only the questions of voluntariness that preoccupied the debate around confession, but also the racial valences of the confessional scene.