It must be said that this question of familial love has been a preoccupation of many other black writers. One of the many effects of slavery and pre-individualism was the repression of love between members of one family. Love was dangerous because at any time the family might be broken apart. It was dangerous because it involved an acknowledgment of individual worth. If you love your people, you are going to fight for them. "Black is beautiful" is revolutionary and dangerous to whites for just this reason. Its absence among the blacks in Wright's childhood is not surprising therefore.
The absence of love in his book will not confuse black readers. Just as the Blues is expressed as a tone of nostalgia and irony, the book's very existence is an act of love. For while it seems that Wright is interested only in escaping from his home, there is ambiguity in his flight. He is, as an artist, obsessed by his own origins. The fact that he finally left the United States for good did not mean that he was in spiritual, as well as physical, exile. As a novelist, or a fictional historian, he had to have distance in order to view his subject with some measure of sanity and proportion. Consequently he wrote of urban violence endemic to America with a clarity that shocked the nation. He didn't ask anyone to make excuses for his attitudes. They spoke for themselves, and many Americans primarily white were appalled by his work and were unable to face its truth.
One reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly reacted to Native Son saying: "Hatred, and the preaching of hatred, and incitement to violence can only make a tolerable relationship intolerable." As if the relationship between blacks and whites were tolerable. Indeed, it was tolerable to whites, which is an indication of the social condition that caused Wright to leave his own country.
Black writers, on the other hand, found in the legendary tale of Bigger Thomas an immediate reality. He became the figure that would dominate their work for a long time to come. In his, and Wright's, monumental stature, black writers found a truth they could address themselves to. Blacks would see themselves as the moral conscience of America after Native Son, although none would have such a single-minded approach to its resolution as Wright. Like Dreiser, who wrote of urban violence with a simplicity usually found in allegory only, Wright is a distinctly American product.
