Notes of a Native Son

“Many Thousands Gone” was first published in the November/December 1951 issue of Partisan Review. Baldwin continues the analysis he launched in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” focusing exclusively this time on Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” included Native Son alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its consideration of the protest novel genre, and therefore evaluated Wright’s novel in terms external to the Black literary tradition. As Baldwin explained in that first essay, the protest novel extends, rather than undoes, the quagmire of White supremacy; he finds Native Son, too, imprisoned within a White paradigm. The protest novels—inclusive of Native Son—not only fail at subversion, they actually retrench the very racist tropes they aim to topple. “Many Thousands Gone,” with its exclusive attention to Wright’s novel, is able to go considerably deeper into this paradigm problem.

The paradigm that Baldwin deconstructs with reference to Native Son is nothing less than that which slaveholding installed throughout Western society. “Many Thousands Gone,” therefore, is literary criticism embedded within trenchant social analysis. The “many thousands gone” references the millions lost to the Middle Passage and enslavement, the thousands murdered during a century of lynching, and the untold scores of Black people succumbing to a litany of premature death across the generations.