Big Black Good Man

“Big, Black, Good Man” exhibits a major preoccupations of Richard Wright’s writing—the psychology of racism and white supremacy. Wright uses a limited third-person narrator and the point of view of an aging Danish man to cast new eyes on the old and seemingly intractable problem of racism as a deep structure of the human mind that distorts every social interaction despite the best intentions of well-meaning people.

Wright uses a limited narrator with access to Olaf Jensen’s mind to do a deep dive into how people who do not see themselves as racist nevertheless are overcome by white supremacist notions of people of color. Olaf’s immediate reaction to Jim is a visceral, instinctive one of fear despite his conscious belief that “men were men” (Paragraph 13). The language he uses to describe Jim—“he didn’t seem human. Too big, too black, too loud, too direct and probably too violent to boot” (Paragraph 13)—is overladen with stereotypes and peppered with words that indicate that this particular man is not human in Olaf’s eyes.

The presence of Jim also brings Olaf’s latent white supremacy to the surface. A key element of white supremacy as a worldview is that it imagines people of color as inherently inferior and as objects designed to serve the egos and needs of whites. In Olaf’s case, who Jim is is about Olaf, not Jim himself. What offends Olaf’s sensibilities is how Jim makes Olaf feel about himself, as if Jim “had come here expressly to remind him how puny, how tiny, how weak and how white he was” (Paragraph 13).

Olaf is further offended by Jim’s treatment of him as an object, a person who is designed to serve the need of a customer who happens to be black. This relationship—customer and service person—reverses the ordinary power dynamics of the relationship between blacks and whites in the 1950s, further undercutting any sense of superiority Olaf might be able to feel. The stroke that cuts the deepest is that as a service person in a mostly white, Northern European city, Olaf is forced to send a white woman—a blonde, no less, and thus a symbol of white femininity—to service this man sexually.

In America at the time this story was written, sex between white women and black men was the greatest taboo and pretext for violence designed to keep black men in their places, so Olaf’s impotence in regulating this relationship would have been seen by American readers of Esquire as the ultimate surrender of his prerogatives and responsibilities as a superior white man. The contemporary reader should also keep in mind that the mere representation of such a relationship in an American men’s magazine in 1957, years before laws forbidding the marriage of black men and white women were struck down in Loving v. State of Virginia, is quite provocative on Wright’s part and would certainly have offended the sensibilities of some white readers.

Wright’s use of the limited narrator also forces the reader to see Jim and Jim’s actions with these same eyes, since Jim is mostly nonverbal and his actions are filtered through Olaf’s paranoid perspective throughout most of the story. Jim’s actions in the story are mostly innocuous and not so different from what another customer might do—he asks for a room, asks the night porter to stash his money in a safe, asks for typical services, and pays his bill on the way out.

The one unusual action is his placing of his hands around Olaf’s neck. Wright uses this scene almost as a gotcha that forces the reader to consider that perhaps Olaf’s paranoia is justified after all; the tension in the scene is possible only because the life of Jim in his room—his growing relationship with Lena, his gratefulness to Olaf, whom he sees as a good man based on his actions—all happen outside the narrative.

The resolution of the narrative—Jim gifting the shirts to Olaf—pulls the white supremacist veil from the eyes of Olaf and the reader. The use of “compassion” (Paragraph 102) to describe the nonverbal interaction between the two men is the first spark of humanizing description granted to Jim. Olaf’s spontaneous exclamation that Jim is a “big, black, good man” (Paragraph 108) and the romance between Lena and Jim show the way to readers who may deep inside, harbor unconscious racism. The ultimate moral of the story is that relationships between black and white people can improve only once all parties give one another the benefit of the doubt.