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Abstract
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Richard Wright’s second edition of his collection of
short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1940), entails both hidden and open
forms of defiance against Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism. In the opening
essay of this collection, namely, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow:
An Autobiographical Sketch,” Wright enlists nine lessons of his nonviolent
activities to fight back White oppression. In “The Introductory
Essay: Richard Wright’s Covert Challenging of Jim Crowism and Uncle
Tomism” (2010b), I restricted the study to four out of nine of Wright’s
lessons, two from the beginning and two from the ending of the essay, to
stress Wright’s “evasive actions, and his covert activities, such as silence,
playing the role of the Monkey trickster in the library, lying consistently
to whites if this act did not question his life and ‘sly civility,’ to fight
the humiliation imposed by Jim Crow laws and customs back.” Thus, in
that article, Wright’s four proactive acts of defiance have been studied.
In this article, however, I intend to focus on four short stories of Uncle
Tom’s Children in which the fictional characters, comprising a community
of Black children, Black men, and a Black woman, turn to more
visible and overt forms of resistance against Jim Crowism by resorting
to guns. Since individualistic acts of defiance occurred four times in five
stories of the collection, it is necessary to study them. This study has
excluded “Fire and Cloud” because it employs a communal and nonviolent
act of defiance against White oppressors by marching for food.
Except for “Fire and Cloud,” in all stories firearms are employed as ameans of overt defiance. Toward the end of the stories, as I propose,
there is an advance from unpremeditated but justified self-defense to
purposeful open defiance using guns. Both in Wright’s own covert, yet
proactive, acts of defiance in the introductory essay and in the overt yet
reactive and individualistic acts of resistance against White oppressors
in the short storie
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