Lawd Today by Richard Wright

First published: 1963

Type of plot: Contemporary black tragedy

Time of work: The 1930’s, sometime during the Great Depression

Locale: Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Jake Jackson, the protagonist and antihero, a black postal worker in Chicago
• Lil, his wife and the victim of his abuse
• Al,
• Bob, and
• Slim, his fellow postal workers and pals

The Novel

Lawd Today opens with Jake Jackson rising out of bed, apparently after a night on the town. The day in question is Lincoln’s birthday, and throughout the day, no matter where Jake goes, radios haunt him with words from that president’s speeches and statements about the Great Emancipator—as though to remind Jake that he is the victim of another kind of slavery. Jake is caught in a web that entangles his soul. It will take much more than a presidential proclamation to set his spirit free.

From the beginning, Richard Wright lets the reader know that Jake, although caught in circumstances beyond his control, is an unsavory individual, one neither to be admired nor empathized with. Jake begins his day by physically and verbally abusing his wife, Lil: In response to Lil’s brief conversation with the milkman, Jake falls into a jealous rage. The reader later learns that Jake married Lil only because the couple thought that she was pregnant. Jake’s resentment at being “tricked” into marriage has grown into a rage that he frequently and violently vents on his wife. Lil, though far from being an aggressive individual, forewarns Jake that his time for this kind of behavior is running out: “This is the last time you going to do this to me.” In the book’s final scene, Lil lives up to her promise and violently subdues Jake in his drunken assault on her by slashing him with a piece of broken glass—a symbolic emasculation.

After Jake’s morning encounter with his wife, the novel takes the reader on a journey with Jake as he goes through the drudgery of his life. He stops by a local numbers operation with the unrealistic dream of increasing his meager pocket money. He loses, and Wright thereby establishes from the outset Jake’s character as that of a loser.

Jake then goes to “Bob’s place,” the home of his friend and working companion. They are later joined by Al and Slim, and the foursome spends most of the remaining time before work playing bridge, followed by a “bout of the dozens” between Jake and Al. Even in this game, in which the pair take turns making less than favorable remarks about each other’s ancestry, Jake cannot win: “Jake screwed up his eyes, bit his lips, and tried hard to think of a return. But, for the life of him, he could not. Al’s last image was too much; it left him blank.” Wright then takes his four characters through a tedious day of work at the post office, where they are subjected to a shift of sorting mail under the scrutiny of white supervisors who go out of their way to inflict stress and tension on the four black employees. During the day, Jake manages to borrow one hundred dollars from a loan shark so that he can treat his friends to a night on the town when they get off work.

Jake’s night on the town turns into disaster when he and his friends go to a local bordello for a night of drinking, eating, and carousing with the women. In the course of the evening, after they are well-fed and drunk, the foursome’s hopes for some time with the women are shattered when a pickpocket makes off with Jake’s wallet. Jake’s protests to the management are to no avail and only gain a beating for him and his friends, followed by their being expeditiously and unceremoniously thrown out of the place.

On his way home, Jake becomes more drunken, finishing off a bottle before finally arriving to take his frustrations out on Lil. The novel’s final scene, in which Lil slashes him in self-defense, completes the downward arc begun in the book’s opening pages. Bleeding, confused, only half comprehending what has happened to him, Jake is utterly defeated: “He shuddered from the chill that was seeping into the marrow of his bones as darkness roared in his brain.”

The Characters

Jake Jackson is a Southern black man who, like many other Southern blacks, escaped his Southern roots in Mississippi to transplant himself into what was perceived to be a more desirable environment for blacks, Chicago. The lure was not that Chicago was desegregated but that there was at least the possibility of work for blacks. Jake is fortunate to be employed as a postal worker during a time, the Great Depression, when jobs were scarce for everyone. Nevertheless, Wright makes clear that Jake and the other black postal workers suffer under extreme conditions of discrimination in their work environment; Jake’s job is as much a part of the trap in which he finds himself as are his marriage, his debts, and his lust.

Jake is self-indulgent, he is mean, he is a wife abuser, he is an alcoholic, he is a womanizer. Wright presents Jake as a loser and gives no clue that he would have been any different in a more favorable situation. At the same time, however, Jake is an archetypal figure who vividly symbolizes the dilemma of many black American families from a sociological perspective. It is in that sense that Jake becomes a tragic figure, not because of who he is or his failures in life, but because he has met the destiny of so many like him.

Lil, unlike Jake, is a character with whom the reader can empathize and identify. She, too, is an archetypal figure, representing abused women—not only black women but all women. In the end, she is courageous in her battle with Jake and, if only for the moment, victorious over his assault if not the circumstances of her unfortunate situation.

Al, Bob, and Slim offer an interesting counterpoint to Jake’s character. Each is single and therefore, in Jake’s view, not caught in the trap of marital responsibilities that he believes is dragging down his life.

Unlike Jake, Al, Bob, and Slim do not have mounting debts that they are unable to pay; they are, in Jake’s estimation, “free.” Nevertheless, Jake’s buddies are as unsavory in their behavior as Jake. Wright pointedly plays on Al’s case of gonorrhea, as well as other attributes—his bragging, his overeating, and his stinginess—to make him the brunt of the others’ jokes. Slim, meanwhile, has a chronic cough, the result of tuberculosis; as Jake observes to Bob, “Ain’t it funny about folks what’s got T.B. They hound for women. . . .” Wright uses these characters in comedic relief against his tragic backdrop, but the technique does nothing to lighten the tragedy of Jake and Lil.

Wright captures exquisitely the black dialect of his characters and accurately preserves the language of the ghetto. A number of minor but colorful characters convey the black world of Chicago’s South Side and give the reader a realistic insight into a world infrequently seen, much less understood, by whites. Wright’s characters, all of them, live on the edge of survival. For those who have not been there, their actions are difficult to comprehend.

Critical Context

Although Lawd Today was his first novel, Wright was unsuccessful at having it published, and it was not until after his death that the work finally reached the printer. Certainly, Lawd Today is inferior to his masterpiece, Native Son (1940); Wright did, however, accomplish several things of note in the novel which make it invaluable for understanding his work in a larger context.

First, Wright captured superbly the language of the black ghetto in all of its color and shades of meaning. Second, the book is extremely interesting structurally. It is compact, compressed into a tight little drama. Description is at a premium, and most of the story is seen through the eyes of the characters in dialogue. Indeed, one can surmise that much of Wright’s early development as a writer took place in Lawd Today. Ultimately, however, the novel’s legacy is its portrait of the brutal world of ghetto life.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin’s Press/Marek, 1985. The essays “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Alas, Poor Richard” provide important and provocative insights into Wright and his art.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on various aspects of Wright’s work and career, with an introduction by Bloom.

Burrison, William. “Another Look at Lawd Today: Richard Wright’s Tricky Apprenticeship.” College Language Association Journal 29 (June, 1986): 424-441. Both positive and negative assessments of Lawd Today have failed to present a detailed, comprehensive analysis of the text itself. The novel is organized according to the comic pattern of the fool/trickster tale; Jake is a version of the tragic fool. The irony of Jake’s position is expressed through complex patterns of colors and numbers and through the use of Lincoln’s birthday as background for Jake’s unlucky day.

Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. A collection of Fabre’s essays on Wright. A valuable but not sustained full-length study.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. 2d ed. Translated by Isabel Barzun. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. The standard biography of Wright. Details his childhood in the South, his role in the literary scenes of Chicago and New York, his relationship with the Communist Party, and his final years among American writers in Paris. Includes interpretation of his novels and summaries of their reception. Fabre explains how Lawd Today is autobiographical, since the story of Jake is based on Wright’s own experience working in the main Chicago post office during the Depression.

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Chapters on Lawd Today, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, The Outsider, and Black Boy, as well as discussions of later fiction, black power, and Wright’s handling of sexuality. Includes introduction and bibliography.

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Richard Wright’s Experiment in Naturalism and Satire: Lawd Today.” Studies in American Fiction 14, no. 2 (Autumn, 1986): 165-178. Neither simply naturalism nor satire alone, Wright’s novel is an experiment at combining the two types of plot to suggest that the foibles of Jake are those of human nature.

Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Twayne, 1997. Divided into sections of reviews, reprinted essays, and new essays. Includes discussions of Wright’s handling of race, voice, tone, novelistic structure, the city, and literary influences. Index but no bibliography.

Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. A study of Wright’s background and development as a writer, up to the publication of Native Son (1940).

Leary, Lewis. “Lawd Today: Notes on Richard Wright’s First/Last Novel.” In Critical Essays on Richard Wright, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Though Lawd Today is an apprentice novel, showing the influence of such writers as John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and James T. Farrell, Wright’s creation of Jake as a caricature of the white world is original.

Margolies, Edward. “Foreshadowings: Lawd Today.” In The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Because of its subtle indirect social criticism, Lawd Today is in some ways more sophisticated than his most famous work, Native Son. Themes of the black man as both villain and hero, black nationalism, the erosion of folk ties in Northern cities, and the similarity of the hero’s failed strivings to the absurdity of the existentialist hero anticipate major themes of Wright’s later work.

Mootry, Maria K. “Bitches, Whores, and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies in the Art of Richard Wright.” In Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984. Argues that Jake’s quest in Lawd Today is the quest of all Wright’s heroes: the pursuit of freedom and manhood against the barriers of racism and the power of black women.

Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books, 1988. A critically acclaimed study of Wright’s life and work written by a respected novelist.

Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968. A well-written biography which remains useful.