Richard Wright’s “Long Black Song” reveals the destructive power of hatred in a situation in which love makes a weak attempt to assert itself, but fails. Sarah is the living embodiment of love. She seems to have an excess of love for almost everyone—her child Ruth, her husband Silas, and also for Tom who could have been her husband had he not gone to fight a war. She has soft feelings also for the white boy who tried to sell her a ‘graphophone’ clock because she can see his innocent boyishness for what it is. Silas, on the other hand, loves his wife and child and their friends and relations, but it is his hatred of the white man that truly characterizes him. It is this hatred and envy of the white man that comes between him and his love for Sarah and brings everything crashing down around them.
When the story begins, Silas has left his wife at home for almost a week while he has gone to sell their cotton and to buy a few necessities and luxuries for the two of them and their child. Sarah is beginning to feel quite lonely and this makes her think of her first love, Tom, and of how life with him could have turned out. Ruth, her young child, had been unaccountably cranky and had not been appeased by a drink of water or even her mother’s milk. Leaving the child free to indicate what it wanted, Sarah finds that the child was crying for a broken-down clock. When the clock is given to her Ruth beats it so hard that her mother fears she would hurt her hands. She gives the child a stick and Ruth amuses herself banging the clock with the stick. It is almost as if the child is berating the time it finds itself in. Anyway, the banging is violent enough to remind Sarah of war and fighting and the circumstances in which Tom was pulled away from her life.
In what might seem a coincidence, a white boy selling ‘graphophone’ clocks to pay for his college education arrives on the scene. He is a mere adolescent and is attracted to Sarah’s sexuality. She tries her best to keep him at bay although her blood too was apparently on fire, missing her husband and thinking of her first love as she so painfully did. The boy leaves, leaving the clock for Sarah’s husband to decide whether to buy or not. In his youthful confusion, he leaves other telltale clues to his presence in Sarah’s bedroom—his hat, his pencil, and his handkerchief.
Silas arrives after the boy has left—a little too soon perhaps, for Sarah would have liked some more time to collect her feelings. Silas is triumphant—he has sold his cotton for a good price, he has both some gifts for Sarah, and he is full of hope for the future. In fact, he believes that he would be able to hire help on the farm like white men—for he believes that the way to get on in life is to do what the white man does.
However, he reveals his true opinion of “white trash”(1407) when he sees the clock the white boy has left in his house and the other telltale pieces of evidence of his visit to their bedroom. He is terribly angry—the sight of the boy’s handkerchief sends him into a rage and he is about to horsewhip his wife. She flees with the child and falls asleep a safe distance from the house. The next morning, when she wakes she is frantic because she knows the white boy would be back to try to sell Silas the clock, and Silas was mad enough to kill.
Sarah forgets the danger to herself and wants to avert a bloody scene of violence, but her noble resolve is too weak. The boy returns with a friend and Silas kills him. The friend manages to escape and Sarah rushes back to try to persuade Silas to flee. Silas refuses and sends Sarah and the child away. His sorrow at the turn of events is powerful enough but his hatred of the white man is much stronger—strong enough for him to kill as many of them as he could and to silently stand his ground even as the white men set him and his house on fire. For all the love in her heart, Sarah can only run “blindly across the fields, crying, ‘Naw, Gawd!” (1414) The child may beat the clock all it can, but the time is out of joint, more is the pity.
Works Cited
Wright, Richard. “Long Black Song.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 1997.