Wright and Brown: Race, Class, and Harlem Renaissance Fiction

Introduction: Two Voices on Racism and Jim Crow

In his autobiographical work The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, Richard Wright describes a disturbing violent scene that was very common among Black communities in the Southern United States. He recounts how one day, while polishing brass at the front of a clothing shop, his boss and the boss's young son (aged 20) drove up in their automobile and got out half-kicking and half-dragging a Black woman into the store. A policeman standing just at the store's corner did nothing but look on, "twirling his nightstick." This poignant image summarizes the essence of Wright's work, revealing how deeply racism was rooted in American society. The policeman's callous attitude — emphasized by the expression "twirling his nightstick" — and his failure to intervene proved that the law institutionalized and virtually upheld racism, allowing the infamous Jim Crow laws to evade federal government oversight.

While Jim Crow violated every principle upon which America was founded, Southern states upheld it as the sole social and political institution for generations. Through enforcement of Jim Crow, America's sacred institutions — including its system of justice — ensured that Black Americans had zero access to financial, cultural, or social capital. As a result, class and race became intricately entwined.

In his poem Bitter Fruit of the Tree, Sterling Brown uses an anecdotal structure to describe the experiences of racial discrimination and how it affected access to power and social class. Brown reflects on his grandparents' generation and how they were taught to remain subservient to White authority figures. Like Wright, who confronted systematic American racism through his personal experiences, Brown writes about how Black Americans were told not to be bitter and to simply accept racial discrimination as a fact of life. The poem's final line — "my brother is bitter, and he does not hear" — answers Wright's implicit question about how Black Americans felt regarding their circumstances. The pervasive mistrust and bitterness toward the White power establishment in America was the sole natural result of systematic racial discrimination, as illustrated by both Brown and Wright in their respective literary works.

Symbolism and Directness: Contrasting Literary Approaches

Sterling Brown employs more symbolism than Wright. Wright's work is more direct, frank, and literal — he narrates actual events from his own life. Brown's Bitter Fruit of the Tree is a remarkably visceral poem; the image of beaten and bloody individuals was, tragically, very real for Black Americans. However, imagery such as the "weather-stripped house that he could not enter" denotes the class disparities resulting from the forced relegation of African American citizens to underclass status. Thus, both Brown and Wright demonstrate how racism produced the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans, which in turn led to drastic income disparities across the United States. Harlem Renaissance literature was fundamentally a form of political protest — a means of promoting activism in support of comprehensive human rights.

Impact on the Reader: Imagery and Emotional Resonance

While Wright uses imagery to a limited degree, his work makes clear that a sharp dividing line existed between the White and Black populations of America, as evidenced by the very first paragraph of his sketch. The imagery he employs places readers directly into the situation and allows them to experience the lessons of Jim Crow firsthand — the abysmal hierarchy that granted whites supremacy over blacks. Emphasizing the extent to which a person was defined by "color," Wright states that "there were black churches and black preachers, there were black schools and black teachers; black groceries and black clerks." This recurring pattern signifies the utter impossibility of equality in that era (Susan, 2014).

Biblical Allusion and Class Inequality in Brown's Poem

The numerous literary elements Brown employs — particularly imagery — have layered impacts on the reader. One such element is a religious image created by the poem's title. The metaphor of "bitter fruit" potentially alludes to the concept of primogeniture, wherein property and land are traditionally inherited by the family's first-born male. Yet this inheritance was entirely denied to enslaved people, who were treated as commodities by their masters:

"When they sold her first-born and let the second die" (line 2)

The poem's title also alludes to the Biblical book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve partake of the "forbidden fruit" from the "tree of knowledge." In their disobedience of God's command, they gain knowledge of good and evil, bringing about mankind's fall from Paradise. In Brown's poem, the slaveholders have recreated a kind of paradise — but only at the slaves' expense:

"Some must work and suffer so that we, who must, can live" (line 6)

The repetition of "must" underscores the stark inequality between master and slave, a contrast made even more vivid in the following line:

"And they left her shack for their porticoed house" (line 9)

"Porticoed" houses represent the grand structures characteristic of affluent White families in the plantation states of the American South. Through these images, Brown highlights both the material and symbolic dimensions of racial and class oppression. For broader historical context on American slavery and its legacy, the contrast Brown draws between the slave's shack and the master's mansion remains one of the poem's most enduring visual arguments.

References

Anderson, D. (1998). Sterling Brown's Southern strategy: Poetry as cultural evolution in Southern Road. JSTOR, 1023–1037.

Brown, S. (n.d.). Bitter fruit of the tree.

Susan. (2014, September 14). TOW #2 — "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (Written). [Blog post].

Wintz, C. D. (2015, February). The Harlem Renaissance: What was it, and why does it matter? Humanities and Texas.

Wright, R. (n.d.). The ethics of living Jim Crow.