The Street

The book "Native Son" by Richard Wright has a lot of parallels with the book the street. Bigger, the main character of "Native Son, was black and at the bottom of the world, and this ideology of class and race seemed to start slowly escaping him. The murders he committed in the book allowed him to slip away from the constricting embrace that his surroundings thrust upon him for being black. The murder made Bigger feel free and capable to do as he wished without any societal barriers. The murder was his, and his alone. Color could not be the number one role pin pointing the murder, he was not just black or white, but a murderer who had been released from the imperceptible force that had been grounding him all his life. He proclaimed that his execution of Mary, a rich white girl, was more than just an act justified by the fear and shame she had made him feel, the fear and shame had just been there. Mary had set off his emotions, just as many like her had done before, but this time he acted upon it. Once he killed her he felt "a lessening of tension in his muscles; he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried" (Wright). 


In "The Street" Lutie sees the whites as having it all. To her money is everything, and you can do anything with money, even cover up suicide. She is obsessed with upward mobilty and strives to accomplish the American Dream. A white man tries to make her his whore essentially, and a black man makes advances to rape her. When the African American man comes at her she beats him to death. Lutie realizes that the American Dream is no longer attainable, as she is a black women who has killed someone. She is stuck as Bigger was, and she decides to give up, leave her son, and get a one-way train ticket and leave the street. Ultimately, her race, gender, and the general manner of capitalism hinder her ability to achieve her goal, just as it did for Bigger, because he was a black man who raped a white girl, and neither he nor Lutie wouldn't have had chance making it out on the street.


-Tanis