Word: jakes
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Wright's Lawd Today was never published during his life, and it predates Native Son, which established his reputation. It tells of a dreadful day in the dreadful life of Jake Jackson, a faceless phantom of insulted life from Chicago's black ghetto. Greedy, but with never enough ham hocks and collard greens, lecherous, but always frustrated, aggressive, but always a victim (even to his beaten, tumor-plagued wife, who cuts him up bad at the end of a long, long day), Jake is no left-wing stereotype of a good man. He and society match each other...
...hard to judge. Even if half-true, Lawd Today is an appalling document. As an artist, Wright was as crude and humorlessly "sincere" as his Depression-period white twin, James Farrell. The U.S. Negro of Baldwin's generation would not be as credulous as was Wright's Jake Jackson, who was dazzled by a preposterous parade of a mythical black army headed by "The Supreme Undisputed Exalted Commander of the Allied Imperial African War Councils unto the Fourth and Last Generations." Yet Baldwin himself has admitted to having been tempted by the less bizarre but more sinister desperado...
...Cage. Wright saw society as an iron cage for his Jake Jackson. There was no key; the cage must be smashed. Nothing less than revolutionary Communism would do. But the Communists betrayed Wright as badly as Baldwin feels let down by the white liberals. The time came when he saw that colored comrades would denounce a fellow Negro in the presence of white comrades. Wright abandoned the fight and fled to Paris with his white wife...
Baldwin met Wright there. Of course, the meeting was awkward; Baldwin, indeed, was standing on Wright's shoulders. No more books can be written in which the fate of the U.S. Negro is as nasty, brutish, short and hard as it was only yesterday for Jake Jackson. But Lawd Today is a thing to remember...
Perhaps not. But Daley has certainly not been the sort of mayor that Bauler, or anyone else, expected. Says Jake Arvey today: "I've served under five mayors, and I think I know my men. When Daley first became county chairman and then mayor. I did not think it would work out. I felt his work as mayor would be colored by his political obligations, and on that ground I opposed him. I think now I was wrong." The Republican Chicago Tribune (which has backed Democrats on infrequent occasions) agrees. When Daley was running for his second term...