Word: lawd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LAWD TODAY (189 pp.)-Richard Wright-Walker...
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...
Wright today should be judged, Baldwin says, by "how accurately or deeply the life of Chicago's South Side had been conveyed." It is 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...