Word: lawd
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...better know that the white man's day is almost over! The days of Uncle Tom and Mr. Charlie, white po-lice, the days of lynchin' an' moanin' an' runnin' an' hidin', they near an' end. An' the end is so close, so close, Mr. Law, that Lawd, yes Lawd, I can see it. I can see the future. I can see the future rushin' at the present, an' lemme sing--lemme sing about the future: I'm singin' 'bout a white dog. I'm singin' 'bout a black dog. I'm singin' 'bout a blue dog. I'm singin...
...Lawd Today, by Richard Wright. Writ ten before Native Son, but now published for the first time (three years after Wright's death), this novel of a brutalized Chicago Negro in the 1930s is a grim reminder of a time, not long ago, when the pain caused by race prejudice was mainly economic...
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...
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...