“Native Son” is set in Chicago in the 1930s. The novel was published originally in 1940. A restored text was published by the Library of America in a hardback edition; the paperback edition was published by HarperPerennial.
The main character, Bigger Thomas, is a teenage black boy who lives with his mother, brother and sister in a one-room slum flat on Chicago’s South Side.
Bigger Thomas takes a job with the well-meaning Dalton family, wealthy white liberals who live on Drexel Boulevard in the then-affluent Kenwood section.
In his first night as chauffeur, he meets the Daltons’ daughter, Mary, and her boyfriend, Jan, a Communist Party worker, who go slumming with the black driver to drink and eat at his haunts.
When he drives Mary home, she is drunk and he helps her to her room. But when her blind mother calls out to her, Bigger panics in Mary’s room and suffocates her in her bed. Then he gets rid of her body by beheading her and stuffing her body in the furnace.
When the murder is discovered, he is hunted throughout the South Side by the police and white vigilantes. He flees with his girlfriend, Bessie, but when he realizes that Bessie will crack under the strain, he kills her and stuffs her body into a crawl space.
It is winter and there has been a blizzard and Bigger is trapped in the web of the city. In the abandoned apartment building where he has killed Bessie, he reads the newspaper he stole from a vendor and studies the white portion of the map in the paper that shows the area of the manhunt:
Bigger looked up. The building was quiet save for the continual creaking caused by the wind. He could not stay here. There was no telling when they were coming into this neighborhood. He could not leave Chicago, all roads were blocked, and all trains, buses and autos were being stopped and searched. . . . He was trapped. He would have to get out of this building. But where could he go? Empty buildings would serve only as long as he stayed within the white portion of the map and the white portion was shrinking rapidly.
He remembered that the paper had been printed last night. That meant the white portion was now much smaller than was shown here. He closed his eyes, calculating: He was at Fifty-third Street and the hunt had started last night at Eighteenth Street. If they had gone from Eighteenth Street to 28th Street last night, then they would have gone from 28th Street to 38th Street since then. And by midnight tonight they would be at 48th Street, or right here. . . .
He went to the end of the hall and flashed the light on a dirty ceiling and saw a wooden stairway leading to the roof. He climbed and pulled himself up into a narrow passage at the end of which was a door. He kicked at the door several times, each kick making it give slightly until he saw snow, sunshine, and an oblong strip of sky.
The wind came stinging into his face and he remembered how weak and cold he was. How long could he keep going this way? He squeezed through and stood in the snow on the roof. Before him was a maze of white, sun-drenched roof-tops.
He crouched behind a chimney and looked down into the street. At the corner he saw the newsstand from which he had stolen the paper; the man who had shouted at him was standing by it. Two black men stopped at the newsstand and bought a paper, then walked into a doorway. One of them leaned eagerly over the other’s shoulder. Their lips moved and they pointed their black fingers at the paper and shook their heads as they talked. Two more men joined them and soon there was a small knot of them standing in the doorway, talking and pointing at the paper. They broke up abruptly and went away. Yes; they were talking about him. Maybe all of the black men and women were talking about him this morning; they were hating him for having brought this attack upon them.
He had crouched so long in the snow that when he tried to move he found that his legs had lost all feeling. A fear that he was freezing seized him. He kicked out his legs to restore circulation to his blood, then crawled to the other side of the roof. Directly below him, one floor away, through a window without shades, he saw a room in which were two small iron beds with sheets dirty and crumpled. In one bed sat three naked black children looking across the room to the other bed on which lay a man and woman, both naked and black in the sunlight. There were quick, jerky movements on the bed where the man and woman lay, and the three children were watching.
It was familiar; he had seen things like that when he was a little boy sleeping five in a room. Many mornings he had awakened and watched his father and mother. He turned away, thinking: Five of ’em sleeping in one room and here’s a great big empty building with just me in it. He crawled back to the chimney, seeing before his eyes an image of the room of five people, all of them blackly naked in the strong sunlight, seen through a sweaty pane: the man and woman moving jerkily in tight embrace, and the three children watching.
Hunger came to his stomach; an icy hand reached down his throat and clutched his intestines and tied them into a cold, tight knot that ached. The memory of the bottle of milk Bessie had heated for him last night came back so strongly that he could almost taste it.
If he had that bottle of milk now he would make a fire out of a newspaper and hold the bottle over the flame until it was warm. He saw himself take the top off the white bottle, with some of the warm milk spilling over his black fingers, and then lift the bottle to his mouth and tilt his head and drink. His stomach did a slow flip-flop and he heard it growl. He felt in his hunger a deep sense of duty, as powerful as the urge to breathe, as intimate as the beat of his heart. He felt like dropping to his knees and lifting his face to the sky and saying: “I’m hungry!”
He wanted to pull off his clothes and roll in the snow until something nourishing seeped into his body through the pores of his skin. He wanted to grip something in his hands so hard that it would turn to food. But soon his hunger left; soon he was taking it a little easier; soon his mind rose from the desperate call of his body and concerned itself with the danger that lurked about him. He felt something hard at the corners of his lips and touched it with his fingers; it was frozen saliva.
He crawled back through the door into the narrow passage and lowered himself down the shallow wooden steps into the hallway. He went to the first floor and stood at the window through which he had first climbed. He had to find an empty apartment in some building where he could get warm; he felt that if he did not get warm soon he would simply lie down and close his eyes. Then he had an idea; he wondered why he had not thought of it before.
He struck a match and lit the newspaper; as it blazed he held one hand over it awhile, and then the other. The heat came to his skin from far off. When the paper had burned so close that he could no longer hold it, he dropped it to the floor and stamped it out with his shoes. At least he could feel his hands now; at least they ached and let him know that they were his.
