Displaced Information


DISPLACED INFORMATION



Zecker, Robert.  Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture.  Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008.





On page 117, Zecker writes:

"The rats echo the grim opening of Richard Wright's novel of Chicago ghetto life, Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas battles to keep the vermin from his child's crib."

It is an accident, one hopes, that led Zecker to confuse Bigger Thomas with Joe, "a frustrated ghetto father…played by James Earl Jones" in an episode of East Side/West Side, an early 1960s television series.  The episode was titled "Who Do You Kill?"  The title is generic.  It might have been used for a 1960s essay on black anger.  Joe's child is attacked by rats and dies in a hospital.  Enraged, Joe acquires a weapon and roams the streets of New York, seeking a person upon whom " to exact vengeance" (118). Zecker's point is that "Joe suffers and endures; unlike Bigger Thomas, he does not kill" (118).

We have a remarkable displacement of information.  Bigger kills the rat to protect his mother, his sister, and his brother.  He is not a father.  He has not fathered a child.  Wright implies that Bigger Thomas is the man of the house,  a surrogate for his father who had been killed in Mississippi.  As we learn in the first section of Native Son, Bigger is capable of protecting his family in a limited fashion, but he is not psychologically predisposed to assume the full burden of being a father.  He fears --even resents --one role that being a black male who is coming of age in a racist society might put upon his shoulders.  Wright opened  the  Pandora's box of race in the 1930s USA by indirectly manipulating a reader to recognize the symbolic function of the rat.

Zecker committed a slip of memory in writing about a television episode which focused on the frustration of a black male in the city.  The slip of memory, a not untypical instance of failure to copyedit one's text,  does set us to thinking productively.  It serves as a warning that scholars must fact-check and copyedit to avoid displacing information.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 9, 2019

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