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Allusions
Book 2
Explanation and Analysis—Can't Git No Justice:
While fleeing the police late in Book 2, Bigger breaks into a vacant apartment that is ostensibly for sale. Below him, he hears two men, Jack and Jim, who speak with strong accents characteristic of African American Vernacular English, particularly that from the south:
"Tha's 'cause so many of us ack like Bigger Thomas, tha's all. When yuh ack like Bigger Thomas, yuh stir up trouble."
"But, Jack, who's stirring up trouble now? The papers say they beatin' us up all over the city. They don't care whut black man they git. We's all dogs in they sight! Yuh gotta stan' up 'n' fight these folks."
"'N' git killed? Hell, naw! Ah gotta family. Ah gotta wife 'n' baby. Ah ain't startin' no fool fight. Yuh can't git no justice pertectin' men who kill..."
None of the other Black characters in the novel have speech so drastically inflected as this. Some of Bigger's friends—Gus, in particular—speak with a similar accent, but none this strong. Bigger, and all the other Black characters, use similar grammatical rules as these men, particularly in verb conjugation ("they beatin' us up"). But Jack and Jim's very particular pronunciation is unique in the book.
Jack and Jim discuss how they hate Bigger because he "made the white folks think we's all jus' like him!" Jack and Jim's heavily inflected dialect serves to show that Bigger feels different, at this point in the story, from Black and white people, and that both groups are antagonistic to him. Especially at this point in the story, after Mary's murder, which opens Bigger's eyes to the racist structures all around him, Bigger is especially attuned to the differences between how Black men talk and act, as compared to white men.
In Book 3, Reverend Hammond speaks very similarly to Jack and Jim. Hammond is from Mississippi, so perhaps Wright intended Jack and Jim to be from Mississippi, too. But Bigger grew up in Mississippi until age 15, when he moved to Chicago, where he lived for five years before the events of the book; apparently in those five years Bigger lost his accent. These men with southern accents in Chicago serve as reminders of the Great Migration. This was a period in American history when millions of Black people from southern states moved to major cities in the northeast. This migration, as Wright shows in this passage, caused much disagreement and discord in Black communities.
Related Themes:
