Racism and Power Theme Analysis

White characters don’t appear often or for extended periods in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” but it’s impossible to understand the anxiety Dave Saunders experiences throughout the story without considering racism. The story is set in the American South around the 1930s, nearly forty years after the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. Yet by explicitly setting the story on a “plantation” in the South, and showing how authority and power in the story always ultimately flows down from the white man who owns the plantation, Richard Wright dramatizes the ways that, even after emancipation of the slaves, systems of racist power continue to ensure that the Black workers on the farm remain under the power and control of white people.

The white Mr. Hawkins, who owns the plantation where Dave and his family work, is established as the premier authority over the plantation early in the story. The first paragraph of the story makes clear that Dave depends on “ol man Hawkins” for his pay, and it soon becomes clear that his father does as well. The entire income of Dave’s family, then, is dependent on Mr. Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins’s plantation is also designed to function by creating divide the loyalties of his back workers—much as slave-owning plantations were in pre-Civil War days—such as by using Black foremen to oversee other workers. These practices offered those given the additional power to protect the white master of the plantation, since their power and improved place flow directly from that master. Dave’s father, Bob Saunders, occupies one of these marginally more powerful positions, and to protect his position, he’s willing to exert Mr. Hawkins’ will on other workers, even his own son—in every conversation with Dave, Bob Saunders focus is on how Dave should listen to and work well for Hawkins. “Hawkins” name itself is symbolic—it is a reference to a hawk, a bird of prey that enjoys a perch at the top of the food chain, just as Hawkins commands the power at the plantation.

While Hawkins control over the plantation and some of his practices for running it are reminiscent of the pre-Civil War South, the climax of the story dramatizes one of the clearest ways that racist power functions differently in the 1930s south while still exerting control over the Black characters. After it’s uncovered that Dave accidentally shot and killed Mr. Hawkins’s mule, Jenny, Mr. Hawkins declares that no one is going to hurt Dave, and that instead Dave will just have to pay him back the cost of the mule—$50—at the rate of $2 per month. In slave-holding times, a plantation owner might well have whipped or otherwise harmed or killed a slave who had caused such “property damage.” Hawkins, though, does no such thing, and at first Dave thinks that the debt he now owes amounts to getting out of “killing the mule so easily.” It’s only later that Dave realizes how much power Mr. Hawkins has gotten over him by imposing the debt—that it’ll take him almost two years to pay for one dead mule. The underlying implication is that while the Black workers on the plantation are not legally slaves, they are nonetheless subject to what might be described as “wage slavery”—they are entirely dependent on Mr. Hawkins for whatever money they can earn, that money is never enough for them to be independent, and they can never cross Mr. Hawkins because of their dependence on him. 

The fact that Mr. Hawkins lives in a “big white house” is also significant. In addition to the racial connotations, the color of his house invokes the White House, where United States presidents live. Through this image of the house, Wright is simultaneously demonstrating how power on plantations has evolved (instead of cracking a whip, Mr. Hawkins uses social skills and economic power to exert control, like an experienced politician) while simultaneously condemning the role the United States government played in ignoring or even promoting these imbalances of power.

While in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” Wright often depicts Dave’s efforts to become a man as comedic, the story underlines a deeper tragedy: that Black Americans more generally weren’t recognized as “men”—as full human beings—even after emancipation. In “The Man Who Was Almost A Man,” this process of dehumanization begins at Mr. Hawkins. The story shows how a white man in the United States can exert frightening and unjust power subtly, without using violence, without even being all that present. Rather than sensationalizing or focusing on only the most extreme examples of racism, in this story Wright depicts a form racist power that, precisely because it avoided violence, could maintain an appearance of legitimacy while being just as pervasive, and giving white men just as much control over Black lives.