Macon is Bigger?

In the opening of the novel, Macon refers to himself as wanting to be the “white Bigger Thomas”. To readers of Native Son, this is a pretty jarring comparison.

For people that haven’t read the novel, here is a very short summary (if you have, feel free to skip this paragraph): Bigger Thomas, the main character of Native Son, is a black man living in Chicago in the 30s. By a series of events out of his control, he finds himself in the room of a rich white girl while she is passed out drunk. He is trying to put her to bed when her blind mother comes into the room. Bigger knows that if either he or the girl makes a single noise, the mother will figure out who is in the room, and from her upper-class-white-afraid-of-black-men perspective, it would look incredibly bad, and the result would probably be lynching or some other vigilante execution. So, to save his own life, he covers the girls face with a pillow to prevent her from talking, and accidentally suffocates her. Then, to hide the body, he ends up burning the girl in the household furnace. The novel continues with Bigger being eventually caught, imprisoned, and executed for his crimes, but the core message of the book is that Biggers environment made Bigger and after a certain point, he had no control over the outcome of his life.

So, obviously, for privileged, white, nothing-to-fear Macon, this seems like maybe the least applicable novel in the world. His whole point is that he is a white man, and so all of the racist assumptions made about black men don’t happen to him. If Macon talks to or even looks at a white woman, he doesn’t have to fear racial violence. He doesn’t have to refer to white people as “sir” or risk being killed. He doesn’t have to conform to the multitude of codes, written and unwritten, laid out for black men in the 30s, where the punishment for nonconformity was being brutally killed. Comparing himself to Bigger is just, incorrect in so many ways, and when I read that passage, it made me pretty angry, because he really clearly does not get it.

But (this is a big big hot take, watch out), now that I’ve read to the end of the book, maybe there is something to the comparison. Or at least, in my notebook, after Friday’s discussion, I have written “Macon = Bigger Thomas?”. What reminds me of Bigger is the sense of spiraling, out-of-control destined demise that both Macon and Bigger are subject to. In both stories, it feels like there is a point of no return where each character respectively gets into enough trouble that there is never digging themselves out from that point. For Bigger, his point of no return is taking Mary to the Loop to meet Jan (and consequently get drunk, pass out, need to be carried in, and so on). For Macon, that point is announcing (with no pre-planning or even thought), the Day of Apology (which leads to tensions with his friends, the race riot, his escape to Alabama, his run-in with Donner, and so on). From this point, the book read as if Macon basically had no autonomy, and was just begin carried through what is happening by some sort of fate or destiny, similarly to Bigger.

So obviously, he is nothing like Bigger Thomas, and comparing himself to Bigger is a boiling hot take in itself. But I struggle to see what else he could mean by calling himself the “white Bigger Thomas”, and I think it has something to do with his story arc as a protagonist.