"He looked round the street and saw a sign on a building: THIS PROPERTY IS MANAGED BY THE SOUTH SIDE REAL ESTATE COMPANY. He had heard that Mr. Dalton owned the South Side Real Estate Company, and the South Side Real Estate Company owned the house in which he lived. He paid eight dollars a week for one rat-infested room. He had never seen Mr. Dalton until he had come to work for him; his mother always took the rent to the real estate office. Mr. Dalton was somewhere far away, high up, distant, like a god. He owned property all over the Black Belt, and he owned property where white folks lived, too. But Bigger could not live in a building across the "line." Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this. Yes; he would send the kidnap note. He would jar them out of their senses."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesExistentialistsAutobiographers from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Flight, p. 148
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Wright
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Richard Wright
Richard Nathaniel Wright (4 September 1908 – 28 November 1960) was an American novelist and writer of short stories and non-fiction.
130 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Richard Wright →
Related Quotes
"But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of hi…"
"But, because the blacks were so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out, because they could not …"
"I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more …"
"It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where…"
"But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives…"
"And in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "cult…"
"I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore…"
"And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive emotion, coalescing and tel…"
"I don't know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don't know if the book I'm working on now will be a go…"
"The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-gen…"