Big Black Good Man

On its face, this short story is about one man’s engagement with blackness and all the negative associations with blackness in Western culture. The story can be read as an allegory about race and racism and how much of a challenge racism is to Western notions about the rationality of man.

Olaf stands in for whiteness as it is imagined in Western culture. On the surface, Olaf has a tolerant, laissez-faire attitude toward people of other races. He believes he has no problem serving and working alongside people of color at the start of the story. Olaf’s encounter with Jim reveals the limitations of this apparent tolerance and highlights the irrationality at the root of Western attitudes about race and thus of Western racial attitudes. The terms Olaf uses to describe Jim are drawn straight from the white supremacist lexicon. When Olaf first sees Jim, he uses “huge black thing” (Paragraph 4), “it” (Paragraph 6), having a “buffalo like head” (Paragraph 6), and other descriptors that erase all recognizable human traits in favor of objectifying terms related to Jim’s blackness and size. Olaf's own reactions—racing thoughts, anger, intense emotions, violent fantasies, and wetting himself—show that Olaf's feelings about blackness are anything but governed by his reason.

The inner and outer conflict for Olaf is that his potency as a man and a white person are threatened by Jim. Within a moment of meeting Jim, Olaf feels:

[t]here was something about the man’s intense blackness and ungainly bigness that frightened and insulted Olaf; he felt as though this man had come here expressly to remind him how puny, how tiny, how weak and how white he was (Paragraph 13).

Furthermore, Olaf thinks several times as he serves Jim that Jim’s presence would be less offensive “if only the man were small, brown and intelligent-looking” (Paragraph 34). He assumes that Jim is “probably too violent to boot” on top of his size and color. In other words, Olaf would be much more comfortable with a black man who more closely approximates whiteness with lighter skin, who does not challenge his sense of himself as mastering his own will, and who, even more importantly, does not challenge Olaf’s sense of himself as a fair and tolerant man. In every sense, the encounter with Jim uncovers Olaf’s white fragility, his desire not to have to own his racism because doing so will damage his sense of himself.

It would be easy to dismiss Olaf’s psychological struggle to accept Jim as harmless in the end, but Olaf’s attempts to grab his gun show that the struggle has real-world consequences if this irrational, knee-jerk reaction to blackness is not checked. Jim, like most black people, is going about his business, unconcerned about what Olaf thinks of him and merely grateful that Olaf will render him service at all. His extraordinary gesture of kindness a year after the first encounter with the gift of the shirts humanizes Jim for Olaf, but Jim does not realize he needed humanizing until the point when Olaf confesses his race-fueled fears.

While Jim’s look at Olaf at the end of the story shows one response to such a recognition—compassion—the “drop dead, Daddy-o” Jim utters in the last line of the story shows that the more likely outcome is bemusement, bitterness, or indifference. In the end, the lesson is one Olaf has to learn, not Jim, and there will not necessarily be a moment in which there is great reconciliation and joy when the white person recognizes the humanity of the black person. Given that Wright wrote the story from Europe during the movement for civil rights in the United States, one could argue that he saw the lofty, idealistic aspirations of the movement with some skepticism because racism and irrationality are such deeply ingrained parts of the Western psyche.