So Bigger is asked to take her trunk to the station. Later in the day, the Daltons assume that Mary has already left for Detroit, as she had planned. He tries to cover up his unwitting murder by beheading Mary and then throwing her corpse into the family furnace. He applies so much pressure that Mary suffocates. Fearing that Mrs Dalton could suspect him of trying to rape her daughter, he gags Mary with a pillow. As he is settling Mary down in her bed, Mrs Dalton who is blind gropes her way into the room. When Jan gets off to see a friend, it is left for Bigger to help the drunken Mary up into her room. They all eat and drink in the Black Belt until about 2 o'clock in the morning of the next day, when they leave for home. On the way, the wild and high spirited Mary changes her mind and asks Bigger to drive her elsewhere to meet her boyfriend, Jan Erlone of the Communist Party. On his first day at work, he is asked to drive Mary Dalton, the only child of the Daltons, to the university. He is reluctant to take up the offer, but due to incessant nagging by his mother he accepts the job all the same. And when he is released from the reform school, he is sent to Mr Dalton, a white millionaire philanthropist, to work as a chauffeur. As a teenager, his petty stealing lands him in trouble with the law. Unlike his religious mother and two siblings, Bigger takes to a life of crime. The firstborn in a single-parent family of three children, Bigger lives in a rat-infested one-room apartment with his family in the slums of Chicago - the Black Belt. All the three parts are interconnected by the story of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the novel. Richard Wright's masterpiece Native Son is divided into three parts - Fear, Flight and Fate. Reissued in 2000 by Vintage Paperback 454 pages Publisher and Date of publication: First published in 1940 by Victor Gollancz.

Native son pages