‘The Man Who Saw The Flood’ by Richard Wright

The Man Who Saw The Flood by Richard Wright, 1937

The magic trick:

Using an individual example to stand in for a national history of tragedy

My recent run of catching up with the Oscar nominations has me thinking about movies. Notably, two of the best movies from the last two years – The Zone Of Interest and Oppenheimer – describe two of the greatest tragedies of the 20^th century by only suggesting them. We never see the Holocaust or the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, respectively, in those films.

In “The Man Who Saw The Flood,” we get the opposite. The tragedy here – a black family’s cabin destroyed by a flood, leaving them even more helpless than before, in debt to their white landowners – is front and center for the reader. Nothing is indirect. We walk the grounds with the protagonist, surveying the wreckage of his home.

As I write this, though, I think I’m wrong in saying that nothing is implied. That’s not right. The story leaves us to imagine the true aftermath of this flood and the crushing effects on this family. It’s also the story of one family, but we clearly see it as representative of the racist systems that have plagued all of American history. All of those stories are off-camera.

So I was going to praise this story for showing us the tragedy directly, as opposed to the kind of indirect storytelling employed by the aforementioned movies. But what you’re witnessing here as you read this is me realizing that’s wrong. “The Man Who Saw The Flood” does show us tragedy. But it’s withholding the full scope of its tragedy in a similar way to those films. While those films do so (I think) to focus our attention on the strange side effects of tragedy on its perpetrators, “Flood” is showing the tragedy of a person to represent the tragedy of an entire race.

And that’s quite a trick on Wright’s part.

The selection:

The damp smell of flood-silt came fresh and sharp to their nostrils. Only one-half of the upper window was clear, and through it fell a rectangle of dingy light. The floors swam in ooze. Like a mute warning, a wavering flood-mark went high around the walls of the room. A dresser sat cater-cornered, its drawers and sides bulging like a bloated corpse. The bed, with mattress still on it, was like a casket of forged mud. Two smashed chairs lay in a corner, as though huddled together for protection.

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