ABSTRACT
The Jim Crow regime of his childhood harbored terrifying levels of paranoia about the black male gaze per se, and it was prone to conflate interracial eye contact with that crime of "reckless eyeballing", which could, in turn, become a pretext for what Angela Y. Davis called "the racist cry of rape". Effectively, in the first and far more aestheticized of Native Son's murders, Richard Wright harnessed his memories of the intimidations of "reckless eyeballing" to a violent fantasy of intimate voyeurism, and in order to produce this new kind of fantasy, he drew upon sources that Native Son's leading critics have not fully recognized. Images of softness envelop Native Son's first murder. An impulse to present Mary's killing as a smooth and bloodless act thus led Native Son for a spell away from the texts that Wright acknowledged as his principal sources.
