Native Son

Though the air of the room was cold, beads of sweat broke onto his forehead and his breath stopped.

Slavery and neo-slavery had led not simply to the development of a psychology of timidity, passivity, and even cowardice among the African American masses, Wright suggests in Native Son, but also to an ominous emerging element of which Bigger Thomas, the central character of the novel, is a reliable if particularly forbidding example.