The Fire the First Time : A TV documentary looks at writer Richard Wright, whose 1940 novel ‘Native Son’ was a searing condemnation of racism and class division.

I was in Paris, waiting to be admitted to Polidor, a no-reservations, family- style restaurant on rue Maitre-le- Prince. Polidor’s prices were reason able, the simple food good and the portions generous, so its clientele (neighborhood regulars, penny-pinching students from the nearby Sorbonne and tourists, like me, who wanted to mix with the locals) was large and the line long.

To kill time, I left my companions and wandered across the narrow, crooked street to scan the menu of a tiny restaurant at No. 14. But instead of being mesmerized by the tantalizing aromas of the plat du jour , I was transfixed by a dark marble plaque: Black American Man of Letters, Richard Wright, Lived in This Building From 1948-1959 .

I passed my hand over the words in quiet homage, thinking how Wright must have wandered these same streets as one of America’s most famous expatriate writers. The discovery held a special significance for me; as a black American, I had long had Wright’s work held up as an icon of my race’s literary achievements.

A few years later, I returned to Polidor to wait in line for dinner again. Glancing across the street, I saw a young black couple; they were standing where I had stood, chattering excitedly, running their hands softly over the plaque’s gold lettering. “Richard Wright,” they murmured, “ Richard Wright ! Here !”

I knew they were wondering the same things I had when I first came across the plaque. And like me, they would tell their Paris-bound friends to be sure to take the detour to the less-than-fashionable little neighborhood in the Latin Quarter, so they could touch the building in which Richard Wright had lived and worked. I hear they still come.

And probably, after Monday, thanks to a collaboration between Mississippi Educational TV and Independent Television Service, the path to No. 14 will be trod even more frequently.

“Richard Wright--Black Boy” is a 90-minute examination of the life and times of the man who, in many people’s estimation, brought race out of the American closet. Written, produced and directed by Madison Davis Lacy, who previously worked on “Eyes on the Prize, Part II” and “Paris Is Burning,” the film, through narrative and dramatized flashbacks, takes an unblinking look at how segregated America shaped Wright and how he, in turn, helped to shape a generation of writers and activists.

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Wright’s work came well before multiculturalism was acceptable to mainstream America. It came before the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s and the cultural nationalism of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. When his work burst upon the national consciousness, Americans were still reluctant to examine the dark places of our collective psyche. Our “race problem” was something that was alluded to infrequently, in the hope, perhaps, that it would just go away, or maybe somehow fix itself, if no one spoke about it too loudly.

Wright wasn’t interested in taking that chance. “Native Son,” published in 1940, was a searing condemnation of racism and class division. It conjured up an almost palpable, seething black anger over racial prejudice in the body of one Bigger Thomas, the Willie Horton of his day. The book’s blunt depiction of black resentment toward racism--both overt and less malicious--differed sharply from the prevalent stereotype of blacks as passive and childlike. It earned Wright international attention.

Historian John Henrik Clarke noted that when “Native Son” was published, the effect was as if Wright had come “like a giant out of the mountain, with a sledgehammer,” so profoundly shaken was the reading public at Wright’s bleak tale of anger, fear and desperation among what is now referred to as the black underclass. People wishing to dismiss Wright’s observations as mere fevered fiction could not look away when, five years later, “Black Boy” was published.

Although Wright did not himself take Bigger Thomas’ brutal, self-destructive response to the degradation of a life severely limited by race, the author’s pointed autobiography made it plain that he understood the forces that eventually drove Bigger to his violent acts. He, too, for instance, had been seduced by the Communist Party, only to discover that the party was not as free of racism or condescension as it believed itself to be--a sore point that eventually caused his break with the party in 1942.

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The film begins with several critical analyses of the significance of Wright’s work by colleagues, friends and biographers. (Ralph Ellison makes an appearance in the last interview before his death.) Then, through dramatized flashbacks effectively directed by Horace Ove, viewers are made to sense vividly how constricted most blacks--especially poor ones--felt living in the sharply segregated South.

The 1930s saw huge numbers of mostly rural black Southerners move to large Northern cities, lured by the promise of plentiful factory jobs and freedom from the caprice of dreaded lynch mobs. Wright, too, made the journey “UpSouth” with his family, only to find a different kind of segregation in Chicago’s Black Belt--but one that was equally oppressive.

Eventually, Wright would leave America altogether. After the success of “Native Son,” he bought a home in Greenwich Village, N.Y., only to make the sad discovery that his new community, which prided itself on being liberal and intellectual, also despised him solely because of his race. Worried that the constant insults and harassment would forever scar his young daughter, he booked passage for his family on an ocean liner in 1947 and never lived in his homeland again.

There are parallels, director Lacy believes, between Wright’s angry Bigger and today’s often alienated young black males, whom much of modern America find as disturbing as an older generation found Bigger half a century ago. “I wanted it to reach young kids,” he says. “Some scholars will say, ‘You could have included this, you really didn’t elaborate on that.’ I refused to dumb it down, but you have to simplify if you want to attract younger people.”

In fact, Lacy tested the film with several groups of high school viewers, who, to his amusement, were not shy about giving him advice. “ ‘Use more music,’ they told me. ‘Make us feel like we’re there.’ ”

Lacy listened to his young focus groups, and the musical undercurrents--steel guitar blues for the Delta sequences, jazz in Chicago and New York, Piaf in Paris--certainly retain the interest of a generation that cut its cultural teeth on music videos.

“I not only wanted them to be curious about Richard Wright the man,” Lacy explains. “We tried to give Richard some meaning as a writer, to give him something to say so that the viewer would be interested in going on and reading him, discovering him for themselves.”

Viewers who wish to take that next step will have a plethora of Wright’s works to delve into; the Library of America has just released several--including “Native Son” and “Black Boy”--that have been restored to their original state.

“He was the first black American author to be selected by the Book of the Month Club,” says Wright’s elder daughter, Julia, who served as a consultant to the film. “So the editors made him cut some passages that they worried their readers would find offensive,” such as a more thorough explanation of Bigger’s simultaneous attraction-revulsion for Mary Dalton, his white employer’s dilettante daughter.

A quiet, elegant woman who has inherited her mother’s pallor and her father’s inky brows and reserved smile, Julia has spent the last nine years researching her own book on her father’s life, “Daughter of a Native Son,” (which will be published by Random House late next year). Her sister, Rachel, is a student at the Sorbonne. Their mother, Ellen, is a literary agent who represents the estate of her lifetime client and friend Simone de Beauvoir. All three women live in Paris.

I f there is one conspicuous ab sence in the film for people even passingly familiar with Wright’s life, it is the total omission of his celebrated feud with James Baldwin, whom Wright befriended and mentored in Baldwin’s early days. Much space has been devoted--by biographers of both men--to the years-long estrangement of the two, who outwardly seemed to have so much in common as black American expatriate writers.

Lacy says the decision was painful but necessary. “I would love to have elaborated a little bit more on the relationship between Baldwin and Wright,” he says with a sigh, “but had I stopped to dwell on that story, it would have destroyed the rhythm I’d developed for this film.”

And anyway, Julia Wright asserts, the story is more myth than fact: “I knew Jimmy very well. As a journalist, I interviewed him in the ‘60s, and our friendship picked up from there. I was with him in St.-Paul-de-Vence two weeks before he died, and I went specifically to ask him about that. Because I was always convinced that, just as they divided DuBois from Booker T. Washington, they did that with Baldwin and my father.

“When I look at my father and Baldwin, I do not see anything spectacular in terms of a quarrel or a feud. I see something blown up to resemble it and magnified at cafe tables in the way it happened in Paris in the ‘50s with expatriates. And when I asked Jimmy about it, basically, he agreed with me. He said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ”

The other myth that angers Julia Wright is the often-repeated recitation of how her father died. His well-known insistence on Third World countries’ rights to political self-determination infuriated the French government, which was losing the Algerian war for independence. Panicking at the prospect of seeing its vaunted empire dissolve (which would happen soon enough anyway), the French government saw Wright’s willingness to voice such thoughts as an egregious abuse of its hospitality. Almost overnight, he ceased being the pet of the intellectual Establishment, the poster boy for France’s alleged enlightened racial policy, and turned into a public relations problem.

Largely because of this, when Julia Wright left for college at Cambridge University in 1960, her father was unable to accompany her mother and sister to England to settle her in. The English government, wishing no Wrightsian pronouncements on the treatment of its colonial holdings, had flatly denied his request for a visa.

“So the family was separated by that,” Julia laments. (But others, such as Wright biographer Margaret Walker Alexander, assert that the separation was the denouement to a marriage that had grown increasingly brittle and that the move to London was Ellen’s way of tacitly ending it.) Presciently, Julia delayed entering university and returned to Paris in September, 1960.

“I was the only member of my family in Paris for the three remaining months of my father’s life,” she says. “These accounts make him out to be sort of romantically alone when he died--but he wasn’t.”

The film’s ending is murky and poignant. Lacy notes that Wright’s health continued to fail, the result of crippling amoebic dysentery he had picked up while traveling through Africa or Asia. After checking into a small Paris clinic for a series of tests, Wright died on Nov. 28, 1960, 24 hours before he was to be released. He was 52. The official cause was a heart attack, but the suddenness of his death gave rise to speculation that perhaps he had been assassinated.

“I don’t think he died of natural causes,” Julia Wright says firmly. “I’m tired of the rumors. Sometimes I envy the kids of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, because they know what happened to their fathers. We’ve been surrounded by those rumors for years, and it’s very difficult to live with.”

In the course of researching her own book, she says, she “unearthed some very strange things. Now I not only know something was wrong, but I have some people who think so too”--but who, frustratingly, are reluctant to talk on the record. Julia is philosophical: “They’re nearing the end of their lives, you know? They don’t want to upset things.”

Some people, though, have decided to set the record straight. “Somebody died and left us a message,” she says, shaking her head a little at the cloak-and-dagger aspect of it all. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m not living one of my father’s books, this search has gotten so convoluted.”

H owever he died, Wright was cremated and placed in a small crypt in Pere Lachaise cemetery, where he joins several cultural luminaries, including Victor Hugo, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde--and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. When Lacy sought out the niche in 1993, he could not find Crypt 848 without the grudging assistance of an officious cemetery bureaucrat who kept claiming he was mistaken: “Monsieur Wright n’est pas ici.”

“Oh, he’s here, all right,” Lacy insisted.

After throwing “a minor tantrum,” he finally got some help and to his dismay found Wright’s ashes “in a silent, secluded niche, near the rear, under the stairs.” That placement speaks as much of Wright’s outsider status as it does of straitened family circumstances. French pride in Wright had cooled considerably by then, so the government could not be expected to honor him with a substantial marker. And for some reason, no group--writers, African Americans, post-colonial independent nations--has banded together to erect a more imposing monument.

“It’s not for the family to ask,” Julia demurs when asked to speculate why. “It’s for people to offer.”

Some people have. There is a monument on the Bluff, in Natchez, Miss., near his 1908 birthplace. And, of course, the plaque on No. 14, rue Maitre-le-Prince, which still attracts reverent visitors. And, since Lacy’s tantrum, Wright’s grave is now on Pere LaChaise’s version of the Map of the Stars.

Perhaps after “Richard Wright--Black Boy” airs, there will be a movement to create on the grounds of Pere LaChaise an appropriate tribute to the man who used words “like a giant with a sledgehammer” in his personal war against racism.*

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“Richard Wright--Black Boy” airs Monday at 10 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.