At one point Wright earned a living selling burial insurance in the Chicago ghetto, where, as he wrote in ''American Hunger,'' ''there were many comely black housewives who . . . were willing to make bargains to escape paying a ten-cent premium each week.'' Wright made such a ''bargain.'' While he did not bash in the woman's face with a brick, he did once threaten to kill her, laughed at her when she admired his ability with words and viewed her as a sex object. ''Sex relations were the only relations she had ever had,'' he wrote. ''No others were possible with her, so limited was her intelligence.'' Once, ''I stared at her and wondered just what a life like hers meant in the scheme of things, and I came to the conclusion that it meant absolutely nothing.''*** Black folks have a word for a man who could even think something like that about a woman whose bed he's shared: cold. And that was the image of Wright that came to me as I read ''American Hunger'' and went back to read ''Black Boy.'' In both books I could see Wright, the frigid intellectual, portraying black people as psychological ''types'' - and then damning them for their lack of humanity. In ''Black Boy,'' he wrote of his father, ''how fastened were his memories to a crude and raw past, how chained were his actions and emotions to the direct, animalistic impulses of his withering body.'' Of black people in general, he wrote, ''I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. . . . I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure.''*** In those passages I heard echoes of ''Native Son.'' What made me furious was not that the novel was autobiographical - an artist has a right to draw his material from wherever he chooses - but that Wright had to know these statements were untrue. But he also knew how much they conformed to the view of blacks that prevailed in the very society he accused of oppression, for, in ''American Hunger'' he wrote that ''My reading in sociology had enabled me to discern many strange types of Negro characters.'' Put kindly, it seemed to me that Wright was pandering to white expectations. Put bluntly, I thought he had sold his people down the river to make a buck.

But as I searched through ''American Hunger'' for the quotes to support that view, I saw something which, in my outrage, I had overlooked: that, after saying the life of his lover ''meant absolutely nothing'' Wright had gone on, ''And neither did my life mean anything.'' The awful thought occurred to me: What if Richard Wright was not pandering to white expectations? What if he believed he was writing the truth? What then would be the meaning of ''Native Son''?

My second full reading of ''Native Son'' filled me with a terrible sorrow. Not for Bigger Thomas - I still did not give a damn about him - but for Richard Wright himself. For when I read the passage in which Mary Dalton tells Bigger how she had long wanted to enter a ghetto house ''and just see how your people live,'' I heard the echo of Dorothy Canfield's introduction. And in the passage in which Jan tells Bigger that it was really O.K. that Bigger had killed the woman he, Jan, loved, because ''You believed enough to kill. You thought you were settling something, or you wouldn't've killed,'' I heard Irving Howe's blithe waiver of the esthetic standards that he, as a critic, had to hold dear. And when Big (Continued on Page 78) ger, at the end of his life, reiterates that piece of dialectic insanity, I saw Richard Wright letting somebody tell him where his life logically ended.

And I realized that previously I had done ''Native Son'' the injustice of trying to fit it into my America, a place where, while a black person's right to human dignity is not exactly a given, such a thesis can at least be argued. Richard Wright's America was a very different place, a place where a black who hoped to survive needed a sense of humility more than a sense of dignity, and where Bigger Thomas's story was no more melodramatic, crude or claustrophobic than the times themselves.

In Richard Wright's America, a novelist could - as Wright did - base descriptions of lynch mobs in the streets of Chicago on reports taken directly from newspapers. In Richard Wright's America, a best-selling, financially independent novelist - if he was a Negro - could not lunch with his agent in a midtown Manhattan restaurant, could not buy a house in Greenwich Village and could only rent an apartment there if he found a landlord willing to defy half the neighborhood. In Richard Wright's America, a critically acclaimed, Guggenheim Fellowship-winning Negro novelist would hesitate to use the surnames of his agent and his editor in the dedication of a book because he was not sure they would want to be so closely associated with a black. In Richard Wright's America, they didn't have black literature courses; a black boy who wanted to be a writer could remain tragically unaware of the writing of black people, and could say, while explaining the origins of his characters, that ''association with white writers was the life preserver of my hope to depict Negro life in fiction, for my race possessed no fictional works . . . no novels that went with a deep and fearless will down to the dark roots of life.''

And so I came to realize that ''Native Son'' was not as inaccurate as I had thought; and that, in a sense, Dorothy Canfield was not entirely wrong. Not that there was great validity in Wright's use of Bigger Thomas as a type. Nor is there any validity in reading any piece of fiction as ''a report'' of general social conditions. But fiction is a report of specific conditions: that is its value. ''Native Son,'' I realized, shows the vision one black man held of his people, his country, and, ultimately, himself. And I thought, Dear God, how horrible for a man to have to write this. And, Please, God, let no one ever have to write this again.

I T IS THE AUTUMN of 1986. I have just finished reading ''Native Son'' for the fourth time. I have been invited to write an introduction to a new edition. Put simply - and frighteningly, to me - I have been asked to step into the role of Dorothy Canfield, and dared to do a better job.