“We’ll Understand It Better By and By”

We’ll Understand It Better By and By is a spiritual song that becomes a point of contact between Mary Dalton and Bigger Thomas. In their exchange, its promise of eventual understanding carries both comfort and unease: Mary treats Bigger as someone she can address across a social divide, while he cannot separate that moment of recognition from her position in the white, wealthy world that restricts his choices.

The Song as Reassurance

Mary tells Bigger to take things easily and invokes the song’s assurance that understanding will come in time. Before leaving, she turns back to ask whether he knows a song like it, one sung by his people. Bigger confirms that he does. The exchange gives the title a specific dramatic setting: it is not simply a reference to religious music, but a reassurance Mary offers while she is about to enter an old, unlit building.

Recognition and Unease

Bigger experiences Mary’s response to him as unusual. She seems to address him as a human being living in the same world as she does, a form of recognition he has not previously felt from a white person. Yet the feeling of freedom this creates remains guarded. Mary is also white and rich, and belongs to the social world of people who determine what Bigger may and may not do. The song’s promise therefore does not erase the unequal conditions between them; its consoling language sits beside Bigger’s awareness of those conditions.

His uncertainty extends to the place Mary enters and the people she may be meeting. He wonders whether she is seeing her sweetheart or meeting Communists, and his ideas about Communists come from newspaper cartoons and associations with dark rooms, whispers, and strikes. When a young white man emerges with Mary, Bigger recognizes him from a newsreel. The song exchange thus occurs amid his effort to interpret a world he has been taught to fear and does not fully understand.

Contrast with Later Events

The song’s language of eventual understanding gains a stark contrast from Bigger’s later treatment of Bessie Mears. During their encounter, Bessie expresses that she does not want what Bigger is doing, but he disregards her refusal. Later, at the inquest into Mary’s death, Bessie’s body is brought forward as evidence against him. Bigger recognizes that her killing is being used to intensify the case for his punishment over Mary’s death, while Bessie herself has not received comparable public concern as a Black victim.

That later sequence does not show the song recurring or resolving the conflict between Mary and Bigger. Instead, it sharpens the limits of reassurance: recognition between individuals cannot by itself undo the racial order that governs whose choices matter, whose death commands attention, and how the dead are made to serve public arguments. The novel’s later reception also reflects this tension. Feminist criticism in the 1980s drew attention to the hostility toward women, especially Black women, in much of Wright’s fictional world, a perspective that makes Bessie’s treatment and the handling of her death especially consequential to the song’s surrounding context.