Black Boy

Wright moves several times as his mother strives to survive financially, and he eventually ends up with family members in Mississippi and then in West Helena, Arkansas. While living with his grandmother in Jackson, Wright discovers the pleasure of reading by way of Ella, a boarder and teacher who shares Bluebeard and His Seven Wives with Wright.

Listening to the story sets Wright’s senses and imagination alight. He becomes obsessed with the power of language to shape his reality; Wright’s grandmother, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, sees fiction as ungodly, and she throws Ella out. Wright is already a defiant boy, and his grandmother’s rejection of literature convinces Wright that he wants more of the “total emotional response” (40) that the lurid tale of Bluebeard elicits from him. Wright hungers for more novels and uses his mother to learn the meaning of every strange word he encounters.

Wright’s sense of the power and danger of words grows when he curses his grandmother out one day as she bathes him. He doesn’t fully understand the obscene language he uses, but the reaction of the adults around him and the ferocious beating he receives as a result convince him that language has power—and he must learn more about it.

As Wright matures, he also becomes aware for the first time of the strange attitude of his mother, grandmother, and other Black people about race. His Grandmother Wilson appears white, so Wright is initially confused about how her nearly undetectable Black heritage causes the family such concern, especially when she takes her darker-skinned grandsons to town with her. Wright’s mother cannot or will not explain the import of Wright’s own racial identity.

Wright and his family move to Elaine, Arkansas, to stay with Aunt Maggie, Mrs. Wright’s sister, and Wright gets a crash course in the true significance of white supremacy in the South. Uncle Hoskins, Maggie’s husband, is the proprietor of a prosperous saloon. White people in Elaine kill him one night because they dislike his prosperity, and the entire household is forced to flee to Mrs. Wilson’s house to escape lynching. While there, Wright becomes even more sensitized to matters of race and the wider world after seeing Black troops train to fight in World War I. He also sees a chain gang in which almost all the prisoners are Black, and every guard is white.

Chafing under Margaret Wilson’s strict religious convictions, Mrs. Wright moves the family back to West Helena, where Wright immerses himself in the street culture of other Black boys. As an unsupervised boy, he chants right along with his peers as they sing anti-Semitic songs to a Jewish shop owner. Wright spies on his landlady, who engages in sex work to supplement her income, leading to the family’s eviction when Mrs. Wright refuses to beat her son for spying on the landlady. Wright gets another lesson in the threat posed by white vigilantism when Aunt Maggie’s boyfriend kills a white person by setting a fire to cover over a robbery. The man is forced to flee ahead of the police man who comes looking for him the next day. Wright’s mother teaches him that no matter what another Black person does, silence is the best response when law enforcement comes calling.

With Maggie gone, the family’s finances worsen, and Wright is so hungry that he attempts to sell his pet dog. Wright learns that the world around him is one over which he has little control, and he retreats to superstition and folk remedies to ward off harm. The South is rife with episodes of white mob violence against Black people, underscoring that the lack of control Wright has over his life is connected to race. Wright overhears a story of a Black woman using subterfuge to systematically kill the white members of a mob that lynched her husband, and the vision of her revenge so resonates with him that he decides that he, too, will be defiant should he ever face a mob. The adult Wright recognizes that this was a childish fantasy, but as a boy, this decision gives him enough of a sense of psychological security to deal with the constant threat of white violence. Growing up in the segregated South, Wright has little contact with white people, but he nevertheless finds that the racial order and the threat of white violence pervade his whole sense of self.

Wright finally makes it to school at the age of nine. Despite his literacy and intelligence, he barely manages to talk when called on by the teacher. This episode in his life is punctuated by the end of World War I, which he recalls hearing about one day as he sits in class. He sees a plane in the air for the first time in his life, and the idea of a man flying provides a hint to him that the world is much bigger than he knows.

At nine years old, Wright becomes more deeply immersed in the lives of the Black boys with whom he runs the streets. In their presence, he engages in verbal contests to establish his place in the pecking order and exchanges stories about the ways of white people. He learns about the mythical North, where Black people apparently are on terms of greater equality with white people. Wright and his Black peers engage in violent street battles with white boys who dare to cross the invisible line that separates their neighborhoods. Looking back, Wright identifies these vibrant exchanges on the streets as part of a “folk tradition” (81) that taught Wright about his racial identity in a racist society.

Mrs. Wright has the first of several strokes, and Mrs. Wilson comes to take care of her daughter and grandchildren. Wright is old enough that he recognizes the implication of his mother’s disability; he is on his own. He is so ashamed of depending on his neighbors for food that he begins refusing to eat all but the barest amount. Mrs. Wilson gathers money from the aunts and uncles and moves the entire family to her home. Wright’s aunts and uncles converge on the home to take care of Mrs. Wright, and Wright is humiliated when someone notices his malnourishment. He is eventually parceled out to live with his Uncle Clark and Aunt Jody in Greenwood, Mississippi; he attends school again and finally has enough to eat. He runs into trouble because of his sensitivity and rough manners. He goes back to his grandmother after his uncle beats him for cursing.

Back in Jackson, Wright’s situation is tenuous. His brother has moved to the North with other family members. Mrs. Wilson is financially under stress as she attempts to take care of Richard’s mother, so the house lacks consistent food and Wright has yet another break in his education. When the family takes Mrs. Wright out of town for an operation, Wright is disquieted when the segregated hospital refuses to let her stay after the procedure.

Mrs. Wright has another stroke, and Wright comes to understand that she will never recuperate, despite the family having spent all of its resources to heal her. Her pain and illness become in the young Richard Wright’s mind a symbol for “all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours [,] the meaningless pain and suffering” (100) of his life and in the lives of many other Black people. By 12, Wright feels that these experiences have alienated him from everyone around him and made the expectation of suffering an integral part of his psychology. Wright is no longer a child. He is a skeptic, a rebel, and sharply curious about all the areas of human experience denied him.

As a member of his grandmother’s house, Wright begins to feel increasing pressure from Mrs. Wilson and Addie, his aunt, to convert to their Seventh Day Adventist faith. Aunt Addie is especially insistent that Wright convert. The family decides to send Wright to the religious school where she teaches, but Addie fears the appearance of favoritism toward Wright and is worried about how his refusal to convert will look to others. She unfairly singles him out for punishment one day. Wright finally tells her he was not the culprit, but when she attempts to beat him again for lying, he threatens her with a knife. The family becomes convinced Wright is irredeemable, and he is forced to endure hours of prayer on his knees every night.

The pressure to conform to his grandmother’s faith increases when a religious revival comes to town and Wright declares that he will no longer attend Addie’s school. Wright is an agnostic, believing that even if there is a God, there is no reason to suspect that he is concerned with the paltry life of one boy. Wright believes only in what his senses and his body reveal to him as true and real.

He refuses conversion. From then on, his grandmother leaves him be, insisting only that he spend an hour in prayer, but Wright spends these hours writing a short story. The act of writing it, particularly the joy of writing for sheer pleasure, is a revelation to him. He shows the story to a neighbor, but she cannot begin to understand what would make someone like him want to write. He likes her puzzlement.

The family gives up on the project of converting Wright and instead chooses to treat him with hostility, going so far as to refuse to buy him the clothes and textbooks he needs to go to public school because they see it as worldly. Still, he enrolls in Jim Hill School, which he attends for four years, the only stretch of uninterrupted education he is ever to have. Wright quickly settles into the social life of the school. He advances from fifth to sixth grade in a matter of weeks.

The big challenge to being at home is that he lacks the money to keep himself clothed decently and interact socially with friends. He convinces his grandmother to let him get a job, with the caveat that he will not be allowed to work on the Sabbath. Finding work that will allow him to take off the Sabbath is almost impossible, but Wright is eventually recruited by another boy to distribute newspapers that include a weekly magazine packed with lurid stories that appeal to Wright, the budding writer. This work comes to an end when a kindly adult points out to Wright that the papers he is distributing are propaganda for white supremacists. He next works over the summer as an assistant to an insurance agent who sells shoddy policies to their Black neighbors, but this job ends as well, preventing Wright from contributing financially to his cash-strapped household.

Grandpa Wilson dies that summer, never having received the pension he was owed for his service during the Civil War. Wright is not allowed to go the funeral. When fall comes, Wright once again is denied clothing to replace the rags his school clothes have become. Out of desperation, he threatens to leave if his grandmother does not allow him to find work, even if it requires working on the Sabbath. Mrs. Wilson relents when she realizes he is serious. Wright is tired of the constant conflict, but he is surprised to find that his defiance pleases his mother.