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Richard WrightA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Wright was born in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents were formerly enslaved people, his mother was a teacher, and his father was a one-time sharecropper. Abandoned by his father when he was five years old, Wright grew up in poverty, living with various relatives around the southern United States. Southern states adopted a set of policies in the late 19th century that restricted the rights of Black people and legalized racial segregation. Known as Jim Crow Laws, these legal forms of oppression demanded, among other things, separate schools, restaurants, toilets, and drinking fountains for white and Black people. The laws, which were in full force during Wright’s lifetime, were accompanied by extralegal violent repression that usually went entirely unprosecuted. African American men were subject to assault and lynching, living with the constant threat of violence.
In the “autobiographical sketch” that precedes “Big Boy Leaves Home” in Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright presents various “lessons” in his “Jim Crow education”—a series of experiences that were meant to teach him to stay in his place and accept his subjection. For instance, he recalls an incident at a hotel where he worked, in which a Black bellboy who was caught with a white sex worker was castrated and driven out of town. The other Black employees were told that their coworker was lucky to have gotten off so easily. One reason Wright includes this nonfictional introduction to his collection of fiction is to head off any accusations that the intense violence of his stories might be exaggerated or sensationalized. Instead, his essay illustrates how the conditions that might give rise to such violence are omnipresent. While the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children are fictional, they are rooted in Wright’s personal experience and in those of people he interviewed as a journalist.
In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Wright explores a scenario in which the omnipresent threat of racial violence is sparked by a minor adolescent rebellion—trespassing on a white man’s land where the only local swimming hole happens to be. A racist stereotype at this time was that Black men were sexual predators who lusted after white women, a rationale that caused many lynchings. This stereotype turns what could have been an innocent or funny situation—being caught in the nude—into a deadly one. As soon as the boys kill a white man, they know that their case will never go to trial. They correctly anticipate being hunted down by a mob seeking to lynch them. The story starkly illustrates how chance encounters can erupt into hyperbolic violence within these cultural conditions.
Like Big Boy, Wright escaped north to Chicago, but he went there with his family under less dramatic circumstances. Just as Big Boy’s future seems uncertain at the end of the story, Wright did not find Chicago to be the paradise of equal rights imagined in the boys’ fantasies.
Protest literature is written to reveal social injustices and incite change. While politics and art are often seen as at odds with one another, authors of protest literature believe that creativity should be used in the service of a cause, such as the abolition of slavery, temperance, or suffrage. While the tradition in the US dates back to the 19th century, Wright is often seen as a forerunner of a new era of protest literature that accompanied the American civil rights movement, which strove to gain equality for African American people in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Big Boy Leaves Home” is drawn from a collection of short stories called Uncle Tom’s Children. That title is an allusion to one of the most popular protest novels of all time—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling 1869 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe was a white abolitionist who wrote her sentimental novel as a protest against slavery. Wright’s reference to Stowe identifies his work as part of this tradition while crucially setting himself apart from such antecedents. His work is not the same as Stowe’s; instead, it’s identified as the next, more enlightened generation of protest literature.
In a brief foreword to the collection, Wright explicitly rejects the representation of Black people in previous protest literature, such as Stowe’s. He writes:
The post Civil War household word among Negroes—‘He’s an Uncle Tom!’—which denoted reluctant toleration for the cringing type who knew his place before white folk, has been supplanted by a new word from another generation which says: ‘Uncle Tom is dead!’ (xxxi).
This declaration frames his representation of the characters in “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Wright’s depiction is not sentimental, and the characters are not faultless caricatures that pander to white audiences. They are realistic kids who are sometimes brash and rude, and, as Big Boy proves, willing to fight back.
Wright wrote “Big Boy Leaves Home” during the Great Depression, a time of huge economic uncertainty. The US stock market crashed in 1929, precipitating a global financial recession that led to widespread unemployment and poverty. African Americans, who were already among the poorest in the US, were hit hardest by this economic downturn. Often the first to be let go from their jobs, they had the highest unemployment rate in the country during the 1930s when Wright was writing Uncle Tom’s Children. While Big Boy’s poverty is not explicitly mentioned, details in the story allude to it. The boys are hungry, and one of their playful fantasies involves listing all the delicious foods they long to eat (22). It is revealed that Big Boy lives in a “shack,” his shoes are too small, and his hat is “battered.”
The terrible suffering caused by the Great Depression also led many people to question free-market capitalism and call for a revolution in the US economic system. One of the foremost alternatives was communism, an economic system wherein private property would be replaced by shared public control and ownership. Instead of having a rich upper-class minority and a poor working-class majority, proponents of communism picture a classless society. Communists often argue that racism is a function of capitalism, intended to keep the working-class fighting against itself instead of joining together to fight their true capitalist oppressors. Without class divisions, they believe, there would be no racial prejudice.
Wright, who was introduced to communist ideas via his love of reading after he joined a John Reed Club in Chicago, was at least partly convinced by these arguments. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1932. His affiliations with the radical movement are explicit in the last two stories of Uncle Tom’s Children, but communist ideas also subtly inform “Big Boy.” For instance, the conflict between the boys and the unseen Old Man Harvey is a class conflict as well as a racial one. Harvey is a landowner who claims the only swimming hole in town as private property. Further, the story meditates on the themes of Collectivism Versus Self-Interest. Big Boy’s self-interest saves his own life but does not save anyone else’s or make a dent in the system that caused this personal crisis. The hero’s consciousness has been somewhat awakened, but he still has a way to go to make a difference for his community.
By Richard Wright