Black Boy

“In the immediate neighborhood there were many school children who, in the afternoons, would stop and play en route to their homes; they would leave their books upon the sidewalk and I would thumb through the pages and question them about the baffling black print. When I had learned to recognize certain words, I told my mother that I wanted to learn to read and she encouraged me. Soon I was able to pick my way through most of the children’s books I ran across. There grew in me a consuming curiosity about what was happening around me and, when my mother came home from a hard day’s work, I would question her so relentlessly about what I had heard in the streets that she refused to talk to me.”

Wright has little formal, continuous education for most of his early life, but this passage shows that even without early education, Wright manages to secure his literacy using what he could pick up on the streets and through incessant questioning of adults. The focus on early literacy is a frequent theme of Black autobiography, especially literacy achieved outside of formal education contexts.

“I forgave him and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted wooden shack. From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed-of shores of knowing.”

Wright’s alienation from the rural South and his family is encapsulated in this passage. The reference to his father as a “black peasant” shows the influence of Marxist class analysis and naturalism on his understanding of the painful content of his life. By labeling his father as a part of an underclass and as a product of his environment on the former plantation, Wright is able to apply an objective lens that allows him to see his father sympathetically. In addition, the reference to their sojourns to urban settings reflects a conventional theme of Black autobiography, namely, the relationship between geography and identity.

“In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I did not and could not share their spirit.”

In this particular scene, Wright is forced by his mother to say goodbye to his Memphis friends as the family prepares to leave to live with family. His refusal to conform, then, is already a central trait of his personality as a child, and his description of how he feels reflects that his alienation from members of his racial community starts early.

“(Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.)”

Wright uses retrospection—recounting the experiences of the past I to tell a story that reflects the interests of the contemporary I—in this passage. Such passages generally appear in parentheses, and they are so lengthy that they frequently interrupt the flow of the narrative about the past. Their heft and frequent inclusion of generalizations about the effects of underclass status on Black Americans reflect that one of Wright’s primary purposes in telling his life story is to provide evidence of the damage that American racial and class politics have done to Black Americans.

“I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway. I realized that they could not understand what I was feeling and I kept quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella’s room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land.”

Like nineteenth-century formerly enslaved narrators, Wright describes language and narrative as forbidden sources of knowledge that are key to a greater understanding of self and the world. Wright picks up on this theme on the importance of literacy from a different historical context, however. He is legally allowed to read, but his grandmother’s religious beliefs make fiction off limits. Here the reader also sees Wright’s early understanding that the ability to read and wield language are important tools for resisting the racial order and conformity to societal expectations.

“The tremendous upheaval that my words had caused made me know that there lay back of them much more than I could figure out, and I resolved that in the future I would learn the meaning of why they had beat and denounced me.”

Wright learns the other side of language as power after he curses his grandmother as she bathes him. This profane statement shocks Wright’s family, although Wright himself is not quite aware of why. This is a key moment during which Wright learns that differences in status control how much he is allowed to say; Wright spends much of life learning to navigate around this issue.

“There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear. [...] Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.”

Wright undergoes an important rite of passage that frequently appears in narratives about Black childhood—coming to an understanding that racial violence is a threat to one’s own survival and the survival of one’s community. Far from providing her son comfort or some detail to put this threat in context, Mrs. Wright chooses to punish her son when he asks her questions. Wright’s mother frequently fails to instruct him in key information he needs to navigate the South and racial politics, a lack that causes him great difficulty throughout his childhood and early adulthood.

“I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [….] I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let go with my gun and kill as many of them as possible before they killed me. The story of the woman’s deception gave form and meaning to confused defensive feelings that had long been sleeping in me. My imaginings, of course, had no objective value whatever.”

Faced with the possibility of his own death or the death of loved ones through white mob violence, Wright imagines himself assuming an attitude of defiance and violence. The contemporary Wright recognizes this as a fantasy of a boy who lacked the tools to deal with racial trauma. In addition, Wright hears this story, which may well be more urban legend than fact, orally. “Emotionally true” stories like these, circulating orally, are a part of Black Southern culture that nourishes and instructs the young Wright even when the adults in his life do not. This form of common or folk culture constitutes an important source of Wright’s sensibilities as a writer.

“And the talk would weave, roll, surge, spurt, veer, swell, having no specific aim or direction, touching vast areas of life, expressing the tentative impulses of childhood. Money, God, race, sex, color, war, planes, machines, trains, swimming, boxing, anything […] The culture of one black household was thus transmitted to another black household, and folk tradition was handed from group to group. Our attitudes were made, defined, set, or corrected; our ideas were discovered, discarded, enlarged, torn apart, and accepted. Night would fall. Bats would zip through the air. Crickets would cry from the grass. Frogs would croak. The stars would come out. Dew would dampen the earth. Yellow squares of light would glow in the distance as kerosene lamps were lit in our homes.”

Wright learns key aspects of Black culture in the company of other boys and via a rich oral culture. Wright peels back the veil from Black boyhood by including this passage, so the book and passages like these are key interventions in the representation of Black childhood. In addition, the lyrical language here, especially the descriptions of nature, strikes a lighter tone than most of the narrative on Wright’s boyhood. Instead of being a lonely, alienated figure, Wright is in community with others. Such passages are rare in the book, but their presence here identifies an important influence on Wright’s artistic sensibilities.

“My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life [….] A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother’s unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me self-conscious, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me.”

Wright makes the connection here between his mother’s suffering and his sense of profound alienation from his family, community, and other people in general. He is only twelve, but that sense of alienation that dominates his identity as he represents it in the book starts here.

“My environment contained nothing more alien than writing or the desire to express one’s self in writing. But I never forgot the look of astonishment and bewilderment on the young woman’s face when I had finished reading and glanced at her. Her inability to grasp what I had done or was trying to do somehow gratified me. Afterwards whenever I thought of her reaction I smiled happily for some unaccountable reason.”

Wright recognizes that being a writer makes him an outsider in the Jim Crow South, where a Black boy having such aspirations runs counter to the social order. Wright already sees himself as an iconoclast. His satisfaction shows that his notion of the writer as a disruptor of the seemingly natural order of things has been incorporated into his identity.

“I was tense each moment, trying to anticipate their wishes and avoid a curse, and I did not suspect that the tension I had begun to feel that morning would lift itself into the passion of my life. Perhaps I had waited too long to start working for white people; perhaps I should have begun earlier, when I was younger—as most of the other black boys had done—and perhaps by now the tension would have become an habitual condition, contained and controlled by reflex. But that was not to be my lot; I was always to be conscious of it, brood over it, carry it in my heart, live with it, sleep with it, fight with it.”

Part of Wright’s predicament is that he never learns to accommodate himself to the iron control required to avoid conflict with white people. In this instance, he attempts to theorize why he has not internalized that socialization, and he blames that lack on a late introduction to being in close proximity to white people. Wright’s efforts to understand why he is different is a frequent preoccupation in the book, and that interest in understanding his inability to fit in reflects his application of sociological lens to even his most intimate and personal concerns.

“And now a strange uncle who felt that I was impolite was going to teach me to act as I had seen the backward black boys act on the plantations, was going to teach me to grin, hang my head, and mumble apologetically when I was spoken to. My senses reeled in protest. No, that could not be. He would not beat me. [...] I ran across the room and pulled out the dresser drawer and got my pack of razor blades; I opened it and took a thin blade of blue steel in each hand. I stood ready for him. The door opened. I was hoping desperately that this was not true, that this dream would end.”

Wright links social conditioning designed to keep Black people compliant in the Jim Crow South to the use of corporal punishment in the Black family. Although Wright’s overt rebellions against this conditioning outside of the home is rare (a strategic choice, considering it could result in his death), he regularly engages in violent resistance when it appears in intimate domestic space at the hands of relatives. Wright wins this contest, but he later learns that violence and rebellion within the family come at great cost: he is alienated from a potential source of resilience and support, and this lack of family feeling is one of the reasons that Wright is unable to withstand living in the South.

“I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. [...] I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness. […] Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life has switched onto the wrong track, and without knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope.”

Wright’s conception of the North as a mythical land of freedom picks up on a key convention of Black autobiographical genres. Also of note is that Wright describes the desire to write as an act of rebellion that counters the entire apparatus of white supremacy of the South. Wright has, in other words, a notion of the writer as a heroic rebel whose refusal to conform is capable of taking on this overwhelming structure. The reference to the train connects Wright to a longstanding association between the train and Black freedom of movement; indeed, Wright and any number of Black migrants to the North ultimately made the trip North by train.

“But I, who stole nothing, who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspired fear in them. The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.”

Wright, now an older teenager, unravels the paradox of white supremacy, which is that it requires Black people to engage in low behavior in order to avoid threatening white people’s sense of racial superiority. This is an absurd existential predicament, especially for a person like Wright, who has a strong internal moral/ethical compass.

“My feelings became divided; in spite of myself I would dream of a locked cupboard in a near-by neighbor’s house where a gun was kept. If I stole it, how much would it bring? When the yearning to leave would become strong in me, I could not keep out of my mind the image of a storehouse at a near-by Negro college that held huge cans of preserved fruits. Yet fear kept me from making any move; the idea of stealing floated tentatively in me. My inability to adjust myself to the white world had already shattered a part of the structure of my personality and had broken down the inner barriers to crime.”

The impossible predicament Wright faces breaks him; in order to be free, he must become the criminal white supremacists assume him to be. Wright is describing a form of double consciousness, one in which a Black person who wishes to maintain personal integrity has to violate standards of behavior in order to do so. Also of note here is that Wright victimizes members of his own racial community in a bid for freedom. His escape to the North is the result of his refusal to become a Black person who is a risk to his community. This is also another passage in which Wright situates the desire for personal autonomy as criminal when a Black person has those desires. This is a resounding condemnation of the Jim Crow South as essentially corrupt.

“An hour later I was sitting in a Jim Crow coach, speeding northward, making the first lap of my journey to a land where I could live with a little less fear. Slowly the burden I had carried for many months lifted somewhat. My cheeks itched and when I scratched them I found tears. In that moment I understood the pain that accompanied crime and I hoped that I would never have to feel it again. I never did feel it again, for I never stole again; and what kept me from it was the knowledge that, for me, crime carried its own punishment.”

Wright returns to the train as a symbol for his freedom of movement as he gets further from the Jim Crow South and closer to urban spaces and the North. His representation of his remorse and refusal to engage in crime again undercuts the white supremacist notion that Black people are inherently criminals. The point here (in keeping with the influence of realism and naturalism’s notions of reality) is that the environment of the South creates Black criminality.

“He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.”

At nineteen, Wright discovers the writing of American essayist and journalist H.L. Mencken, known for his exquisite style and advancement of American realism. The discovery of Mencken’s writing helps Wright to channel his overt physical violence in the face of oppression into the act of writing. The idea of words as weapons coincides with Wright’s notion of the writer as an iconoclast and a rebel. Even more of note here is that Wright conceives of the Black writer as a person who can use writing as a weapon on behalf of his community, conceived broadly as all oppressed people.

 “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.”

Like writing, reading is also an act of resistance for Wright. Under the influence of the realist and naturalist fiction that is his preferred reading material, Wright comes to a greater understanding of his own identity and the meaning of the suffering he and other Black people experience. The liberating possibility of literacy connects Wright to a longstanding theme of Black literature, especially Black autobiography.

“My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie.”

Wright immediately moves to undercut the idea of the North as a promised land by capturing the grittiness of his first vision of the city. This is foreshadowing since Wright continues to struggle with pressure to conform and financial difficulties. The failure of the North to live up to the all the dreams of Southern migrants is a key moment in most Great Migration narratives.

“I looked about to see if there were signs saying: FOR WHITE—FOR COLORED. I saw none. Black people and white people moved about, each seemingly intent upon his private mission. There was no racial fear. Indeed, each person acted as though no one existed but himself. It was strange to pause before a crowded newsstand and buy a newspaper without having to wait until a white man was served.”

The one way in which the city does live up to Wright’s dreams is that it is an equal opportunity impersonal setting for city dwellers, regardless of race. After a lifetime of having to watch his every action to avoid tripping over Jim Crow social conventions and laws, Wright experiences his first taste of a more egalitarian landscape. Still, as Wright observes the bewilderment of Black people like his Aunt Cloe, whose life in the South failed to equip her to deal with modern life, he learns that the psychological impact of Jim Crow has left a permanent mark on him that mere movement to the North cannot undo.

“Ross was typical of the effective, street agitator. Southern-born, he had migrated north and his life reflected the crude hopes and frustrations of the peasant in the city. Distrustful but aggressive, he was a bundle of the weaknesses and virtues of a man struggling blindly between two societies, of a man living on the margin of a culture. I felt that if I could get his story I would make known some of the difficulties inherent in the adjustment of a folk people to an urban environment; I would make his life more intelligible to others than it was to himself. I would reclaim his disordered days and cast them into a form that people could grasp, see, understand, and accept.”

Wright’s explanation of his rationale for this writing project reveals several key aspects of his beliefs about art and the artist. Wright casts the artist as a person who can contribute to the creation of a working-class consciousness, which he implies is necessary for the working class and oppressed to effect change. The implication here is that this is necessary work for would-be revolutions. This idea about art undercuts the prevailing belief that artists are parasitical and anti-revolutionary among Wright’s Communist peers, and it also shows that Wright now sees the writing an aspect of the writer’s social responsibility, not just a means of engaging in self-expression.

“Racial hate had been the bane of my life, and here before my eyes was concrete proof that it could be abolished. Yet a new hate had come to take the place of the rankling racial hate. It was irrational that Communists should hate what they called “intellectuals,” or anybody who tried to think for himself. I had fled men who did not like the color of my skin, and now I was among men who did not like the tone of my thoughts.”

Wright articulates his ambivalence about Communism and its role in his own life. He is impressed by its ability to overcome the deep-rooted racism of America, but as an individual, Wright cannot abide party discipline because it runs counter to the nonconformity that is by now an essential part of his personality as a writer and Black man. Wright goes on to argue that their inability to accept a Black autodidact from the laboring classes is the result of a fundamental mismatch between the Russian culture and Anglo-American culture, which has a long tradition of organic, self-made intellectuals because of the wide availability of texts.