Black Boy

Part of what makes Black Boy such a remarkable text in American literature is that Richard Wright devotes much of the work (more than two thirds) to portraying Black American boyhood. Black childhood in general does not make many appearances in American literature up to this point. The childhood that appears in American literature is one that adheres to certain norms in which children do not bear the responsibilities of adults and have a certain leeway for innocence, especially when those children are white and middle class. Wright discards these conventions because they do not align with the Black, working-class childhood he experiences.

One frequent theme in works centered on childhood is the move from innocence to knowledge. Wright chooses to open Black Boy with scenes from when he is four years old and accidentally set fire to his grandmother’s house; the resulting beating he experiences ends his innocence. Wright says that “for a long time I was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me” (7). From that point on, trauma and alienation resulting from abuse and neglect by the important adults in his life are threads that run throughout his entire account of Black boyhood.

The point seems to be that Wright is not an innocent boy for very long. Like many Black and working-class children, he experiences adultification, which is when children are forced to function as adults both by members of their own communities and by people outside of their communities. Wright recounts being an alcoholic at six, seeking his first employment outside of the house while still a very young boy, being separated from his mother when she was too poor to keep him and his brother, and, in general, floating from home to home because of poverty and his mother’s illness. Childhood makes him more (not less) vulnerable to violence and deprivation, and his early loss of innocence makes him acutely aware of how desirable it is to escape his status as a child.

The material conditions of Wright’s youth mean that he misses out on several significant aspects of childhood, like a full institutional education. In his first nineteen years of life, Wright spends no longer than four continuous years enrolled in public school. One hundred years after ex-slave Frederick Douglass writes about having to steal his literacy from unsuspecting adults and white children at play, Wright is forced to do much the same. He learns his vocabulary and reading from raunchy saloon dwellers, a random boarder in his grandmother’s house, and incessant questioning of his harried mother. He learns his numbers from a random coal delivery man when the man discovers he cannot make change. This spotty education did not necessarily place Wright outside of the norm of early twentieth-century childhood, but Wright takes great pains to show that the lack of emphasis on literacy and education is a direct result of his race and class. In other words, Wright’s education came piecemeal because no one thought he was owed anything else.

There are props of childhood identity that appear in Black Boy, but they also show the marks of a deprived childhood. In many accounts of the lives of children, one sees a focus on important relationships (including family relationships and romantic ones as the child transforms to adulthood). Wright’s family relationships are disjointed because his father abandons the family and Wright’s mother is disabled early on by her strokes, making her unable to care for her children. Wright’s relationships with his grandmother, uncles, and aunts are frequently violent and antagonistic. As Wright grows older, there are no mentions of a first romance, although he does mention that at 12 his “glands began to diffuse through [his] blood […] those strange chemicals that made” (112) him look at women and girls as objects of physical desire. That is as far as he goes in putting his life in a larger context of social relationships. His childhood and adolescence are lonely and isolated.

There are two exceptions to Wright’s representation of himself as standing outside the flow of life in his family and community. One is in his description of the culture he and his fellow boys created, especially in Memphis, where Wright was largely unsupervised. Wright is immersed in a combative, free-wheeling oral culture in which talk and verbal games are the means by which “[t]he culture of on black household was thus transmitted to another black household” and in which “folk tradition was handed from group to group” (81). This culture is also rife with magic and folk beliefs that Wright records at length (72). Wright is a high-strung, socially awkward boy, but what he does know of navigating life and Black identity, he learns in the company of other boys.

The second exception is nearly universal in narratives about Black childhood, and that is the rite of passage by which Wright learns about the threat of racial violence for Black people—especially men and boys—who defy white supremacist norms. The first inkling of the import of racial violence for men and boys comes to Wright from his peers because his mother refuses to give him what he needs, choosing instead to hide from him the “feelings, attitudes, convictions” (49) about which Wright is curious. That lesson becomes explicit when white people kill Hoskins, Wright’s uncle and a prosperous saloon owner, forcing the family to flee. Wright calls this threat of death and violence “white terror” (55).

The struggle to survive his childhood and the threat of death are with Wright until he leaves the South. In his last lines in Part 1, he encapsulates a childhood spent in the South by noting that “[t]his was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled” (257). Even after leaving behind this childhood, he bears its marks in a physical frame so thin that it takes years for him to put on weight and many more beyond that to end the habits of lying, servility, and self-imposed invisibility used as protection.