Black Boy, the first book-length installment of Richard Wright’s novelistic autobiography, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the second of Wright’s works to be so recognized, the other being his enormously popular and important first novel Native Son (1940). In Black Boy, Wright delineates his coming-of-age in the segregated South of the early 20th century. The narrative opens when Wright is about four years old and ends when he leaves the South for Chicago when he is 19. Rather than recount his growth and development in strict chronological terms, Wright fashions his narrative around certain guiding themes that characterized his life in the South, principal among those being fear, hunger, and deprivation. Moreover, Wright transcends his own individual experience and captures the experiences of countless black males who grow up in a South that does not recognize them as men and does not nurture them as human beings. In a 1945 interview with John McCaffery, Wright noted, “I wanted to lend, give my tongue, to voiceless Negro boys” (Kinnamon and Fabre, 65). In so doing, Wright achieves something of a primer for growing up black in the Deep South, a lesson he had first offered in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” a previously published essay that appears as the opening chapter of Black Boy.
One primary theme that Wright deals with extensively in Black Boy is the intense racism that every African American was subjected to in the South. This racism not only characterized Wright’s own early life, but also was an aspect of southern life that he examined in a number of his short stories and novellas. One especially harrowing experience was the murder of Wright’s Uncle Hoskins by white Arkansans who wanted to control his lucrative saloon business. The family had to flee Arkansas to escape a similar fate. The fear engendered by these and other acts of violence is a second primary aspect of life for blacks in the South during the first third of the 20th century and Wright shows how this fear becomes a stunting if not altogether paralyzing factor in the lives of black boys in particular. The presence of this fear made Wright determined “to render a judgment on [his] environment” (64).
Perhaps the most far-reaching characteristic of Black Boy is its focus on hunger, in both its physical and spiritual dimensions. Having been abandoned by their husband and father, Wright’s mother, often ill from a stroke, and her sons were frequently hungry. Just as Frederick Douglass noted in his Narrative that the cruelest behavior of whites toward their slaves was to deprive them of food, Wright echoes a similar sentiment in his autobiography where he claims that one of the most painful and debilitating aspects of growing up black in the South was the lack of sustenance. Despite their best efforts, including young Wright’s taking on many odd jobs to help out with expenses, the family rarely had enough to eat.
Spiritual hunger is another aspect of hunger that Wright deals with extensively in Black Boy. This type of hunger manifests itself in the absence of the father, in Wright’s inability to pursue an education in a sustained manner, and in the treachery he often experienced at the hands of fellow African Americans, including members of his own family, for either not knowing his place or refusing to accept the subservient roles expected of him as a black boy in the segregated South. The quest for an education was particularly frustrating for young Wright, and the fact that reading any book except the Bible was considered sinful by his fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother did much to embitter Wright against organized religion.
Hunger was such an impediment to Wright’s developing a wholesome perspective about the South that he used “American Hunger” as the working title for the autobiography. At the suggestion of his editor, the narrative was divided into two parts, with Black Boy chronicling the years in the South and American Hunger, published posthumously, chronicling his early years in the North. The text has since been restored and both installments appear under the single title of Black Boy. As black autobiography goes, Richard Wright’s Black Boy stands as a remarkable document of the problems attendant on growing up black in the American South. Its literary merit is further enhanced by the author’s supremely competent handling of character development, setting, imagery, and theme.
SOURCES
Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Brigano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University Press of Pittsburgh, 1970.
Gayle, Addison, Jr. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1980.
Kinnamon, Kenneth, and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. [1945]. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis, Slave Narrative
Slave Narrative
You must be logged in to post a comment.