Black Boy
Black Boy is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his upbringing. Wright describes his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party. Black Boy gained high acclaim in the United States because of Wright's honest and profound depiction of racism in America. While the book gained significant recognition, much of the reception throughout and after the publication process was highly controversial.
Background
Richard Wright's Black Boy was written in 1943 and published two years later in the early years of his career. Wright wrote Black Boy as a response to the experiences he had growing up. Given that Black Boy is partially autobiographical, many of the anecdotes stem from real experiences throughout Wright's childhood. Richard Wright's family spent much of their lives in deep poverty, enduring hunger and illness, and frequently moving around the South, and finally north, in search of a better life. Wright cites his family and childhood environment as the primary influence in his writing of the book. Specifically, Wright's family's strong religious beliefs imposed on him throughout his childhood shaped his view of religion. Similarly, the considerable distress—physical, mental, and emotional—that Wright experienced while growing up hungry is documented throughout much of Black Boy.Most generally, Wright credits the public influence of Black Boy to his description of the racial inequalities he was subjected to throughout his travels in America. Wright recognized the power of reading and writing to stimulate "new ways of looking and seeing" at a young age. When he was seventeen, he left Jackson to find work in Memphis where he became heavily involved in literary groups and publications and expanded on his use of words as the weapon "to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for the life that gnaws in us" that is seen in Black Boy. Wright claims that he chose to write about the experiences referenced in Black Boy in an effort to "look squarely at his life, to build a bridge of words between him and the world".
Plot summary
Black Boy is an autobiography following Richard Wright's childhood and young adulthood. It is split into two sections, "Southern Night" and "The Horror and the Glory"."Southern Night"
The book begins with a mischievous four-year-old Wright setting fire to his grandmother's house. Wright is a curious child living in a household of strict, religious women and violent men. After his father deserts his family, young Wright is shuffled back and forth between his sick mother, his fanatically religious grandmother, and various maternal aunts, uncles and orphanages attempting to take him in. Despite the efforts of various people and groups to take Wright in, he essentially raises himself with no central home. He quickly chafes against his surroundings, reading instead of playing with other children, and rejecting the church in favor of agnosticism at a young age. Throughout his mischief and hardship, Wright gets involved in fighting and drinking before the age of six. When Wright turns eleven, he begins taking jobs and is quickly introduced to the racism that constitutes much of his future. He continues to feel more out of place as he grows older and comes in contact with the Jim Crow racism of the 1920s South. He finds these circumstances generally unjust and fights attempts to quell his intellectual curiosity and potential as he dreams of moving north and becoming a writer."The Horror and the Glory"
In an effort to achieve his dreams of moving north, Wright reluctantly steals and lies until he attains enough money for a ticket to Memphis. Wright's aspirations of escaping racism in his move North are quickly disillusioned as he encounters similar prejudices and oppressions amidst the people in Memphis, prompting him to continue his journeys towards Chicago.The youth finds the North less racist than the South and begins understanding American race relations more deeply. He holds many jobs, most of them consisting of menial tasks: he washes floors during the day and reads Proust and medical journals at night. At this time, his family is still suffering in poverty, his mother is disabled by a stroke, and his relatives constantly interrogate him about his atheism and "pointless" reading. He finds a job at the post office, where he meets white men who share his cynical view of the world and religion. They invite him to the John Reed Club, an organization that promotes the arts and social change. He becomes involved with a magazine called Left Front and slowly immerses himself in the writers and artists in the Communist Party.
At first, Wright thinks he will find friends within the party, especially among its black members, but he finds them to be just as timid to change as the southern whites he left behind. The Communists fear those who disagree with their ideas and quickly brand Wright as a "counter-revolutionary" for his tendency to question and speak his mind. When Richard tries to leave the party, he is accused of trying to lead others away from it.
After witnessing the trial of another black Communist for counter-revolutionary activity, Wright decides to abandon the party. He remains branded an "enemy" of Communism, and party members threaten him away from various jobs and gatherings. He does not fight them because he believes they are clumsily groping toward ideas that he agrees with: unity, tolerance, and equality. Wright ends the book by resolving to use his writing as a way to start a revolution: asserting that everyone has a "hunger" for life that needs to be filled. For Wright, writing is his way to the human heart, and therefore, the closest cure to his hunger.
Genre and style
The genre of Richard Wright's Black Boy is a longstanding controversy due to the ambiguity. Black Boy follows Wright's childhood with a degree of accuracy that suggests it exists as an autobiography, although Wright never confirmed nor denied whether the book was entirely autobiographical or fictitious. None of Wright's other books follow the truths of his life in the way Black Boy does. The book's apparent tendency to intermix fact and fiction is criticized because of the specific dialogue that suggests a degree of fiction. Additionally, Wright omits certain details of his family's background that would typically be included in an autobiographical novel. While Wright may have deviated from historical truths, the book is accurate in the sense that he rarely deviates from narrative truth in the candidness and rawness of his writing.The style in Black Boy is so highly regarded because of the frankness that defied social demands at the time of Black Boy’s publication. Wright negates the racially based oppression he endured through his ability to read and write with eloquence and credibility as well as with his courage to speak back against the dominant norms of society that are holding him back.
Analysis
Given Black Boy’s emphasis on racial inequality in America, many of the motifs refer to the lingering aspects of slave narratives in present day. These motifs include violence, religion, starvation, familial unity and lack thereof, literacy, and the North Star as a guide towards freedom. The depictions of lingering racial animosity are at the core of the arguments in favor of censorship for many critics. The prevalence of violence amidst and against Blacks in America ties back to the violence exerted upon slaves generations before. The theme of violence intermixes with the notion of race as Wright suggests that violence is deeply entrenched into a system where people are distinguished based on their race. Regardless of Wright's efforts to break free from this violent lifestyle, a society based on differences will always feed on an inescapable discourse.Wright's skeptical view of Christianity mirrors the religious presence for many slaves. Throughout Black Boy, this skepticism of religion is present as Richard regards Christianity as being primarily based on a general inclusion in a group rather than incorporating any meaningful, spiritual connection to God. The general state of poverty and hunger that Wright endures reflects, to a lesser degree, similar obstacles that slaves faced. Wright's portrayal of hunger goes beyond a lack of food to represent a metaphorical kind of hunger in his yearning for a better, freer life. In his search for a better life in the North, Richard is seeking to fulfill both his physical and metaphorical hungers for more. The cyclical portrayal of poverty in Black Boy represents society as a personified enemy that crushes dreams for those who aren't in command of high society.
The strong attempt at maintaining family unity also relates to the efforts amidst slaves to remain connected through such immense hardship. Wright's longing to journey North in search of improvement embodies the slaves longing to follow the North Star on the freedom trains in search of freedom. Despite the harsh reality upon arrival, throughout Black Boy, the North is represented as a land of opportunity and freedom. Lastly, Wright's focus on literacy as a weapon towards personal freedom also reflects the efforts of many slaves hoping to free themselves through the ability to read and write. The emphasis on literacy complicates the notion of finding freedom from a physical space to a mental power attained through education.
The most general impact of Black Boy is shown through Wright's efforts to bring light to the complexities of race relations in America, both the seen and unseen. Given the oppression of and lack of educational opportunities for black people in America, the raw honesty of their hardships was rarely heard and even more rarely given literary attention, making the impact of Black Boy’s narrative especially influential. The book works to show the underlying inequalities that Wright faced daily in America.