Black Boy by Richard Wright
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Black Boy is a poignant, often painful, brutally honest look at growing up as a young Black man in the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century. Wright takes us nearly all the way from infancy to his early twenties, and we follow him from place to place as his family (and later mostly his mother) looks for work and stability in a hostile world. We spend time in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and later Chicago, and briefly New York City. While Wright is constantly surrounded by some family member, from a younger brother to various aunts and uncles and grandparents, his father leaves his mother early on in his youth, which makes the family income a constant struggle. Coupled with the existing state of poverty that his family finds themselves in, Wright spends a significant portion of his youth starving or scheming ways to get food. He bounces from place to place, his mother eventually falls ill (no doubt in some part due to the stress), and points out that he doesn't complete a single full year of schooling without a move until somewhere around 9th grade, I think.
Despite having to work from a very young age to support his family, Wright manages to get to and through high school, and graduates first in his class. He has few options outside of teaching Black children, and though he wishes to go to college, it is not open to him. He decides to leave the South and moves first to Memphis and then Chicago, eventually saving enough money to bring his mother and brother along. He scrapes by, but things are always excruciatingly difficult, and as he develops his racial consciousness, he finds himself isolated both from whites and from his peers because he believes in racial equality and that Blacks should have rights, respect, jobs, education, etc. He struggles to keep jobs because they are always for whites and always involve degradation, whether implicit, explicit, or both.
He eventually joins a Communist group which provides him with a community of more like-minded individuals, but he is still one of the few Black people in the group, and finds himself more and more at odds with them because he is branded an 'intellectual', which is counter to their worker mentality. He is eventually forced out of the group, and finds himself desirous of departing from them anyway, as he wants to devote himself to writing. While this is revolutionary for a Black man at the time, Wright carves out the space, time, and energy to practice writing and draft novels. We leave him contemplating the futility of this effort, but determined to write just the same.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear readers,
It has been TOO LONG, I know. Many of you have probably forgotten about this blob, or wondered if I was, in fact, ever going to blob again. Well here I am! It took me a while because once again I got caught up reading a set of books I created for a book bingo, but I finally made it to this novel. It was definitely a tough read. Painful to hear and wear and share Wright's incredibly uphill battle of adolescence, and to wonder how much of the system and circumstances in this country have really changed for Black men since then. This is only the second Wright novel I've read - Native Son was on the blob list as well. I'd like to read more, though I would want to space them out, only because the content is so harrowing to navigate through.
That said, there were many parts that resonated with me, so I'll share those with you now, and you can decide if and when you choose to explore this work for yourself. As usual, there's no particular order to them.
On school and learning
Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. I loved this line. It's painful, because it points out how much living he has been asked and forced to do before he is educated, but beautiful in its poignancy.
On selling papers but not reading them
For a while, Richard learns that he can get papers to read by selling them, much to his delight, as books are hard for him to come by. His friend says:
'Hurry up and start selling 'em,' he urged me. 'I'd like to talk to you about the stories.' Which I thought was super endearing. The stories are in the magazine sections, and these are all that Richard reads, as he peddles the papers out to his community. One day, an older Black man finally points out to Richard that he's selling Klan propaganda; horrified, Richard reads the papers he's been selling and not reading, and realizes he has to stop immediately. This was such an intense and heartbreaking moment.
On writing
Richard, like many protagonists in writers' somewhat fictionalized autobiographies, is coming to being as a writer. Here are some of my favorite lines of his about writing.
- Nobody can tell me how or what to write.
- My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his notion of direction, his senses?
- 'You'll have to prove your revolutionary loyalty.'
'That's what I'm trying to do through writing.'
'That's not the way to do it,' he said. 'You must act.' This tension was so beautifully explored, and felt so absurd and nonsensical. And yet, also so real - how many presidential candidates have been deemed 'too intellectual'? But I love that Wright's is a writing revolution, even if others can't see it.
Lines I loved
- Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one? This is in reference to the fact that a new Communist Party member who has recently wreaked havoc on the group turns out to be an escapee from an insane asylum.
- 'Comrade Nealson,' I said, 'a writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person. Now, I'm in that category. Yet I think I can write. I don't want to ask for special favors, but I'm in the midst of a book which I hope to complete in six months or so. Let me convince myself that I'm wrong about my hankering to write and then I'll be with you all the way.' I loved this exchange because it's very similar to how I feel as an aspiring/early writer.
- Writing had to be done in loneliness and Communism had declared war upon human loneliness.
Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say.
On being Black in America
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 somehow lived in it but not of it.
On hunger
Hunger is (sadly) a recurring them throughout the novel. What I loved was not that Richard was so often hungry, but how beautifully he captured this state of being. Here's one of my favorite scenes.
When supper was over I saw that there were many biscuits piled high upon the bread platter, an astonishing and unbelievable sight to me. Though the biscuits were right before my eyes, and though there was more flour in the kitchen, I was apprehensive lest there be no bread for breakfast in the morning. I was afraid that somehow the biscuits might disappear during the night, while I was sleeping. I did not want to wake up in the morning, as I had done so often in the past, feeling hungry and knowing that there was no food in the house. So, surreptitiously, I took some of the biscuits from the platter and slipped them into my pocket, not to eat, but to keep as a bulwark against any possible attack of hunger. Even after I had got used to seeing the table loaded with food at each meal, I still stole bread and put it into my pockets.
I won't list every other way that hungerness and starvation are captured, but I will say that this topic included: Serving food to whites that Black folks were not allowed to eat themselves, eating leftovers from white lunch deliveries, living at an orphanage where they got only stale bread with molasses twice a day, and failing the postal exam because he weighed only 110 pounds as a young adult.
On fear
Another theme throughout the novel is the fear with which Richard lives his life as a Black boy in southern America. Again, while this is not something I celebrate, the way Wright describes it is painfully epic:
When his uncle is lynched by white men for 'doing too well' at his business:
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. I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins was buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she able to claim any of his assets. 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.
When Richard hears of other young men in his acquaintance being murdered by white men: The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worth-while to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.
And later, this exchange with his Black friend: 'Do you want to get killed?' he asked me.
'Hell, no!'
'Then, for God's sake, learn how to live in the South!'
On social awkwardness
Poor Richard is bounced so many places within his family and the larger world as a boy, and whether his discomfort with social interaction is related to this or not is unclear, but it was adorable and hard to watch him try to navigate new homes.
'Good morning, Richard,' Aunt Jody said.
'Oh, good morning,' I mumbled, wishing that I had thought to say it first.
'Don't people say good morning where you come from?' she asked.
'Yes, ma'am.'
'I thought they did,' she said pointedly. This reminded me of when my host dad in France always used to say 'Bon soir' or 'Bonjour' when he saw me, and somehow I always chose the wrong one.
On learning whiteness protocol
Part of what makes this book and Richard as a person so incredible is that he stands outside the norm, and then shouts it from the rooftops. While this is revolutionary and stunning, it's also really hard for Richard.
I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt. I had begun coping with the white world too late. I could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior.
On battles on the home front
One of the most difficult parts of reading this book for me was how often Richard is beaten by members of his own family. I recognize that discipline in Black families is a super complex subject, and one in which I generally don't have the right to weigh in on, but it was really hard to read how often his mother, or his aunt, or his grandmother, or his uncle, or his father, wanted to beat him with a switch. I thought this line captured some of the chaotic nature of this:
There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes understanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack.
The sunken place
As Richard gets older, he struggles with watching how his own race responds to the white world. This reflection reminded me of the sunken place in Get Out:
I began to marvel at how smoothly the black boys acted out the roles that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them were not conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. Yet I knew that in some period of their growing up - a period that they had no doubt forgotten - there had been developed in them a delicate, sensitive, controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all that the white race had said was taboo. Although they lived in an America where in theory there existed equality of opportunity, they knew unerringly what to aspire to and what not to aspire to. Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals.
On games
Richard, on watching other boys play craps at work:
Gambling had never appealed to me. I could not conceive of any game holding more risks than the life I was living. Man, this line gets me.
On talking to southern white men
Code-switching and navigating racially charged conversation is, I'm sure, still extremely prevalent for Black folks, but it was part of literally every interaction for Richard. I loved this line from an exchange with a southern white man, because it made it clear how many landmines there were all around Wright conversationally:
Was this a trap? He had mentioned a tabooed subject and I wanted to wait until I knew what he meant. Among the topics that southern white men did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; Frenchwomen; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United states; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion.
On empathy
I've written on this blog before about how much I love that books and reading instill empathy in readers. I thought Wright's exploration of this was fascinating and challenging:
As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. I felt vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me.
On the difficulty of getting books to read
Richard has to work SO HARD to get books in his hands (he ends up getting a white co-worker to share his library card, but still has to fake notes and pretend he's getting books for the man) but I love the way he describes reading:
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.
Crossovers
As I've said many times before on this blog, I never cease to be amazed at how each book touches or intersects with my life somehow, no matter how seemingly disparate our worlds are. This book was no exception, whether it was Richard's response to his deeply religious upbringing and school companions, to the books he reads (he reads Stein's Three Lives, which I just read for this blog), or the way he feels about writing, I felt a lot of kinship with Richard. I think the most intense example of this for me was when he read Proust, which my blobbist readers will know I have a deep affection for after having read it for this blog:
I spent my nights reading Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure of the Frenchman's epic of death and decadence. But it crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people in my environment with an equal thoroughness, and the burning example before my eyes made me feel that I never could. Richard, I think many have likely already said this, but you absolutely have done that. You have given your people that same thoroughness, and you are your own burning example for us to live up to.
Referents & Reverberations
I like to call out places where this work speaks to works that came before or after, at least in my head.
There were several places and times when Richard had to fight his family or his environment so hard to be able to read, and these reminded me of both Proust as a young boy and Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird.
These moments from this work:
- On talking to a woman, Ella, and eventually getting her to read him some of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives - 'Your grandmother wouldn't like it if I talked to you about novels.'
- On the helpfulness of his grandmother's illiteracy because her religious nature makes her wary of all books: Oh, boy, how lucky it was for me that Granny could not read!
- My excessive reading puzzled Aunt Maggie; she sensed my fiercely indrawn nature and she did not like it. Being of an open, talkative disposition, she declared that I was going about the business of living wrongly, that reading books would not help me at all.
Reminded me of these moments:
- In To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout gets in trouble for reading too much at school, and reflects: Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
- And in Remembrance of Things Past, when the young boy's great aunt comments: What! still amusing yourself with a book? It isn't Sunday, you know! because she thinks reading is only appropriate on a day of rest.
The other book this novel reminded me of, which obviously came after it, was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This interaction in Black Boy:
'Well, I want to be a writer,' I mumbled, unsure of myself; I had not planned to tell her that, but she had made me feel so utterly wrong and of no account that I needed to bolster myself.
'A what?' she demanded.
'A writer,' I mumbled.
'For what?'
'To write stories,' I mumbled defensively.
'You'll never be a writer,' she said. 'Who on earth put such ideas into your n* head?'
'Nobody,' I said.
'I didn't think anybody ever would,' she declared indignantly.'
Reminded me of this moment in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when Malcolm tells his favorite teacher he wants to be a lawyer:
You've got to be realistic about being a n*. A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a n*. You need to think about something you can be. You're good with your hands - making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don't you plan on carpentry?
The difference in time was maybe 40 years, but how many Black children (and Black boys, in particular) are still being told by their largely white teachers that they can't be what they want to be? We all bear the responsibility of breaking this narrative.
Lines in the running for title of this blog
- How could I ever learn this strange world of white people?
- Was I always to hang on the fringes of life?
- Could a Negro ever live halfway like a human being in this goddamn country?
Whew. Well I know this has been a lengthy post, but I hope you have enjoyed it! I'll leave you with three final thoughts from Mr. Wright.
(1) I think his reflections on America are SO spot-on, and particularly relevant and telling as we look back at the last few years. Here's a somewhat condensed version of this, underlining my own.
I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task...Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion...Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.
(2) I love that Richard is so willing and so desperate to fight for the right to write, even when society is trying so hard to exclude him from the space. Here's how he ends the novel:
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
(3) And last, but not least, I'll leave you with this exchange between Richard and his classmates after his fiction story is published in a paper, which so brilliantly typifies the idea that writers don't write because they want to or they're told to, they write because they HAVE to.
'Did you really write that story?' they asked me.
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'Because I wanted to.'
'Where did you get it from?'
'I made it up.'
'You didn't. You copied it out of a book.'
'If I had, no one would publish it.'
'But what are they publishing it for?'
'So people can read it.'
'Who told you to do that?'
'Nobody.'
'Then why did you do it?'
'Because I wanted to.'
So write because you must, read because it makes us feel each other's lives in a way that is not otherwise possible or plausible, and if you're in a country that celebrates it, enjoy this day of Labor which we celebrate with time off. I really will try not to take so long to blob on the next book, I promise! Stay safe, keep faith, and good night.
