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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Absolutely heartbreaking childhood. It hurt me so much as a mother of little boys to read.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Richard Wright’s Black Boy is a staggering account of Black life from early- to mid-twentieth century, ranging from the Jim Crow Southern states on up to Memphis and eventually Chicago and New York. From its outset, when a four-year-old Richard accidentally burns down his family’s home, to its bittersweet ending, when Richard, in his twenties, abandons the Communist party in Chicago after realizing the strictly limited and petty scope of its immediate goals, it is at once a deeply personal and tragically universal story of the Black American experience of Wright’s era, told with painful clarity and intensely human interest.
From what I have read, the "authenticity" of the narrative Wright presents here, as autobiography, has been the subject of some scrutiny. Evidently, it is an "intermix of fact and fiction" to some extent ("Black Boy" Wikipedia), but in the face of what it achieves in its naturalistic detail, I would argue that whether each and every one of these events happened to Wright precisely as they are described here, or if perhaps some happened to other people he had known, such as his attempt was with the character Ross (Wright 332) does not matter. What is important here is the ongoing reflection Wright is engaged in, concerning the social forces which shape Black and white American life.
There are numerous instances in the text which vividly illustrate the ways Black and white culture clash with one another, and how each has affected the other, but to my mind, perhaps the starkest example is the episode in which Richard, while working at an optical house, is set by his white coworkers against another Black man, Harrison, who works at another local optical house (235). Mr. Olin, one of the white men, tells Richard that Harrison wants to "get" Richard for "[calling] him a dirty name," but Richard quickly deduces that Harrison's white coworkers have told him the same thing about Richard; it is all a ploy designed to make the two Black men commit violence against one another, maybe even kill each other (235-238).
It's sickening to think of the Southern white men in these scenes, who have no specific grudge against Richard or Harrison, but who have so little regard for all Black people that they put concerted effort into continuing to assert their dominance over them, and to treat them like disposable property.
But while the sheer cruelty and callousness of the white men is disturbing enough, yet more disheartening is how Richard and Harrison both have been so beaten down by the systems of oppression, via their respective prior life experiences and the relentless egging-on of their racist white coworkers, that they eventually agree to box one another (242); but despite their intention to stage a brawl and each earn some money, they come to brutal blows: "The hate we felt for the [white] men whom we had tried to cheat went into the blows we threw at each other... I hated [Harrison] and I hated myself... I felt that I had done something unclean, something for which I could never properly atone" (243). Richard feels ashamed for giving the white men what they wanted, for being "duped" (243) into providing base entertainment, and for hurting another Black person in the process.
Scenes like this one frame the novel for me as a naturalistic novel, one that fairly objectively presents a realistic vision of the world, and the people in it "as products of heredity and environment" (Murfin and Ray 283).
However, I do not find the text to be entirely pessimistic. Despite all of the trauma Richard faces throughout the narrative, despite all the violence he is subjected and witness to, despite being shut down and excluded by white and Black society time and again, there is a vigorous spark of human curiosity and decency that absolutely cannot be overstated or ignored. Perhaps because I am interested in literature and am a writer myself, I find this passage keenly emblematic of that fierce will:
"If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world." (Wright 280)
Richard's will to learn and to create is nothing short of inspiring, and even through to the end of the novel, when he has been disillusioned once more after being bodily thrown out of the May Day parade (381), he is still striving toward creative self-reflection, "send[ing] 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" (384).
From what I have read, the "authenticity" of the narrative Wright presents here, as autobiography, has been the subject of some scrutiny. Evidently, it is an "intermix of fact and fiction" to some extent ("Black Boy" Wikipedia), but in the face of what it achieves in its naturalistic detail, I would argue that whether each and every one of these events happened to Wright precisely as they are described here, or if perhaps some happened to other people he had known, such as his attempt was with the character Ross (Wright 332) does not matter. What is important here is the ongoing reflection Wright is engaged in, concerning the social forces which shape Black and white American life.
There are numerous instances in the text which vividly illustrate the ways Black and white culture clash with one another, and how each has affected the other, but to my mind, perhaps the starkest example is the episode in which Richard, while working at an optical house, is set by his white coworkers against another Black man, Harrison, who works at another local optical house (235). Mr. Olin, one of the white men, tells Richard that Harrison wants to "get" Richard for "[calling] him a dirty name," but Richard quickly deduces that Harrison's white coworkers have told him the same thing about Richard; it is all a ploy designed to make the two Black men commit violence against one another, maybe even kill each other (235-238).
It's sickening to think of the Southern white men in these scenes, who have no specific grudge against Richard or Harrison, but who have so little regard for all Black people that they put concerted effort into continuing to assert their dominance over them, and to treat them like disposable property.
But while the sheer cruelty and callousness of the white men is disturbing enough, yet more disheartening is how Richard and Harrison both have been so beaten down by the systems of oppression, via their respective prior life experiences and the relentless egging-on of their racist white coworkers, that they eventually agree to box one another (242); but despite their intention to stage a brawl and each earn some money, they come to brutal blows: "The hate we felt for the [white] men whom we had tried to cheat went into the blows we threw at each other... I hated [Harrison] and I hated myself... I felt that I had done something unclean, something for which I could never properly atone" (243). Richard feels ashamed for giving the white men what they wanted, for being "duped" (243) into providing base entertainment, and for hurting another Black person in the process.
Scenes like this one frame the novel for me as a naturalistic novel, one that fairly objectively presents a realistic vision of the world, and the people in it "as products of heredity and environment" (Murfin and Ray 283).
However, I do not find the text to be entirely pessimistic. Despite all of the trauma Richard faces throughout the narrative, despite all the violence he is subjected and witness to, despite being shut down and excluded by white and Black society time and again, there is a vigorous spark of human curiosity and decency that absolutely cannot be overstated or ignored. Perhaps because I am interested in literature and am a writer myself, I find this passage keenly emblematic of that fierce will:
"If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world." (Wright 280)
Richard's will to learn and to create is nothing short of inspiring, and even through to the end of the novel, when he has been disillusioned once more after being bodily thrown out of the May Day parade (381), he is still striving toward creative self-reflection, "send[ing] 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" (384).
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Holy cow, this book was intense. This is author Richard Wright's autobiography in its fullest form. Apparently when it was originally published it was only the first part as publishers were not keen on all of his communist talk.
Wright was hungry his whole life, both physically and symbolically. I am blown away that a poor, Black kid growing up in the south in the early 1900's with little schooling can write as eloquently as this.
It is an important book to read, and I never read it in school, so I'm glad I picked it up.
Wright was hungry his whole life, both physically and symbolically. I am blown away that a poor, Black kid growing up in the south in the early 1900's with little schooling can write as eloquently as this.
It is an important book to read, and I never read it in school, so I'm glad I picked it up.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I read this in college and remember being impacted by it. Probably time for me to read it again....