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| AN ESSAY ON RICHARD
WRIGHT'S 'BLACK BOY' |
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From fall 2002 |
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An essential component of understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy lies within the subjectivity of the protagonist, Richard, as he matures. His coming-of-age can be looked at in three main stages: occurrences in chapters one and two as a young child who's blind to the world, chapters three through ten as a maturating adolescent entering the working world, and chapters eleven through fourteen as he starts to achieve independence and make it on his own. It's quite clear from Richard's actions that the course he chose was of non-conformity, rebellion, and individualism. Unlike most of his peers and unlike his family wanted it, he thirsted for knowledge and for an understanding of the world. Richard's desire to better himself in every way possible, and his choice of living a non-conforming lifestyle, has been engrained in him since childhood. Since Richard ultimately obtained independence and reached his goal of moving north, this non-conforming lifestyle, even though he may have caused trouble along the way, was clearly the right way for him to live. When the book opens, we see a not-yet-sculpted, dependent Richard as a four-year-old who sets his grandparents' house on fire out of sheer boredom. He was subsequently beaten into an unconscious state, which left him bedridden and near death for days. This opening scene really sets the stage for much of the book, at least Richard's earlier years: He's bored because of restrictions put on him by a guardian, and then wants to know what it will look like if the curtains burn; he tries to avoid punishment; and finally his parents find him and he gets his due, according to his parents decree. Quite frankly, this sequence of events, with variations, occurs frequently in the book. We see it with the kitten he kills, reading with Ella at his grandparents' house and his public demonstration of profanity on neighbors' windows, just to name a few. He's bored, wants to learn, does something bad, and gets punished, often quite cruelly. He refuses to conform to the good, timid little black boy his parents and grandparents want him to be. Richard causes such mischief so often because he wants to learn about something. Stepping out of society's wish that he conform to the lack of power left to blacks, he tries over and over again to learn about something, anything ... the world ... beyond. However, the southern culture vehemently denied blacks of knowledge as much as possible, thus keeping away power. This problem becomes prevalent in the midst of racial tension and Richard's comprehension of race. An early encounter with racial tension is at the kitchen his mother works at in Memphis, and the resulting displaced anger. His mother ran this kitchen: cooking, cleaning, doing dishes, everything. Richard and his brother would stand in the corner and watch her give sweat, blood and tears to satisfy the white people who sat and ate in the dining area, having a good time. The Wright brothers would get scraps to eat, if lucky. Their mother received just enough money to get by. Richard is always starving since his family has a lack of food, and he said that "watching the white people eat would make my empty stomach churn and I would grow vaguely angry" (Wright 19). It seems he recognizes that something is wrong, since he's angry, and yet he really doesn't know what's wrong, since the anger is "vague." In another instance he learns of the white man who beat the black boy, and after learning the man was not the boy's father, tries to learn why he would do such a thing. Anyone (all those "normal" conformists) Richard would ever ask about these racial issues refused to explain it. Beyond just learning about racial issues, it's ironic that he ends up learning more about life in general from drunkards in a saloon that give him whiskey and put dirty words in his head than he does from his mother or any of his relatives. The uneasiness Richard often experiences due to lack of knowledge on many subjects shows up around virtually every corner. He sums it up perfectly after the burning-the-house-down scene: "Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings" (7). Richard's life is a constant barrage of new situations and the slow process of understanding his encounters as he breaks the restraints of the norm. Some understanding of these encounters starts to grow toward and during Richard's adolescent years, in chapters three through ten, as he increasingly moves away from acting like society would want. Richard now sees and knows of the separation of the whites and blacks, but knows only that — the fact that there's a separation, a disunity. Now he has his group of friends, who discuss anything and everything, each acting tough, and using profanity, and trying to be independent, trying to be men. The black children and white children had a racial boundary, the roundhouse. If any ventured to the wrong side, they'd have stones thrown at them and be beaten. Another event that would reaffirm his knowledge of the racial divide occurs when there was no space in the hospital for his mother. She had to be treated at home, and then moved to her parents' house to live. "They searched through a dresser and found a dollar or two and sent for a doctor ... my mother had suffered a stroke of paralysis. She was in serious condition. She needed someone with her day and night; she needed medicine" (85). Despite the terrible condition Richard's mother had reached, all he could do was write to his grandmother as the neighbors nursed her. There's no doubt any adolescent watching his mother slowly start to die right before his eyes would wonder why in the world someone couldn't get the proper treatment due to the worst disease of all in the eyes of white people: being black. The segregation comes up again when Richard starts to work. As Richard is growing up, he increasingly wants to work, and his mother and grandmother won't let him. When the time finally comes to break this conformity and get a job, Richard goes through many, each with problems. Often he didn't get fed well, or was treated badly overall, and given absolutely no respect since his employers were always white. Many times he crossed the line of how he "should" act, either by doing something that white people believed black people shouldn't do or saying things they believed he shouldn't. A woman he worked for was absolutely shocked and appalled that he wanted to go to school and be a writer. The boss at the brickyard ignores the fact that his dog took a bite out of Richard, not caring if the wound gets infected or not. It seems the culmination of employment woes comes when he's basically driven out of his job at the optical shop by his co-workers. Even Crane, his boss, wants to help, and does by giving him extra money. But it doesn't change the fact Richard had to quit because of the harsh oppression of Pease and Reynolds. It's interesting when Richard leaves the shop for the last time; he's leaving his job at an optical shop and he said he walked home as a "blind man" (193). Richard is blind because of the absolute confusion he's in, the numb state he's in, not fully understanding just why his life is the way it is just because of his color. He gives one more crack at honesty when working at the hotel, but once again has problems. After seeing the hardships and poverty stemming from a real job compared to the easy money made by dishonesty, Richard decides that the non-conformist lifestyle of crime is the way to go. This is a real turning point, and a major revelation in Richard's life. The issue of race has become quite apparent to him. He tried so hard to make it in a cruel society, and had been driven to take part in a scheme at the movie theater to embezzle ticket money. This becomes a profitable endeavor, and finally Richard can afford to go to Memphis on his own, and vows never to steal again, in fear of crime's dreaded companion, punishment. Now Richard has the opportunity to become fiercely independent, something almost any southern black boy of the time could never imagine. The truly rebellious young man (for a black person, of course) finds a place to live with Mrs. Moss, and prefers to eat on his own in his room and make it by himself. I lay on the bed and reveled in the delightful sensation of living out a long-sought dream. I had always flinched inwardly from the lonely terror that I had thought I would feel in a strange city, and now I had found a home….I could start anew. I wanted…to be human, to be caught up in something meaningful. But I must first get a job ( 210-211). Mrs. Moss' daughter, Bess, has delusions of marrying and living happily ever after, but Richard wants nothing to do with that. He tries work at an optical shop and a hotel, and sees co-workers such as Shorty, who's willing to demean himself if it means an extra quarter. Richard doesn't understand this and refuses to conform to such a way of life, once again going against what would be expected of him by white people. Earning his own housing, food and clothing is only one aspect of Richard's new found independence and extreme non-conformity. He also starts reading passionately, craving only to read and write. He works, reads, eats on his own, reads, and sleeps — alone:"Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the room ...It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different" (248-249). Richard finally has a sense of himself, knows full well he needs to escape the oppression of the South, and pursue his dream of writing and making a decent living in the North. He knows enough not to a make a scene of his departure, as it makes southerners uncomfortable when a black person decides to move north. But a couple days in advance, he tells his boss, who really seems to show more empathy than derision. Richard thinks it's a dream that he can finally go to Chicago. Throughout his life it was made out to be just that, a dream, for a poor, black person like himself to make it. His struggles and his actions, whether one judges them as good or bad, got him there and the trouble-making, irreverent, non-conforming boy turned into an independent man who may now have an opportunity to live out his dream. And no doubt, the possibility of living that dream was made possible by non-conformity. The way Richard went outside of the norm and lived in a different way to become something is commendable. He made it to his goal. And if he stepped on anyone to do it, it was mostly oppressive white people who deserved to be stepped on over and over again because they normally do the stepping. "This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled" (257). These words show Richard's absolute conviction, his awareness that everything around him is wrong. Maybe he didn't know everything about racial tension when he was younger, but it seems something inside him knew, and made him live the life he did, to find a better tomorrow. Perhaps if there were more Richard Wrights in that time or even earlier in the history of the United States, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s would have occurred much earlier. It takes those not willing to be subjected to majority rule and break conformity's restraining barriers to make a real difference. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. |
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