Black Boy

by Richard Wright

“Listen, son,” he said. “Listen. You’re a black boy and you’re trying to make a few pennies. All right. I don’t want to stop you from selling these papers, if you want to sell ’em. But I’ve read these papers now for two months and I know what they’re trying to do. If you sell ’em, you’re just helping white people to kill you.” “But these papers come from Chicago,” I protested naïvely, feeling unsure of the entire world now, feeling that racial propaganda surely could not be published in Chicago, the city to which Negroes were fleeing by the thousands. “I don’t care where the paper comes from,” he said. “Just you listen to this.” He read aloud a long article in which lynching was passionately advocated as a solution for the problem of the Negro. Even though I heard him reading it, I could not believe it. “Let me see that,” I said. I took the paper from him and sat on the edge of the steps; in the paling light I turned the pages and read articles so brutally anti-Negro that goose pimples broke out over my skin. “Do you like that?” he asked me. “No, sir,” I breathed. “Do you see what you are doing?” “I didn’t know,” I mumbled. “Are you going to sell those papers now?” “No, sir. Never again.”