Black Boy

by Richard Wright

In Memphis we lived in a one-story brick tenement.

It was in this tenement that the personality of my father first came fully into the orbit of my concern. He worked as a night porter in a Beale Street drugstore and he became important and forbidding to me only when I learned that I could not make noise when he was asleep in the daytime.

The orphan home was a two-story frame building set amid trees in a wide, green field.

The most abiding feeling I had each day was hunger and fear. The meals were skimpy and

I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure.

I am not sure today a black individual could get away with such self-disapproval regarding his race.

I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it.

Ella’s whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response.

The days and hours began to speak now with a clearer tongue. Each experience had a sharp meaning of its own. There was the breathlessly anxious fun of chasing and catching flitting fireflies on drowsy summer nights.

There was the pitying chuckle that bubbled in my throat when I watched a fat duck waddle across the back yard.

There was the relish of eating my first fried fish sandwich, nibbling at it slowly and hoping that I would never eat it up.

There was the all-night ache in my stomach after I had climbed a neighbor’s tree and eaten stolen, unripe peaches.

wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched, it seemed, except in violence.

“What was Granny’s name before she married Grandpa?” “Bolden.” “Who gave her that name?” “The white man who owned her.” “She was a slave?” “Yes.” “And Bolden was the name of Granny’s father?” “Granny doesn’t know who her father was.” “So they just gave her any name?” “They gave her a name; that’s all I know.”

It was summer and the smell of clay dust was everywhere, day and night.

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.

Though I was nearly nine years of age, I had not had a single, unbroken year of school, and I was not conscious of it.

hated Jews,

To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage.

asafetida

Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination.

I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.

“Niggers smell from sweat. But white folks smell all the time.” The enemy is an animal to be killed on sight.

Once again I knew hunger, biting hunger, hunger that made my body aimlessly restless, hunger that kept me on edge, that made my temper flare, hunger that made hate leap out of my heart like the dart of a serpent’s tongue, hunger that created in me odd cravings.

This oft used way of many, many examples of what he’s talking about; I wonder if he does this in his other books?

the Seventh-Day Adventist religious school

As the first week of school drew to a close, the conflict that smoldered between Aunt Addie and me flared openly.

and I knew more than she thought I knew about the meaning of religion, the hunger of the human heart for that which is not and can never be, the thirst of the human spirit to conquer and transcend the implacable limitations of human life.

returned home with a pocketful of money that melted into the bottomless hunger of the household.

pot liquor from greens

Granny’s informative prayers at the breakfast or dinner table.

“You, git ’way from me, you young’un,” was all that he would ever say.

It was from Granny’s conversations, year after year, that the meager details of Grandpa’s life came to me. When the Civil War broke out, he ran off from his master and groped his way through the Confederate lines to the North. He darkly boasted of having killed “mo’n mah fair share of them damn rebels” while en route to enlist in the Union Army.

“Granny, what did Grandpa say? I didn’t quite hear him,” I whispered. She whirled and gave me one of her back-handed slaps across my mouth. “Shut up! The angel of death’s in the house!” “I just wanted to know,” I said, nursing my bruised lips. She looked at me and relented. “He said that God had picked out his seat in heaven,” she said. “Now you know. So sit down and quit asking fool questions.” When

The routine of the house flowed on as usual; for me there was sleep, mush, greens, school, study, loneliness, yearning, and then sleep again.

1924.

Later in the afternoon a tall white man wearing a cool white suit, a Panama hat, and white shoes came toward me. “Is this the nigger?” he asked a black boy as he pointed at me. “Yes, sir,” the black boy answered. “Come here, nigger,” he called me. I went to him. “They tell me my dog bit you,” he said. “Yes, sir.” I pulled down my trousers and he looked.

“Humnnn,” he grunted, then laughed. “A dog bite can’t hurt a nigger.”

And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard.

What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things?

Was I really as bad as my uncles and aunts and Granny repeatedly said? Why was it considered wrong to ask questions?

Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

What would the story be about? It resolved itself into a plot about a villain who wanted a widow’s home and I called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre. It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, and stemmed from pure feeling. I finished it in three days and then wondered what to do with it.

the Southern Register

above all, they could not understand why I had called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre.

In the end I was so angry that I refused to talk about the story. From no quarter, with the exception of the Negro newspaper editor, had there come a single encouraging word.

Horatio Alger

I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle.

I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation’s capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.

With almost seventeen years of baffled living behind me, I faced the world in 1925.

The boss, his son, and the clerk treated the Negroes with open contempt, pushing, kicking, or slapping them.