Black Boy

by Richard Wright

“Who brings food into the house?” my mother asked me. “Papa,” I said. “He always brought food.” “Well, your father isn’t here now,” she said. “Where is he?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m hungry,” I whimpered, stomping my feet. “You’ll have to wait until I get a job and buy food,” she said. As the days slid past the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness.

“Did Granny become colored when she married Grandpa?” “Will you stop asking silly questions!” “But did she?” “Granny didn’t become colored,” my mother said angrily. “She was born the color she is now.” Again I was being shut out of the secret, the thing, the reality I felt somewhere beneath all the words and silences.

“Then what am I?” “They’ll call you a colored man when you grow up,” she said. Then she turned to me and smiled mockingly and asked: “Do you mind, Mr. Wright?” I was angry and I did not answer. I did not object to being called colored, but I knew that there was something my mother was holding back.

Could I ever talk to her about what I felt, hoped? Could she ever understand my life? What had I above sex to share with her, and what had she?

I looked northward at towering buildings of steel and stone. There were no curves here, no trees; only angles, lines, squares, bricks and copper wires.

Before I could receive a permanent appointment I would have to take a physical examination and the weight requirement was one hundred and twenty-five pounds and I—with my long years of semistarvation—barely tipped the scales at a hundred and ten.

I felt that the Negro could not live a full, human life under the conditions imposed upon him by America; and I felt, too, that America, for different reasons, could not live a full, human life. It seemed to me, then, that if the Negro solved his problem, he would be solving infinitely more than his problem alone. I felt certain that the Negro could never solve his problem until the deeper problem of American civilization had been faced and solved.

I knew that he was using the Negro vote to control the city hall; in turn, he was engaged in vast political deals of which the Negro voters, political innocents, had no notion. With my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the face of the ballots: I Protest This Fraud

One morning I rose and my mother told me that there was no food for breakfast. I knew that the city had opened relief stations, but each time I thought of going into one of them I burned with shame. I sat for hours, fighting hunger, avoiding my mother’s eyes. Then I rose, put on my hat and coat, and went out.

His fear-haunted life made him suspicious of everything that did not look as he looked, that did not act as he acted, that did not talk as he talked, that did not feel as he felt.

Wrestling with words gave me my moments of deepest meaning. The short story, Big Boy Leaves Home, had posed a question: What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?

I found myself arguing alone against the majority opinion and then I made still another amazing discovery. I saw that even those who agreed with me would not support me. At that meeting I learned that when a man was informed of the wish of the party he submitted, even though he knew with all the strength of his brain that the wish was not a wise one, was one that would ultimately harm the party’s interests.

I headed toward home alone, really alone now, telling myself that in all the sprawling immensity of our mighty continent the least-known factor of living was the human heart, the least-sought goal of being was a way to live a human life.