![]() ![]() I seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls.Ĭommunist party meddling or no, I can see why white publishers were wary of the book’s refusal of uplift. A million times I asked myself what I could do to save myself, and there were no answers. I no longer felt that the world about me was hostile, killing I knew it. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. In a riff on Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, Wright describes his literary self-education-he used the library card of a sympathetic white co-worker to check out books-as a mixed blessing: Poverty is corrosive, yet Wright’s escape carries with it regret, loss, sorrow, and rage. ![]() The consequences of discovery for Wright and the others are simply too great. Yet this scene, which in another writer’s hands could be laugh out loud funny, is tense, terrifying. Who knows, Wright wryly speculates, what medical advances were made that day. With only minutes to go before the scientists are due back from lunch, Wright and the others chase the animals, tossing the animals into cages willy-nilly. One day, two of the janitors, who hate each other, get into a fight that turns into a brawl-the cages are knocked to the floor, and most of the animals escape. The basement of the hospital contained a lab where white scientists performed experiments on animals (afflicting mice with diabetes and other horrors). Together with three other men, all Black, Wright worked without thanks and almost without recompense: his description of mopping stairs that people immediately muck up, offering what they think is an amusing quip about how work is never done or, as is more often the case, not even seeing him at all will make your blood boil. (Admittedly, Gates was of a different class and writing about the 1950s not the 20s and 30s.) The funniest scene concerns his job as a janitor at a Chicago hospital. There’s nothing here to compare, for example, to the meaningful pleasures described in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Colored People. Wright’s life was hard, his upbringing mean, in both senses of the world, his horizons cramped by racism and the strict religion of his family. What stands out to me about Black Boy is its almost complete lack of joy. It emphasized self-sacrifice in a way his own life had prepared him to understand. ![]() Wright believes there is something essential to communism that cannot be quashed by its instantiation, whether in the Soviet Union or south side Chicago. (And ending with the train ride to Chicago implies an overcoming that the rest of the book belies.) But I found the cruel political machinations described in the second half engrossing-excommunication, quasi-Stalinist show trials, oof. They’re certainly more reducible to a narrative of suffering that makes sense to (white) readers. (I gather the party pressured the BMOC to make the changes, which suggests an America so different from the one we live in I don’t even know what to say.) I sort of agree that the parts about Wright’s childhood and early adulthood in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee are more compelling. Wright changed the title to Black Boy after the Book of the Month club, which had selected the title-as it had done some years before with Native Son-declined to publish the manuscript’s second half, which describes Wright’s experiences after escaping the South for Chicago, specifically his involvement with the communist party. For example, they had to “mow” the orphanage’s grounds: a herd of children on their hands and knees, pulling the grass out in clumps, often too lightheaded to make any headway. ![]() He and the other children were fed only twice a day-before bed they received a thin slice of bread with a smear of molasses-but that didn’t save them from having to work. (He was turned down for a good job with the post office because he didn’t weight enough.) In one indelible scene, Wright, who has been deposited in an orphanage because his mother temporarily can’t take care of him, is dizzy with hunger. Most of all, though, the title is literal: Wright was seriously undernourished much of his life, even into adulthood. Wright wanted to call the book American Hunger, a resonant title that suggests not just the hunger that African Americans have felt to belong to their country but also the hunger with which America has devoured them. Amazing that Wright survived not just that errant moment but his childhood at all. In the first pages of his autobiography, Wright, a bored four-year-old, almost burns his grandmother’s house down, and the rest of the book is seldom less incendiary. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger) (1945/1991) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |