Wright's "Black Boy" Chapter 11

Wright leaves Jackson Mississippi at the age of seventeen and arrives in Memphis to get work, make more money, reunite is family, and then plan his further trip north. He makes accommodations at a boarding house that belongs to Mrs. Moss. Wright's southern upbringing and his naivety to city life is apparent by all those his come in contact with him and he even becomes the victim of a minor scam. But Wright learns quickly. He also sees that people in Memphis, though still racist, are more warm toward blacks than in Jackson. They are more tolerant of blacks making mistakes.

One of the biggest trials Wright faces is actually between him and Mrs. Moss' daughter. Mrs. Moss continually tries to push her daughter onto Wright, insisting that they should be married. Wright is astounded by their forwardness and looking back on Wright's life in Jackson, women other than his mother and grandmother are rarely mentioned. Wright is clearly not comfortable with the openness that the Moss' have. Throughout his stay there, Mrs. Moss' daughter and Wright have a tomultous relationship. At some points the daughter throws herself at Wright, when he declines her offers she says she hates him, and at other times she teases him for his eating habits.

As Wright has a goal of bringing his mother and brother to Memphis and later to take them all to Chicago, he develops a rough financial budget which only allows him to eat a certain amount of food so that he can save. When he is caught by Mrs. Moss' daughter eating out of a can, she teases him, aggravating the deep sense of pride Wright has. " 'Don't disturb her,' I said, knowing that she was going to tell Mrs. Moss about my wanting to eat out of a can and feeling my heart fill with shame. My muscles flexed to hit her" (Wright 236).

The affects of discrimination on the personal life of blacks is an apparent theme in this book. The isolation blacks experience from whites because of Jim Crow Laws seems to carry over into personal problems. How blacks interact with each other is influenced by segregation. In some cases it appears that a bond is created through mutual experiences. Many southern blacks harbor the same resentment and those feelings of deep-seeded hatred toward whites connects them all. But in Wright's case the pain from the continual attacks on his pride and manhood isolates him a step further. His intellect, his pride, and his keen awareness of the interpersonal affects of racism also make him a social pariah in regards to the other blacks of his community. This isolation carries over into his new life in Memphis.

When making new friendships and relationships with people in a new city, it is normal to ask some personal questions to get a better sense of a person's character and personality. When Wright experiences this, he immediately puts up a brick wall. When asked about his home life, he reacts in a cold manner, "I stiffened. I did not like that. She was reaching into my inner life, where it was sore, and I did not want anyone there" (Wright 237). Despite Wright's hard and calloused outward demeanor, the condemnation he received during his childhood, from both whites and blacks, left him emotionally scarred. Not only was he mentally abused by whites, but his relationship with his family also took a toll on him as well, "I had come from a home where feelings were never expressed, except in rage or religious dread, where each member of the household lived locked in his own dark world" (Wright 238).

To let someone into his inner life would mean, to him, to allow them to further hurt him.

Wright's Black Boy Ch. 9 and 10

Life does not improve for Wright as he grows older. In fact, as a young adult he was treated with more contempt than ever before. At another job that he accepted at a store, he witnessed the mafia-like punishments his boss inflicts on the black people who do not pay their bills. In another instance, Wright accepted a ride from a car-full of white boys when they offered him a seat when they saw his bike was broken. When then declines an offered bottle of whiskey, he is immediately thrown out of the car and asked, "Nigger, ain't you learned no better sense'n that yet?- Ain't you learned to say sir to a white man yet?" (Wright 200).  From this experience Wright muses, "I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what was said and what was left unsaid," Wright 200.

Wright has the chronic problem of being in need of a job. When his friend points out that he has never been able to hold steady to a job, Wright makes himself believe that he needs to "break himself," like a horse that needs to be broken in. Looking at his employment history, he thinks that he needs to finally begin to learn how to interact with whites so that he can at least get by, at least hold onto a job. 

Wright gets a job at an optical factory that is run by a man from the north. He is especially excited because the owner, Mr. Crane, says that he will train him in how to make glasses. All Wright wants is to be skilled in something, learn a trade, and make a living that has more meaning than menial, brainless work. Though both Mr. Crane and Wright are optimistic about the business venture, the other white workers resent Wright and his desire to learn. They eventually bully him out, cornering him and forcing him to admit to a minute mistake that he did not actually commit.  Wright is left, yet again jobless and confused on how he unknowingly, yet continually pisses off white people.

He concludes that, "My words were innocent enough, but they indicated, it seemed, a consciousness on my part that infuriated white people" (Wright 215). Even the smallest, most innocent phrases that Wright could utter could send a white man into a frenzy. Wright is unable to curb this 'habit' because he unknowingly responds in ways that make him seem more than just an ignorant idiot that Southern whites demand all blacks to be. "I  began to marvel at how smoothly the black boys acted out the roles that the white race had mapped out for them" (Wright 216). Wright is for some reason, not able to fit the mold that his peers so easily assume. 

Wright finally figures out how the white man is able to contrive the deep-set mentality and life style that blacks and whites take on in the south. He sees how blacks works for whites, bow their heads and act dumb and passive in their presence, but when the whites turn around, they steal from them to get by. The whites punish this, but Wright observes how in a way, whites also promote it as a way to enslave blacks further into the role they want them to stay in. 

But I, who stole nothing, who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspired fear in them. The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior. Wright 219.

By the end of the chapter, Wright is hired at a theater and cooperates with his co-workers in a scheme to steal money from the white owner. They succeed, but the guilt Wright experiences following his first major act of thievery leaves him sick and unwilling to do such an act again. With the money he resolves to leave the south, deeming it a land that he could never prosper in because of his awareness and intellect, qualities he cannot stifle.

Wright's Black Boy Chapters 7 and 8

Chapter 7

It is summer and the idleness surrounding the freedom from school has pushed Richard to look for another job. He takes the position as a water boy for a brickyard. The white brickyard owner has a severe and violent dog that occasionally bites the workers. Despite the attacks, the owner never leashes it. One day Richard gets bit and when he approaches his employer, the man says, "A dog bite can't hurt a nigger" (Wright 180).

When school starts again, the eighth grade, the walking commute exhausts Richard and he is unable to concentrate. He also goes without books for the first month. 

"The bleakness of the future affected my will to study" (Wright 181). 

Richard begins to question the origin for the conflict between blacks and whites, "What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things?" (Wright 181). But the relationship established between blacks and whites is so engrained in their mentality, that Richard's peers do not want to address his questions, or don't know how to. So they avoid them with silences and by contorting them into jokes. "They were vocal about the petty individual wrongs they suffered, but they possessed no desire for a knowledge of the picture as a whole" (Wright 181).  Wright begins making steady and disheartening discoveries, 

"Ought one surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. 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." (Wright 182). 

The growing bleakness of his future and the dismal boredom he endures during the school day somehow inspires Richard to write a story. When he finishes it, he decides to publish it in the local Negro newspaper. When the story comes out, his friends and family are in disbelief. It is inconceivable to them why Richard would write a story at all. What made him do it? How did he come up with the content? They all grow suspicious of him and Richard becomes more alienated than ever. Even without the approval of his friends, Richard begins to dream of going north and continuing to write. 

The last realization Richard makes in the chapter is a defining one, one that transcends the consciousness of all other blacks around him, 

"I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; 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" (Wright 186).

Richard realizes just how stifling the Jim Crow laws are, that they were created to not only be engrained in the minds of both black and white people, but they were meant to never be questioned or noticed as unjust. Both whites and blacks accepted them without confronting or questioning them. The acceptance of the Jim Crow laws led to the ongoing mind-control white congressmen had over blacks.

Chapter 8

One day Richard sees one of his friends crying on a porch. When Richard inquires as to what is wrong, the boy tells Richard that his older brother Bob had been shot for supposedly hiring a white prostitute. From that moment, the reality of being a black man in the South became a constant threat that hangs over Richard until adulthood, "Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. - What I had heard altered the look of the world.- The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worth-while to make any move at all" (Wright 190). Wright is paralyzed with fear. He realizes that there is a constant threat of being misunderstood or caught doing what was legal for whites to do but not blacks, the penalty of which is death without trial or the opportunity to explain the circumstances. 

Richard had never experienced or first-hand witnessed the violence of whites against blacks, but the cautionary tales he hears work in a way that controls his and all other blacks' behavior in a way that is more effective than out-right beating all blacks. The propaganda and fear of hearing stories second-hand works as a more effective tool for the whites in instilling fear and subordination in blacks.

"The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew. - As long as it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was compelled to give my entire imagination over to it" (Wright 190).

Another school term ends and Richard is selected to give the valedictorian speech.  He is confronted by the principal and is given a pre-written speech for blacks to read. The worst thing a person can do to Richard is question his intellect and valid opinion, and the principal does. " 'Listen boy, you're going to speak to both white and colored people that night. What can you alone think of saying to them? You have no experience...' I burned" (Wright 193).  There develops an extreme conflict between the principal and Richard's principles. The principal goes on to bait and threaten Richard, but Richard sticks to his moral compass and reads his own speech at the ceremony. By the time of the ceremony, word had spread about the twos' encounter and after Richard finished his speech, no one applauded but a few. 

"I did not want to see any of them again. I walked home, saying to myself: The hell with it! With almost seventeen years of baffled living behind me, I faced he world in 1925" (197).

Richard Wright's "Black Boy" Chapters 5 and 6

Wright again displays his abnormally large capacity for learning. Despite his failure to get a full year of schooling in, when he starts a steady attendance under his grandmother's instruction, he leaps through the grades in a matter of weeks. His family is astonished that such a ill-behaved boy could be so smart. 

He is so poor though that he is unable to take or buy lunch at school. A classmate recognizes his plight and suggests a job of selling papers from Chicago. Wright takes up this job and enjoys reading the fictional story inserts, though he never reads the actual newspaper. He begins selling them to his neighbors and friends and reaps the benefits of having a circulation with a steady, yet meager income of his own. That is until one of the men who buys from him confronts him on the content of the newspaper. It turns out Wright had been distributing propaganda that promoted Ku Klux Klan doctrines. 

Wright learns two lessons from this experience: 1. Know and clearly understand a product before you promote it, and 2. That the North was not the black-heaven he had imagined it to be. Wright was confused on how a Chicago-based paper could publish and distribute ideals that opposed the accepting nature Wright believed all Northerners embodied. 

The rest of Chapter 5 consists of Wright again demonstrating his refusal to be beaten, this time by his grandmother, and of his grandfather dying. His grandfather had fought for the Union in the Civil War, but due to spelling errors and his illiteracy, he was never granted the pension he was promised.  He died believing that another Civil War was bound to erupt because of the segregation and repression of blacks that remained. 

After his grandfather dies, Wright confronts his grandmother on the restrictions she made that refused work on Saturdays, and thus slashed any hopes Wright had of getting a job. The confrontation leads to a verbal battle that he wins, and despite the fact he is spiritually estranged from his grandma and aunt, Wright's mother shows her approval with a hug and kiss.

Wright starts the search for a job right away and takes the first reference he hears about working for a white family doing various household chores. This is his first true interaction and experience working directly under a white person.  The first sign of trouble was when the Missus asked a list of questions, one of them being, point blank, whether he stole. In response Wright laughed. Who would ever answer, "Yes, I steal," to an interview question. 

The woman not only believes that  stale bread and moldy molasses is a suitable breakfast for a black, but she also "assaulted his ego,"

"What grade are you in school?"

"Seventh ma'am,"

"Then why are you going to school?" she asked in surprise.

"Well, I want to be a writer," I mumbled, unsure of myself.-

"A what?" she demanded.

"A writer," I mumbled.

"For what?"

"To write stories," I mumbled defensively

"You'll never be a writer," she said. "Who on earth put such ideas into your nigger head?" (Wright 162).

Even after he quits that job that very day for the above reasons, he convinces himself that that woman was an isolated case, that there are white people out there who are nice and fair. So he goes to another white home to do chores and is again faced with a host who is aghast at his opinion and experiences that are so outside of the black stereotype that she had accepted as being all-encompassing and true.  His lack of knowledge to milk a cow seemed absurd to the woman.

"I said nothing, but I was quickly learning the reality - a Negro's reality- of the white world. One woman had assumed that I would tell her if I stole, and now this woman was amazed that I could not milk a cow, I , a nigger who dared live in Jackson... They were all turning out to be alike, differing only in detail. I faced a wall in the woman's mind, a wall that she did not know was there" (Wright 163).

What astonishes me is that not only white people think it outrageous that Wright would want to be a writer, but also black people.  Wright is still an adolescent, barely a teenager, and all of the adults in his life have already shut down the dreaming that is normal for children to make.  These experiences illustrate the conditioning black children were raised with that contained their creative thinking and curbed any desires to attain an elevated lifestyle. These children were not only restricted from equality physically, but also mentally.

Wright's mother begins to heal fast, and with her growing health grows her passion for religion. She forces Richard to go to church. The peer pressure he receives from his friends also demands that he attend church to be accepted as part of the group.  At one church gathering, in the thrall of a heated sermon, the imploring looks he receives from his weak mother forces him to accept an invitation to be baptized, despite the hypocrisy he sees surrounding the religion. 

"The Bible stories seemed slow and meaningless when compared to the bloody thunder of pulp narrative. And I was not alone in feeling this; other boys went to sleep in Sunday school. Finally the boldest of us confessed that the entire thing was a fraud and we played hooky from church" (Wright 171).

Wright learns that he must do certain things and follow the status quo to an extent if he is to be accepted in the community. An initiation of sorts. After which he can join the others in disowning the doctrines. 

I have noticed that Richard remains an outsider  from all of the people surrounding him. It may be due the constant moving he experienced as a child and so his lack of having any long-term friends, but it may also have to do with his elevated intellect and heightened curiosity with the world and the societal norms that have been accepted without ever being questioned or challenged. Richard never has a best friend worth mentioning, and he is in always the object of disapproval in his community.