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.