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).