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The 100 best nonfiction books / No 36 / Black Boy / A Record of Childhood and Youth by Richard Wright (1945)

Richard Wright

100 best nonfiction books: No 36 – Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth by Richard Wright (1945)

This influential memoir of a rebellious southern boyhood vividly evokes the struggle for African American identity in the decades before civil rights

Robert McCrum
Monday 3 Octuber 2016

Great coming-of-age memoirs have a potency rare in literature, and can be just as influential as great novels. Richard Wright, outstanding in both genres, was an important 20th-century African American writer, renowned for his 1940 novel, Native Son. Together with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, Wright was crucial in forging an authentic literary consciousness for the black community as it struggled to escape decades of oppression after the civil war.

The bestselling Black Boy, published in 1945 (its original title had been Black Confession), explored the background to Native Son, but was also a visceral and unforgettable account of a young black man’s coming of age in the American south in the bitter decades before the civil rights movement.

Full of vivid scenes and arresting vignettes, it begins with four-year-old Richard (“angry, fretful and impatient”) setting fire to the family home, a brilliant opening that establishes young Wright as a fiery protagonist. Indeed, he presents himself throughout Black Boy as a rebel, at odds with both his ailing mother, his faithless, improvident father and tyrannical “Granny”. After the fire, the Wright family headed to Memphis, Tennessee where they lived in “a brick tenement”.

Young Richard goes to school; his father deserts the family and his sons are put into care. Eventually, they move to Arkansas, where Wright broods on “the cultural barrenness of black life”. For him, however, there is not even the consolation of religion. He’s an atheist. In church, when his fellows sing: “Amazing grace, how sweet it sounds”, he is humming under his breath: “A bulldog ran my grandma down.”

Slowly, Wright’s mature character formed itself: “At the age of 12 I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me sceptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical.”

This lifelong spirit, he writes, “made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men’s souls.”

Thus driven, and to escape the shocking racism of the south, it becomes his ambition to head north to Chicago as soon as he can afford the trip. But first, he must start out in life as a young black man in Memphis.

The first half of Wright’s “confession” is set exclusively in the south; the second part, describing his Chicago experiences, entitled The Horror and the Glory, was originally part of a longer book with the working title American Hunger. For various commercial considerations, Wright’s publishers requested that he focus on his Mississippi childhood and drop the final (Chicago) chapters. American Hunger became Black Boy, and would not be published with all parts fully restored until 1991, when the Library of America issued Black Boy (American Hunger).

The British, Vintage edition, though incomplete, is faithful to the 1945 edition. It subtly mythologises Wright’s African American upbringing and fearlessly confronts southern racism. For Wright, coming of age was all to do with claiming and celebrating his identity as a black man. The south, he declared, in a fierce passage, had only allowed him “to be natural, to be real, to be myself” through a negative form of self-expression, “in rejection, rebellion, and aggression”. He continues:

‘Men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame’: Richard Wright.

The white south said that it knew ‘niggers’, and I was what the white south called a ‘nigger’. Well, the white south had never known me – never known what I thought, what I felt. The white south said I had a ‘place’ in life. Well, I had never felt my ‘place’; or, rather, my deepest instincts had always made me reject the ‘place’ to which the white south had assigned me. It had never occurred to me that I was in any way an inferior being.

As a youngster in small-town Jackson, Wright knew only too well what it meant to be a “nigger”, a second-class citizen. He worked as a porter in a clothing store; next he worked for an optician; then he moved to a drugstore, sweeping the sidewalk. But he had a fundamental problem. He “could not make subservience an automatic part of my behaviour”.

Finally, in November 1925, he arrived back in Memphis. This was not Chicago (a journey he could not yet afford), but it was a start. He began to read, educating himself by studying the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Here, he stumbled on the work of HL Mencken, and had his Damascene moment:

Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons?

Indeed they could. Better still, Mencken was introducing the young writer to a new world: Spinoza, Gustave Flaubert, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, TS Eliot, and many more. “Were these men real? And how did one pronounce their names?” Wright was hooked. Soon after this, he set off for Chicago:

I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backward glance. The face of the south I had known was hostile and forbidding, and yet out of all the conflicts and the curses… I had somehow gotten the idea that life could be different, could be lived in a fuller and richer manner... If I could meet enough of a different life, then, perhaps, gradually and slowly I might learn who I was, what I might be.

Wright’s closing words evoke the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, making a surprising and unexpected link between himself and Martin Luther King. He has, he writes, “a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled here beneath the stars.”

A signature sentence

“A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a share-cropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands – a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realised that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there were echoes of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly different planes of reality.” (page 32)