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Black Boy | Introduction

Richard Wright made a masterful recording of his own life in the form of the novel Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. The work earned him a place as "father" of the post-WWII black novel and precursor of the Black Arts movements of the 1960s. Published in 1945 as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Black Boy was received enthusiastically by the reading public and topped the best-seller lists, with 400,000 copies sold. The commercial success of this novel secured for Wright what his acclaimed novel of 1940, Native Son, had demanded. With these two works, Richard Wright is correctly said to be one of the most powerful forces in twentieth-century American literature. Without doubt, he is the most powerful influence on modern African American writing due to his impact on James Baldwin (Another Country, 1962), and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1953).

Black Boy is an autobiographical work in which Wright adapted formative episodes from his own life into a "coming of age" plot. In the novel, Richard is a boy in the Jim Crow American South. This was a system of racial segregation practiced in some states of the U.S., which treated blacks as second-class citizens. In his novel, Wright emphasizes two environmental forces of this system: hunger and language He shows how hunger drives the already oppressed to even more desperate acts, and his emphasis on language explains how he managed to survive Jim Crow: by developing an attention to language as a coping mechanism for the surface world of life. Meanwhile, literature offered him internal release from the tensions of living without the freedom to express his dignity as a human being. Thus, Wright's novel is a powerful story of the individual struggle for the freedom of expression.

Black Boy Summary

Richard Wright's autobiographical account in Black Boy opens with his earliest memory, standing before a fireplace as a four-year-old child on a rural Mississippi plantation. Warned repeatedly to "keep quiet," young Richard instead plays with fire and nearly bums his family's house down, then unsuccessfully tries to avoid being severely punished by hiding under the burning house. After the family moves to a new home in Memphis, Richard again challenges parental authority by taking literally his father's exaggerated demand that he kill a noisy kitten. Richard lynches the cat and then feels triumphant over his stern father, who can not beat Richard because he was just following orders. However, when his mother forces him to bury the animal and pray for forgiveness for his cruel act, he feels crushing guilt. These two incidents set the stage for various attempts by young Richard to express his powerful feelings and to test the limits placed on him by his family and his environment.

Richard begins to explore the world around him early on, sneaking into saloons and begging for pennies and drinks, learning to read from neighborhood school children and learning to count from the coal man, and above all, asking questions of everyone he encounters. He is witness to several disturbing scenes and events that do not make sense to his young mind. He hears that a "'black' boy had been severely beaten by a 'white' man" and he can only assume that it is because the "boy" is the white man's son, since in Richard's world fathers are allowed to beat their children and Richard does not know what "black" and "white" means. He sees a black military regiment and asks his mother to explain the meaning of "soldiers," "rifles,"... ยป Complete Black Boy Summary