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I've just finished reading a book tonight that was so difficult to read - not in its style, but in its content - that I had to shelve the book a few months ago and wait to find the guts, I guess, to face it again.



Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945) was a bestseller so controversial in its day that it was even denounced in the Senate by a Mississippi senator. It's an autobiography: the story of the author's life growing up in the South. The new edition I was able to read also included what Wright originally intended to form the second half of the book - a piece on his experiences after moving north to Chicago and his attraction to the Communism. While he was working with his editor to prepare the book for publication, the Book of the Month Club agreed to consider the book if the second section was removed. Wright agreed to it, and published bits of the second section as magazine articles over the next year or two. The two halves were not reunited in print until 1993.

Wright, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and a mother who suffered recurring bouts of devestating illness, was born in the shadow of a former plantation in Mississippi in 1908. After being deserted by their father, Wright and his brother were shifted from one family home to the next throughout the deep South, once, even, spending time in an "orphan home." This is a story of hunger - ravenous, unending hunger for a boy who never found enough to eat at home and his hunger for escape to the North he could hardly even imagine, a hunger so strong it drove him to steal in order to save the money for a train ticket --- in fact, Wright originally planned on naming the book "American Hunger."

It's also the story of Wright's "education" in learning how to act as a black man in the early 20th century South. He wasn't born knowing how to act in a Jim Crow world in order to stay alive. He learned it bit by bit, after painful experience, his mother sometimes beating it into him for fear she would lose him to white violence. Perhaps some of the most uncomfortable passages for me to read were set in Jackson and Memphis, where Wright was working prior to escaping the South in 1927. He describes simple, daily interactions with white men and women and his paralyzing fear as he gauged his every response to them, knowing that there were certain facial expressions and certain words ONLY that were acceptable. That white Southerners expected a certain demeanor from black men, women, and children, and the result of not meeting their expectation to the letter could be violence or death.

While working in a small Memphis factory, Wright asked a co-worker of his, an Irish immigrant disliked by most of the other men, to let him pick up books at the library using the man's library card. African Americans were not allowed to have library cards, but Wright was desperate to read more than just the newspapers he was able to afford. He had long felt drawn toward writing, and as he discovered the greats of modern American lit, he grew determined to become an author. He was intrigued by the power of the written word - the ability talented writers had to describe human suffering... Wright ultimately became a writer himself. An earlier novel, Native Son (1940), became so popular that it began a run on Broadway as a play directed by Orson Welles in 1941. After the publication of his next book, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), the FBI began an investigation of Wright that would last for a number of years. He was already a public figure, then, when his autobiography was published. Judging from the first edition's dust jacket, it was definitely marketed to whites as a sensational expose of the South.

Black Boy wasn't by any means an easy book for me to read, but I'm glad I read it. Not only does it have a lot to tell us about conditions in the South (and elsewhere) during the early part of the last century, but it makes you wonder about the people snatching it up at the bookstores during the spring and summer of 1945. What was going on in their own lives at the time that made them so receptive to this book --- and made it so appalling to others?