Modern American Memoirs (23 page)

Born on a cotton plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and a teacher, Richard Wright ended his formal schooling at sixteen.

At seventeen, Wright moved to Memphis, where, using forged notes to borrow books, he read most of everything the public library contained. When he was nineteen he migrated to Chicago, where he wrote poems; ten years later, he moved to New York. Switching to prose, he wrote his first four books. The novel
Native Son
(1940) and the autobiography
Black Boy
(1945) made him prominent. He was the first black novelist to write about life and rage in the northern cities.

Following an invitation from the government of France, he moved to Paris, where he and his family could live without fear of prejudice; there he stayed. He published eleven books during his short life
. Native Son
and
The Outsider
(1953) remain his best-known novels
.

Wright's memoir
Black Boy
consists of a series of dramatic encounters with the closed society in the white South of the time
. American Hunger,
the complete text of the original second section of
Black Boy,
did not see publication until seventeen years after Wright died. “My environment,” Wright said of his boyhood world, “contained nothing more alien than writing.” This selection from
Black Boy
describes Wright's literary adolescence
.

from B
LACK
B
OY

T
he eighth grade days flowed in their hungry path and I grew more conscious of myself; I sat in classes, bored, wondering, dreaming. One long dry afternoon I took out my composition book and told myself that I would write a story; it was sheer idleness that led me to it. What would the story be about? It resolved itself into a plot about a villain who wanted a widow's home and I called it
The
Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre
. It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, and stemmed from pure feeling. I finished it in three days and then wondered what to do with it.

The local Negro newspaper! That's it…I sailed into the office and shoved my ragged composition book under the nose of the man who called himself the editor.

“What is that?” he asked.

“A story,” I said.

“A news story?”

“No, fiction.”

“All right. I'll read it,” he said.

He pushed my composition book back on his desk and looked at me curiously, sucking at his pipe.

“But I want you to read it
now
,” I said.

He blinked. I had no idea how newspapers were run. I thought that one took a story to an editor and he sat down then and there and read it and said yes or no.

“I'll read this and let you know about it tomorrow,” he said.

I was disappointed; I had taken time to write it and he seemed distant and uninterested.

“Give me the story,” I said, reaching for it.

He turned from me, took up the book and read ten pages or more.

“Won't you come in tomorrow?” he asked. “I'll have it finished then.”

I honestly relented.

“All right,” I said. “I'll stop in tomorrow.”

I left with the conviction that he would not read it. Now, where else could I take it after he had turned it down? The next afternoon, en route to my job, I stepped into the newspaper office.

“Where's my story?” I asked.

“It's in galleys,” he said.

“What's that?” I asked; I did not know what galleys were.

“It's set up in type,” he said. “We're publishing it.”

“How much money will I get?” I asked, excited.

“We can't pay for manuscript,” he said.

“But you sell your papers for money,” I said with logic.

“Yes, but we're young in business,” he explained.

“But you're asking me to
give
you my story, but you don't
give
your papers away,” I said.

He laughed.

“Look, you're just starting. This story will put your name before our readers. Now, that's something,” he said.

“But if the story is good enough to sell to your readers, then you ought to give me some of the money you get from it,” I insisted.

He laughed again and I sensed that I was amusing him.

“I'm going to offer you something more valuable than money,” he said. “I'll give you a chance to learn to write.”

I was pleased, but I still thought he was taking advantage of me.

“When will you publish my story?”

“I'm dividing it into three installments,” he said.

“The first installment appears this week. But the main thing is this: Will you get news for me on a space rate basis?”

“I work mornings and evenings for three dollars a week,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Then you better keep that. But what are you doing this summer?”

“Nothing.”

“Then come to see me before you take another job,” he said. “And write some more stories.”

A few days later my classmates came to me with baffled eyes, holding copies of the
Southern Register
in their hands.

“Did you really write that story?” they asked me.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to.”

“Where did you get it from?”

“I made it up.”

“You didn't. You copied it out of a book.”

“If I had, no one would publish it.”

“But what are they publishing it for?”

“So people can read it.”

“Who told you to do that?”

“Nobody.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because I wanted to,” I said again.

They were convinced that I had not told them the truth. We
had never had any instruction in literary matters at school; the literature of the nation or the Negro had never been mentioned. My schoolmates could not understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they could not understand why I had called it
The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre
. The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien thing conceivable to them. They looked at me with new eyes, and a distance, a suspiciousness came between us. If I had thought anything in writing the story, I had thought that perhaps it would make me more acceptable to them, and now it was cutting me off from them more completely than ever.

At home the effects were no less disturbing. Granny came into my room early one morning and sat on the edge of my bed.

“Richard, what is this you're putting in the papers?” she asked.

“A story,” I said.

“About what?”

“It's just a story, granny.”

“But they tell me it's been in three times.”

“It's the same story. It's in three parts.”

“But what is it about?” she insisted.

I hedged, fearful of getting into a religious argument.

“It's just a story I made up,” I said.

“Then it's a lie,” she said.

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

“You must get out of this house if you take the name of the Lord in vain,” she said.

“Granny, please…I'm sorry,” I pleaded. “But it's hard to tell you about the story. You see, granny, everybody knows that the story isn't true, but…”

“Then why write it?” she asked.

“Because people might want to read it.”

“That's the Devil's work,” she said and left.

My mother also was worried.

“Son, you ought to be more serious,” she said. “You're growing up now and you won't be able to get jobs if you let people think that you're weak-minded. Suppose the superintendent of schools would ask you to teach here in Jackson, and he found out that you had been writing stories?”

I could not answer her.

“I'll be all right, mama,” I said.

Uncle Tom, though surprised, was highly critical and contemptuous. The story had no point, he said. And whoever heard of a story by the title of
The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre?
Aunt Addie said that it was a sin for anyone to use the word “hell” and that what was wrong with me was that I had nobody to guide me. She blamed the whole thing upon my upbringing.

In the end I was so angry that I refused to talk about the story. From no quarter, with the exception of the Negro newspaper editor, had there come a single encouraging word. It was rumored that the principal wanted to know why I had used the word “hell.” I felt that I had committed a crime. Had I been conscious of the full extent to which I was pushing against the current of my environment, I would have been frightened altogether out of my attempts at writing. But my reactions were limited to the attitude of the people about me, and I did not speculate or generalize.

I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naïve imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. 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.

Had I been articulate about my ultimate aspirations, no doubt someone would have told me what I was bargaining for; but nobody seemed to know, and least of all did I. My classmates felt that I was doing something that was vaguely wrong, but they did not know how to express it. As the outside world grew more meaningful, I became more concerned, tense; and my classmates and my teachers would say: “Why do you ask so many questions?” Or: “Keep quiet.”

I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air….

 

One morning I arrived early at work and went into the bank lobby where the Negro porter was mopping. I stood at a counter and picked up the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
and began my free reading of the press. I came finally to the editorial page and saw an article dealing with one H. L. Mencken. I knew by hearsay that he was the editor of the
American Mercury
, but aside from that I knew nothing about him. The article was a furious denunciation of Mencken, concluding with one, hot, short sentence: Mencken is a fool.

I wondered what on earth this Mencken had done to call down upon him the scorn of the South. The only people I had ever heard denounced in the South were Negroes, and this man was not a Negro. Then what ideas did Mencken hold that made a newspaper like the
Commercial Appeal
castigate him publicly? Undoubtedly he must be advocating ideas that the South did not like. Were there, then, people other than Negroes who criticized the South? I knew that during the Civil War the South had hated northern whites, but I had not encountered such hate during my life. Knowing no more
of Mencken than I did at that moment, I felt a vague sympathy for him. Had not the South, which had assigned me the role of a non-man, cast at him its hardest words?

Now, how could I find out about this Mencken? There was a huge library near the riverfront, but I knew that Negroes were not allowed to patronize its shelves any more than they were the parks and playgrounds of the city. I had gone into the library several times to get books for the white men on the job. Which of them would now help me to get books? And how could I read them without causing concern to the white men with whom I worked? I had so far been successful in hiding my thoughts and feelings from them, but I knew that I would create hostility if I went about this business of reading in a clumsy way.

I weighed the personalities of the men on the job. There was Don, a Jew; but I distrusted him. His position was not much better than mine and I knew that he was uneasy and insecure; he had always treated me in an offhand, bantering way that barely concealed his contempt. I was afraid to ask him to help me to get books; his frantic desire to demonstrate a racial solidarity with the whites against Negroes might make him betray me.

Then how about the boss? No, he was a Baptist and I had the suspicion that he would not be quite able to comprehend why a black boy would want to read Mencken. There were other white men on the job whose attitudes showed clearly that they were Kluxers or sympathizers, and they were out of the question.

There remained only one man whose attitude did not fit into an anti-Negro category, for I had heard the white men refer to him as a “Pope lover.” He was an Irish Catholic and was hated by the white Southerners. I knew that he read books, because I had got him volumes from the library several times. Since he, too, was an object of hatred, I felt that he might refuse me but would hardly betray me. I hesitated, weighing and balancing the imponderable realities.