Richard Wright's Identity and Way of Life

The two men continue to harass him, when the manager and his secretary are gone, Pease summons Wright from his duties. Suddenly he finds himself hemmed in between the white men in a narrow corridor. Pease glances at him winks at Reynolds, standing a short distance away. The two white men measure him with hostile eyes. He is trapped. He realizes what they want: he volunteers to quit. He feels as if he has been slapped out of human race.

He begins his campaign to leave Jackson in earnest. He drifts from one job to another. He mingles only with blacks. One of his jobs is as a bellboy in the same hotel in which the brother of his classmate has been lynched. There, for the first time, he becomes privy to the locker-room discussions among blacks of his age and older. The discussions seem aimless, pointless, and almost frivolous. They center upon sex, women, sports and the perfidy of whites. In their fantasies, white men are conquered, vanquished, while, in reality, the situation is altogether different. He is an outsider among these men also, because he cannot live on two planes simultaneously, the fantasy and the real. For him, reality always thrusts itself upon his consciousness. Freedom is a real necessity. He leaves for Memphis, Tennessee.

In Memphis, he gets a job grinding lenses in an eyeglass factory. His supervisor interrupts his work one morning to tell him that Harrison, another black worker in a rival optical company across the street, holds a grudge against Wright. The supervisor says that Harrison carries a knife. Wright and Harrison meet that afternoon and they realize that their white supervisors have fabricated the grudge in order to pit them against each other, and then they agree to keep quiet and let the joke die. But the white Supervisors persist. They arm the two of them with knives, and tell each to attack without warning, when their strategy fail, the supervisors and a group of other white men ask Wright directly if he will settle his nonexistent grudge with Harrison in a boxing match, for five dollars apiece. Wright refuses at first but Harrison persuades him that the five dollars would be easy money, that all they will need to do is to pretend, to fight and pull punches. But the fight becomes real and brutal, at the end; the two boys have to be pulled apart having beaten each other senseless. Thus “a lie became the truth, and that two people who thought they had known what the truth was wound up living the lie”. (Rosenblatt 18)

Wright gradually evinces great interest in reading books. He takes whatever comes in his way and reads. And he reads Mencken and Mencken introduces him the great men of letters in his Prefaces. Mencken becomes an example to Wright.

I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured that man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words…Yes; this man was using words as a Weapon, using them as one would use a club, could words be Weapons? Well. Yes. For here they were. Then may be perhaps, I could use them as a weapon. (BB 218)

A few months after reading Mencken, Wright, finds the convenient opportunity to flee to the North. The book is a testimony of a Black child’s growing consciousness in a squalid environment and hatred, and white oppression. Race prejudice, discriminations and injustices are common codes of life. Fear and frustration dominate both black and white community; they reed bitterness.

Wright’s bitterness-the material which he presents in Black Boy-he nursed from his frightened mother who beat him to make him conform so he could survive. That bitterness is the fear-hate-fear complex grown hard. He is bitter because he is a man who is taunted by being told that he is a man but not allowed to act like one. (Cayton 188).

The racial dilemma present in him is quiet obvious that Wright says in his autobiography as follows: “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as ‘White’ people came from the fact that many of my relatives were ‘White’ looking people” (BB 31).

The harshly religious grandmother who dominated the household in which he was brought up, looks like a White woman. She came of Irish, Scotch, and French stock in which Black blood had somewhere and somehow been infused. His father had Indian white and Black ancestry. “Then what am I?” Richard asked his mother, and she mockingly replied: “They’ll call you a colored man when you grow up…. Do you mind, Mr. Wright?” (BB 57).

Actually, the percentage of red, white, and black blood in Richard Wright’s veins mattered not at all. What counted was that he was born into the Black world of Mississippi and experienced all its cruelty and poverty, before he escaped to Chicago, only to learn the bitter truth about that city’s ghetto horrors.

Wright’s earliest memories were of living in a humble shack overlooking the Mississippi river near Natchez. From this rural environment, his parents moved to the city of Memphis, Tennessee where they lived with their two children in a small tenement. Before Richard was six his father deserted the family to go off with another woman. Until his mother could get a job Richard had very little to eat. “As the days slid past the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness” (BB 22).

While their mother worked for meager wages as a cook white families, Richard and his brother ran the streets of Memphis, engaging in pastimes far from innocent.

I was a drunkard in my sixth year, before I had begun school with a gang of children; I roamed the streets begging pennies from passersby, haunting the doors of saloons wandering farther and farther away from home each day. I’ll and desperate, the mother placed the children in a Negro orphanage, a cheerless institution, where the boys were still hungry (BB 29).

Redeemed from the orphanage, Richard and his brother accompanied their mother to Arkansas, where they lived for a time with relatives. While waiting for the train that would take the Wright family to Arkansas, Richard Wright became aware of the racial discrimination. As he says, “….and for the first time I noticed that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a ‘White’ line and a ‘Black’ line” (BB 64). In small Arkansas towns Richard became more aware of the frightening contacts between whites and Blacks. The morning after white ruffians murdered his uncle, to rob him of his profitable saloon, the rest of the family fled town without even trying to claim the body. Richard sensed the rising racial tensions of World War-I days. “A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. (BB 64).

He participated eagerly in the stone throwing wars between the white and Black boys. “All the frightful descriptions we had heard about each other, all the violent expressions of hate and hostility that had seemed into us from our surroundings, came now to the surface to guide our actions” (BB 93).

Richard is piqued when he is advised not to meddle with the white people. As he writes,

“Can I go and peep at the white folks?” I asked my mother.

“You keep quiet” she said.

“But that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?”

“Will you keep still?”

“But why can’t I?”

“Quit talking foolishness:” (BB 99).

When Richard was twelve, he lost even the precarious security that his mother had tried to provide. She became a helpless paralytic, dependent upon relatives to care for her and the boys. After some unhappy attempts at other solutions to the problem the maternal grandmother took Richard and his mother into her home in Jackson, Mississippi.

Escape from the south became imperative and eventually Wright was able to move northward. In order to get the necessary cash, he stole from a white employer. For many Blacks such thefts were taken for granted; since the days of slavery Blacks had registered their silent protest against white exploitation by petty thievery. But White had prided himself on his honesty. Aboard a train speeding north he discovered tears on his cheeks.

In that moment I understood the pain that accompanied crime and I hoped that I would never have to feel it again. I never did feel it again, for I never stole again; and what kept me from it was the knowledge that for me crime carried its own punishment. (BB 227)

Then, came the turning point. He stumbled upon A Book of Prefaces by H.L. Mencken. Of this experience he says,

That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences…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? Well, yes, for there they were. Then, may be, I could use them as weapons? (Gibson 26).

The next year Richard left the south for Chicago and a new life. The past was dead, only its roots would persist as a memory of the days that had gone. But the memory was bitter. And out of it has flowed the bitter experiences of Black Boy.

Richard Wright showed his dislike of convention in his autobiography. His dialogues with his little brother are quite revealing in this regard. “You better hush”, my brother said. “You shut up”, I said” (BB 9).

The little boys are supposed to be silent. Richard Wright’s father who was a night porter in a Beale street drugstore does not want his day time sleep to be disturbed. But Richard is creating quite a racket and does not want, as he tells his brother categorically, to be silent.

When Richard burns the sticks in the broom one by one, his little brother asks him not to do that, Richard asks him the reason.

“You’ll burn the whole broom”, he said

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“You hush”, he said

“I’ll tell”, he said

“And I’ll hit you”, I said. (BB 10)

Richard is not only unwilling to listen to the voice of convention but he is also violent in his reaction. This militancy is to be seen in his later day conflicts. He never surrenders to anything associated with convention. He not only transgresses convention but also takes up cudgels against it.

Richard Wright is thus propelling towards his consciousness that he is a black. He is not aware of it up to a particular stage. Thereafter, he is filled with the knowledge of his black identity. His mother prepares him for the conflict ahead by training him to stand up and fight for himself. His fight with a gang of boys earns him not only the rights to the streets of Memphis but also the much-needed impetus to fight against convention and live with his black identity.

Richard has his first taste of the racial discrimination when his mother is working in a white house hold. As he says then, “If the white people left anything, my brother and I would eat well; but if they did not, we would have our usual bread and tea” (BB 26).

He wonders why he could not eat when he was hungry. He goes on to ask why he always had to wait till others ate. He could not understand why some people had enough food and others did not. Richard begins to involve himself in all matters however trivial that happens in the neighborhood as he writes, “It was in this manner that I first stumbled upon the relatives between whites and blacks and what I learned frightened me” (BB 45).

The word ‘stumbled’ is the key word underlining the accident nature of his awareness of his black identity. The white people never meant anything emotionally to Richard. They were merely people like other people. He believes that the white man is the black boy’s father and hence had the paternal right to beat him. His ‘White” grandmother puzzled him all the more, As he says,

I brooded for a long time about the seemingly causeless beating of the ‘black’ boy by the ‘White’ man and the more questions I asked the more bewildering it all became. Whenever I saw ‘White’ people now I stared at them, wondering what they were really like (BB 45).

Richard’s awareness of his black identity makes him contemplate about his own race and its short comings. The habit of reflection is newly acquired by him. He is baffled by the black man’s (a) lack of real kindness, (b) unstable tenderness (c) lack of genuine passion (d) lack of great hope (e) timid joy (f) bare traditions (g) hollow memories (h) lack of intangible sentiments binding man to man (i) shallow despair. He goes on to write, “Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it”. (BB 45)

However, it is from Ella, the coloured teacher that Richard learns about stories and gets books to read. His own mother is irritated whenever he questions her about whites and blacks. He puzzles over the strange untouchability practiced against the black people. As he says, “ I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched it seemed, except in violence” (BB 55). Richard is unable to understand the colour difference between him and his grandmother. He is baffled when his uncle Mr. Hoskins is shot by a white man.

Richard’s awareness of his black identity and his sympathetic attitude towards his own race surfaces when he comes face to face with a chain gang. At first he mistakes the chained black criminals to be elephants. He later explains that the blackness of an elephant and the stripes of a Zebra got mixed in his mind and led to his misconception of the Black criminals wearing striped dress as elephants. He again and again asks if white men ever wear stripes. By his usual catechistic manner, he prises out the truth from his mother’s lips.

“Why are there so many black men wearing stripes?”

“It’s because ….Well, they’re harder on black people”.

“The white people?”

“Yes” (BB 68).

Immediately, his militant spirit takes over and he asks his mother, “Then why don’t all the black men fright all the white men out there? There are more black men than white men…..” (BB 68).

As the black people are hated by the whites, they, in turn, hate the Jews. They treat them with contempt throwing at them abuse in nonsense rhyme.

“Jew, Jew, Jew,

What do you chew?” (BB 70).

The blacks living in the neighbourhood hate Jews. It is not because of their exploiting them but because, they have been taught even from childhood to hate them as they are Christ-Killers. As Richard Wrights. “To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust towards, Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage” (BB 71).

Richard’s acute awareness of his black identity and his growing hatred of the white people are reflected in the female poodle episode. This one seemingly ordinary episode accentuates the black hostility towards the white majority. As Richard is badly in need of money to buy food, he decides to sell his pet female poodle, Betsy. He goes to the house of a white lady and asks for a dollar in exchange for the poodle. But the lady has only ninety-seven cents. As it is three cents less, he refuses to sell the poodle. The white lady declares that he is almost the craziest nigger boy she ever did see. But, later, while talking to his mother he gives the reason why he refused.

“But I didn’t want to sell Betsy to white people”

“Why?”

“Because they are white,” I said (BB 81).

Richard begins to acquire superstitions characteristic of the black race. He lists out score of superstitions, of which the following are interesting

If my nose itched, somebody was going to visit me.

If I broke a mirror, I would have seven years of bad luck.

If I stepped over a broom that was lying on the floor,

I would have bad luck (BB 81-82).

Along with these superstitions, Richard also nurtured a fear of the white race. As he says, “A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination” (BB 83). He begins to feel the pressure of hate and threat stemming from the invisible whites. It fills him with awe, wonder and fear and as a result he begins to ask ceaseless questions.

The story of the Black woman who shoots down her husband’s killer instills in Richard a hope against the hopeless predicament of the Blacks. He writes thus, “I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless men who could violate my life at will” (BB 83).