1182 Wright, Richard
spite of the family’s acute poverty, Granny also bans
Wright from working on Saturdays for reasons of
strict religious observance, and he feels the effects of
this decision deeply. As a young boy, he experiences
constant, intense bouts of hunger from a nutrition-
ally inadequate diet of mush and lard gravy. In one
passage, he describes the difficulty of watching other
children eat sardine sandwiches purchased during
school breaks with the money they have earned from
Saturday jobs.
Despite Wright’s inability to subscribe to the
religious order, Granny’s campaign to save his soul
continues unabated. In an interesting church epi-
sode, Wright tries to allay Granny’s fears for his soul
by indicating that he would surely believe in God
if only he could see proof in the form of an angel,
as Jacob did. Believing that her grandson has really
seen an angel, Granny summons the church elder
with great pride, only to be humiliated when Wright
publicly corrects her misinterpretation. The episode
casts him in a renewed shadow of scorn.
Granny’s religious thinking also underlies her
strong distaste for fiction and storytelling. In a
memorable scene, Wright convinces Ella, a black
schoolteacher staying with the family, to tell him the
story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives. Captivated,
his childish imagination soars until Granny’s furi-
ous interruption, during which she slaps Richard,
reprimands Ella, and declares storytelling the devil’s
work. At another time, when Wright publishes his
first story in the Southern Register, Granny expresses
grave suspicion about his motives. To Wright, she
seems unable to grasp the concept, and value, of
fiction.
Wright’s mother, too, discourages his writing,
preferring more “serious” tasks. Although Wright
focuses less on his mother’s religious indoctrina-
tion than he does on Granny’s, there is little doubt
that she, too, was a strict religious advocate. In a
memorable passage, Wright’s mother shows signs of
recovery from her stroke and promptly begs him to
enroll with her in a Protestant church. Wright has
mixed feelings about this new church, wishing to be
among its people for the sense of community but
feeling unable to be anything more than a stranger
in this world. With emotional blackmail, the dea-
con and Wright’s mother conspire to admit him
into the church, where he endures the humiliating
experience of a forced public baptism. Wright finds
this whole business of “saving souls” exploitative,
particularly for the way it plays on the “tribal” aspect
of the congregation.
Black Boy also explores the link between religious
practice and the status of African Americans. One
example is Wright’s criticism of the irrational hatred
for Jewish people among young black children, who
learn at Sunday schools to despise them as “Christ
killers.” In a powerful passage, he elicits the dramatic
irony of such children—themselves victims of racial
prejudice—meting out cruel “folk ditties” to neigh-
borhood Jews. Another example is found within
Wright’s tense relationship with Aunt Addie. Addie
exemplifies an African American who has turned to
religion under the weight of prejudice and depriva-
tion, her success contingent on how well she can
indoctrinate others, with those who fail to conform
regarded as a threat. Wright, of course, falls into this
category, and the pair endure numerous physical
confrontations.
Wright’s personal feelings about religious ideol-
ogy are perhaps most tellingly expressed in chapter
4, where he describes his childhood learning of the
gospel as implausibly fantastic, mythical, and apoca-
lyptic. He feels that the credibility of Scripture is
undermined by a more hopeful reality outside of the
church—one in which ordinary people, under bright
sunshine, fill the streets with “throbbing life.”
Kaleem AshrafStaGeS oF LIFe in Black Boy
Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy deals
with the first 20 years of his life through the stages
of childhood, early teens, and late teens. The first
two principally cover his years growing up in Jack-
son, Mississippi, while the latter explores time spent
further north in Memphis, Tennessee. The book
closes with Wright, as a young man, about to leave
for Chicago, where he hopes white racial prejudice
will be relatively less severe than in the turbulent
South.
Early in Black Boy, Wright captures the sights,
sounds and feelings of life through the eyes of his
childhood in a long passage of short, poetic sen-
tences. This passage gives a clear sense of how his