Throughout Black Boy, Wright uses whiteness,
like the threatening white bags that hover above
the child’s head, as a metaphor for the endemically
oppressive world he knows intimately—found not
only in the dichotomized society he must endure
but also often in the biracial home of family mem-
bers, especially his white-looking grandmother.
His naive “black boy,” and later young adult Rich-
ard, must escape. For example, by age nine Rich-
ard learns a lesson about the power of whiteness
while living in Elaine, Arkansas, with his Aunt
Maggie and Uncle Hoskins, proprietors of a black
saloon, with whom his mother had sought sanc-
tuary. When covetous whites kill Uncle Hoskins,
the entire family is forced to flee in the middle of
the night out of fear that they, too, will be killed.
Wright recalled;
I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins
was buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed
to see his body nor was she able to claim any
of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been
plucked from our midst and we, figuratively,
had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into
that white-hot face of terror that we knew
loomed somewhere above us. This was as close
as white terror had ever come to me and my
mind reeled (64).Unlike the black masses of Mississippi, Arkan-
sas, and Tennessee, whose enforced obsequious-
ness and self-deprecation before white people he
had grown to detest, Richard developed a rebel-
lious spirit, becoming an outcast even among fam-
ily members who, seeking to protect him, insisted
that he, too, defer to his “Jim Crow station in life”
(274). The clear exception was the well-crafted buf-
foonery that Wright employs, for example, to gain
access to the public library and the “strange world”
of books, for which he hungered upon discovering
that words could be used as weapons—as the vehi-
cle to self actualization and true freedom. In 1927,
Wright migrated to Chicago—the North—where,
he was convinced, “life could be lived in a fuller
and richer manner” (281).
Black Boy, which ends with Wright’s departure,
at age 18, from the American South, surpassed
the success of NATIVE SON and Uncle Tom’s Chil-
dren (1938), a collection of short stories about Jim
Crow life in the South. For most critics, black and
white, it was an angry—almost too angry—book.
In March 1945, Black Boy received the Book-of-
the-Month Award. In 1992, Library of America
published Wright’s complete original work, Black
Boy together with American Hunger, which covers
his experiences in the North.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gates, Henry Lous, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard
Wright. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Perennial Li-
brary, 1966.
Linda JohnsonBlack Fire: An Anthology of Afro-
American Writings LeRoi Jones (Amiri
Baraka) and Larry Neal, eds. (1968)
AMIRI BARAKA and LARRY NEAL, leading architects
of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, edited Black Fire,
selecting writers whose nationalist leanings reso-
nated with their ideological prescription for the
production of a more utilitarian, functional art
with emphasis on the political interconnected-
ness of the artist/writer and the black community.
Most of the writers were driven by a sense of ur-
gency for change, one Baraka announced in his
May Day poem “SOS”: “Calling all black people,
man woman child / Wherever you are, calling you,
urgent, come in.” Baraka declared in the foreword
that black artists are black magicians, wizards, and
bards whose role, as founding fathers and moth-
ers of a new black nation, was to destroy Western
culture as it existed and fulfill the immediate needs
and well-being of the black community. Convinced
that new writers were adhering to this admonition,
Baraka celebrated: “We are beings of goodness,
again. We will be righteous, and teaching” (xvii).
Neal explained, in his manifesto “The Black
Arts Movement,” “The cultural values inherent
in western history must either be radicalized or
destroyed.... In fact, what is needed is a whole
new system of ideas” (188). Like Baraka, he, too,Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writings 51