In a published speech called “The Respon-
sibility of the Writer as Participant in the World
Community,” Wright confirms the central ideas
that drive her views as a writer and activist: The
writer must be true to herself; this self-grounding
will reflect the writer’s determination to present
the black experience realistically in all of its beauty
and suffering. Thematically, Wright’s work has
reflected this pursuit of truth: The oppression of
the black working class mirrors world poverty but
does not prevent the emergence of a spirituality
and courage that helps blacks transcend adversity
and work toward unity, and black women, as writ-
ers and fictional characters, have borne the burden
of racism just as black men, but black women have
also struggled against the oppression of black men
and have refused to be silenced.
Wright’s coedited volume Give Me a Child re-
flects her interest in speaking for the voiceless and
celebrating courage, as she does in A. Phillip Ran-
dolph’s biography. In the poem based on a actual
incident, “To Some Millions Who Survive Joseph
Mander, Sr.,” Guilford explains that Mander, a
black man, drowned (in Philadelphia) while trying
to save the life of a white youth. Wright universal-
izes Mander’s experience and pleads that her read-
ers remember the irony of his sacrifice for a white
youth who later might join others in denying life
to blacks like Mander.
The details of This Child’s Gonna Live are star-
tlingly real, resembling an earlier black novel,
These Low Grounds (1937) by Waters Turpin, about
black oyster pickers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Wright immerses the reader in the grinding pov-
erty, racism, sexism, and intraracial strife of the
lives of blacks on Maryland’s oyster-bearing East-
ern Shore during the late 1920s. The driving force
in the novel is Mariah Upshur, wife of Jacob and
mother to three boys. Mariah’s central motivation
is to leave Tangierneck (“the Neck,” in local dialect)
with her children and save the life of her unborn
child who, like her previous child, might not sur-
vive without sufficient food and clothing. Mariah
and her family subsist on potatoes, molasses sand-
wiches (for the children’s lunches), an occasional
slab of fatback, and chicken (in rare instances for
company). The time of the novel is significant be-
cause Wright implies a connection between the
decline in the availability of oysters for blacks to
pick and the 1929 stock market crash. The reader,
then, is encouraged to compare the half-starved,
scantily clad, worm-infested Tangierneck blacks
who somehow manage to survive with some of the
more privileged urban whites who commit suicide
because of their lost fortunes.
The racial oppression of the Upshur family
and other blacks is due to lost fertile land, a valu-
able source for farming when there are no oysters
to bring in income. Wright combines the Neck’s
interracial history and violence with white greed,
despite racially mixed bloodlines. At least two gen-
erations of Upshurs owned land before hard times
fell on Jacob’s father, Percy Upshur. To relieve him-
self of debt, Percy borrowed money from Bannie
Dudley, a white neighbor, who eventually took the
land when Percy could not pay her. Blacks who
pay higher rents to live on the Upshurs’ less fer-
tile ground are bitter and resentful toward Bannie,
who is supported by other whites, and Percy, who
is powerless to retrieve the land, although he and
Bannie have a son and share one white ancestor.
Against this backdrop of communal strife, Wright
implies that it is Mariah’s spirituality—even with
its many shortcomings—that encourages Jacob to
keep the family together.
Wright, like Mariah, continues to work by
sharing her creative talents; now in her 70s, she
is a licensed poetry therapist and teaches creative
writing.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, Jennifer. “ ‘It’s a Time in the Land’: Gen-
dering Black Power and Sarah E. Wright’s Place in
the Tradition of Black Women’s Writing.” African
American Review 31 (Summer 1997): 211–223.
Guilford, Virginia. “Sarah Elizabeth Wright.” Diction-
ary of Literary Biography. Vol. 33, 293–300. De-
troit: Gale, 1984.
Wright, Sarah. “The Responsibility of the Writer as
Participant in the World Community.” Zora Neale
Hurston Forum 3, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 34–39.
Australia TarverWright, Sarah Elizabeth 569