Black Boy and American Hunger by Richard Wright

First published:Black Boy, 1945; American Hunger, 1977

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1908-1943

Locale: United States

Principal Personages:

• Richard Wright, who overcomes his impoverished background to pursue a career in writing
• Ella Wright, Wright’s mother, a strict disciplinarian and a stroke victim
• Nathan Wright, Wright’s father, who deserts the family when Richard is still a young boy
• Granny Wilson, Wright’s grandmother, who condemns Wright for his lack of religious faith

Form and Content

Black Boytraces the young Richard Wright’s troubled journey through the violence, ignorance, and poverty of the Jim Crow South. Originally intended as a much longer work, the autobiography focuses primarily on the racist attitudes Wright encountered as he moved from rural Mississippi and Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee. It also highlights the turmoil he suffered growing up in a supposedly cruel and often overbearing family environment. The book ends in 1925 with the nineteen-year-old Wright, having begun his literary apprenticeship, determined to become a writer and escape the nightmarish turbulence of the oppressive South.

The posthumously published American Hunger takes up where the earlier autobiography left off. It chronicles not only Wright’s disillusionment with the Communist Party, which he joined near the end of 1933, but also the difficulties he experienced as a poor African American living in the urban North. “What had I got out of living in America?” Wright asks at the end of the book. “I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and a dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life.” Wright vows to “hurl words” at his country in order to make it a safer and more promising place for all Americans.

In the early 1940’s, Wright considered himself a militant novelist; he thought his own biography would be of little interest to the American public. Writing disturbing, violent fiction such as the acclaimed novel Native Son (1940), which put to rest the myth that American racism confined itself only to the Deep South, provided him the voice he needed to help resist American injustice. Only after he traveled to Fisk University in Nashville in 1943 to speak to a group of sociology students did Wright realize the potential of his own life story. The mixed group of white and African American admirers responded enthusiastically as he recalled what it was like growing up during the early decades of the twentieth century. That night, Wright decided to abandon fiction temporarily and to string together his own thoughts and memories into a candid, personal narrative.

Wright wrote his complete autobiography, which he originally entitled American Hunger, in less than eight months, relying partly on a sketch he had written about himself in 1937 called “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Eventually included in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), his first collection of short stories, this early autobiographical piece recounts, in nine segments, the violence and resistance Wright had experienced in Jackson, Mississippi, and West Helena, Arkansas, where he spent most of his childhood, and in Memphis, where he spent his later adolescence and plotted his eventual journey north. The author’s expanded autobiography expounds on these episodes and more, including Wright’s flight from the South and his future assimilation into a Chicago slum. It also recalls his days as a young militant and the difficulties he encountered trying to make his living as a writer under the aegis of the Communist Party.

Edward Aswell, Wright’s editor at Harper & Brothers, praised the manuscript and agreed to publish it the following year. He suggested to Wright, however, that only the “Southern” section of the text be released. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which had agreed to feature the autobiography, objected to Wright’s criticism of the Communist Party and threatened to withdraw its support without specific revisions. Somewhat reluctantly, Wright accepted Aswell’s advice. Further delays postponed the publication until the following spring, when it appeared under the new title Black Boy: A Recollection of Childhood and Youth. Over the next several months, Wright’s recollections of his Chicago days were published separately as articles in various literary journals. They appeared collectively as American Hunger in 1977, seventeen years after the author’s death.

Black Boy is divided chronologically into fourteen chapters. It begins with two episodes that introduce most of the important people in Wright’s youth, including his parents and his Grandmother Wilson. On the opening page of the book, Wright recalls an accidental fire he set in his grandparents’ rural home and how he was beaten so severely afterward by his parents that he lost consciousness. The “fog of fear” that enveloped Wright following the beating stands as a fitting metaphor for the agonizing and painful relationship that he claims he experienced with his family while living in the South.

The second episode is set in Memphis and involves Wright’s gruesome killing of the family kitten. Wright had been playing with the noisy animal with his younger brother when their father, who had been trying to sleep, ordered his sons to “Kill that damn thing!” Wright knew that his father had only meant to quiet the pet, but his hatred for his father encouraged Wright to accept the statement literally. After he hanged the kitten, Wright realized that he had triumphed over his father. He was elated because he had finally discovered a way of throwing his criticism of his father into his father’s face. “I had made him feel that, if he whipped me for killing the kitten, I would never give serious weight to his words again,” Wright explains. “I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me.”

Wright recalls several other disturbing incidents in his troubled home: the day his father, who had deserted the family, humiliated his mother at a court hearing; his mother’s debilitating strokes, which left her paralyzed for months at a time; and the constant shufflings back and forth between distant relatives. He also details the numerous battles he had with Granny, his strict Seventh-day Adventist maternal grandmother, who repeatedly warned young Richard that he “would burn forever in the lake of fire” unless he converted and renounced his sinful ways. The family quarreled incessantly, and Wright often compared his living situation to that of a common criminal. “Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife,” Wright proclaims. He characterizes religion as “the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God.”

Black Boy is equally remembered for its depiction of Wright’s numerous encounters with racism and for the courage and dignity he tried to maintain while living in the oppressive South. In one gripping scene, Wright recalls how his Uncle Hoskins, who owned a thriving liquor business, was killed by a gang of jealous whites who coveted a share of his liquor profits. In order to avoid further danger, Wright’s family was forced to flee in the middle of the night. No matter where he lived in the South, Wright witnessed insult and false accusation, police brutality, rape, castration, and lynching—all at the hands of racist whites. Educated in the ethics of Jim Crow, he soon learned how to pitch his voice “to a low plane, trying to rob it of any suggestion of overtone or aggressiveness,” so that local whites would tolerate him.

Even in the more cosmopolitan Memphis, Wright experienced racial prejudice and quickly learned the numerous subjects that southern whites refused to discuss with African Americans. Despite its bigotry, however, the city environment did offer Wright new options, including the chance to discover the world of literature. In one of the book’s most memorable passages, Wright describes how, as an adolescent, he would forge notes in order to check out books from the city library. Each time he wanted new literature, he would hand the white librarian a sheet of paper that read, “Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by. . . .” Wright believed that the librarian would never suspect him of writing such a note if he actually referred to himself as a “nigger.” The trick worked. Wright read voraciously, and books by H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis taught him new ways of looking at the world. Convinced that his southern heritage would continue to terrorize him, Wright left Memphis for Chicago on December 27, 1927. He was nineteen years old.

American Hunger, a much shorter work of five chapters, begins with Wright’s arrival in “the flat black stretches” of Chicago. Initially, the northern city offered Wright little relief. As had been the case in Memphis, he had difficulty finding decent employment and had to take odd jobs washing dishes and delivering goods. By the following summer, he had acquired part-time work at a city post office; because of severe malnourishment, however, he failed his physical exam, and once again he had to seek menial employment to survive. Wright also experienced an unhealthy family environment. Shortly after his move north, he was forced to share a windowless, one-room apartment with his mother and younger brother. The “emotional atmosphere in the cramped quarters became tense, ugly, petty, bickering,” Wright remembers in American Hunger. The brutal hardships of the urban surroundings left him bewildered and lonely, as if he “had fled one insecurity and . . . embraced another.”

Wright comments extensively on his interactions with the Communist Party, which offered him a needed escape from some of his personal misery. As he recalls in the autobiography, he was invited one evening by a friend to attend his first John Reed Club meeting. At first he was skeptical, convinced that Communists cared little about minority rights and solicited African American membership merely to push a political agenda. When he finally accepted his friend’s offer, he decided to attend “in the capacity of an amused spectator.” After several meetings, however, Wright’s opinions started to change. He was impressed by “the scope and seriousness” of the club’s activities and quickly moved from the rank and file to group leadership. The club initiated Wright into the modern world and provided him sustainable relationships with both men and women for years to come.

Many of these relationships were literary, and Wright soon discovered that club members and other leftists associated with the Communist Party provided him the encouragement he needed to pursue his writing career. Wright helped form literary support groups and engaged in political debate about the future of America’s oppressed. Just as relationships with his family suffered in the face of poverty, however, so too did his association with Communists deteriorate. Although they recruited him for public appearances, many Communists, especially African American Communists, suspected Wright’s motives and often challenged him to debate. Wherever he turned, Wright was subjected to deceit and harassment. He was soon branded an “intellectual” and accused of plotting to undermine the Communist Party. Convinced that the artist and the committed activist stood at “opposite poles,” Wright severed his ties with the Communist Party in 1944.

Wright details other episodes that affected him while he was living in Chicago, including a rare humorous moment when he and his fellow workers disrupted a downtown medical research institute. Wright remembers how two older attendants got into a fistfight and accidentally knocked over the steel tiers containing scores of animals used in scientific experiments. The frightened workers quickly straightened the tiers, but they were left with the unwanted task of placing the cancerous rats, diabetic dogs, and other infected animals into their respective cages. Luckily, Wright and his cohorts were never discovered. In fact, as Wright ironically points out, they were left to marvel at how the fate of the research institute rested in “ignorant, black hands.”

Critical Context

Black Boy and American Hunger take their place within a long list of autobiographies rooted in the African American slave narrative. Like this early literary form, both books indict a racist system based on ignorance, fear, and hate. At the same time, each text exaggerates its claims. Wright’s recollections of his unhappy childhood, for example, are emotionally charged and often distort the facts. He projects his bitterness toward his family onto all African Americans, leading at times to faulty generalizations and illogical conclusions.

The value of each autobiography, however, rests on its artistic merit. Both works are continuous with Wright’s famous fiction and focus on narrative voice, imagery, and dialogue as much as on social commentary. As in his early fiction, Wright is committed to detail. Relying on the journalistic skills he developed a decade earlier, he examines both rural and urban America, analyzing myriad aspects of African American society. He cleverly manipulates scenes; interpolates description, imagery, exposition, and theme; intersperses dialogue and annotation; carefully selects and controls syntax; and varies tone. Indeed, Wright’s autobiographical writings contain some of his most eloquent prose.

Wright was relatively young—in his mid-thirties—when he attempted to write his autobiography. Though he died in Paris at the age of only fifty-two, he still had some twenty years in which to reexamine the events that had affected him so profoundly during his youth. He also had plenty of time to experiment as a writer and to grow intellectually, which he did after befriending French existentialists and African expatriates while living in France. Despite what both texts might have been had Wright postponed their writing, Black Boy and, to a lesser extent, American Hunger stand as American classics. They provide not only a critical look at American life during the early twentieth century but also a vivid account of one individual’s determination to secure a permanent place in American letters.

Bibliography

Andrews, William L., and Douglas Taylor, eds. Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” (“American Hunger”): A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Compilation of responses to Black Boy that includes contemporary criticism by such writers as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, as well as later academic evaluations.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” New York: Chelsea House, 2006. Collects essays on Wright’s autobiography by leading scholars. Includes thematic studies, as well as comparisons of Wright’s work to that of Maya Angelou and to the African American autobiographical tradition generally.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Generally considered the definitive biography of Wright. Details the period in which Wright wrote the autobiographies. Also offers an in-depth critical evaluation of each text.

Gibson, Donald B. “Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the Trauma of Autobiographical Rebirth.” Calloloo 9 (Summer, 1986): 492-498. Offers a short but informative analysis of Black Boy, arguing that the first chapter, in which Wright distances himself from his environment, sets up an outline for the rest of the text.

Mechling, Jay. “The Failure of Folklore in Richard Wright’s Black Boy.” Journal of American Folklore 104 (Summer, 1991): 275-294. Points out several passages in Black Boy that highlight Wright’s use of songs, riddles, and stories, but generally argues that Wright’s text fails as authentic folklore.

Stepto, Robert. “Literacy and Ascent: Black Boy.” In Richard Wright, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Shows how Black Boy “revoices” Wright’s own Native Son and borrows from various tropes in African American narrative literature.

Wright, Richard. Later Works. Vol. 2 in Works. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Includes an informative section of notes by Rampersad pertaining to Black Boy and American Hunger. Rampersad argues that the Library of America edition is the “complete text” that Wright presented to his publishers. Points out how the Book-of-the-Month Club influenced Wright’s editor and persuaded him to convince Wright to publish his autobiography in two volumes.