Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, tells about the real life occurrences that characterized his life from childhood until adulthood. The book begins with Richard’s boyhood, which was spent mostly growing up in the South where Jim Crow laws still dominated the every day lives of blacks. These laws stipulated that segregation was mandatory in public places such as restaurants, movie theaters, bathrooms, and hospitals. Jim Crow laws indirectly influenced more than just segregation however; they caused Southern American to divide into a class of blacks that predominately lived in poverty. On the other hand, whites were financially more sound at the time, and abused their newly earned power by buying the black farmer’s land and employing them as laborers. The social unrest between Southern blacks and whites is a large theme of the book, directly or indirectly influencing nearly every event of Wright’s young life.
One interesting event in Wright’s childhood that is portrayed in the first chapter of Black Boy is the description of how Wright became a six-year-old drunk. As a young boy, Richard is largely unsupervised by his mother, Ella who is raising him on her own. The challenges that Ella has to face such as poverty, hunger, lack of education, and her being a black woman in Jim Crow South all contribute to her negligence raising Richard. Ella was determined to make a successful life after her husband left, and had to go to work to support her family. Because Ella is working, Richard is left to his own devices much of the time. In this event in the novel, Richard is looking for ways to entertain himself when he comes across a bar where he can laugh at the drunks entering and exiting the saloon.
One day, he gets dragged in and is encouraged to say dirty words in exchange for money and drinks. Quickly Richard becomes a fan of this game that he plays with the patrons of the bar. Wright writes, “The entire crowd in the saloon gathered about me now, urging me to drink. I took another sip. Then another. My head spun and I laughed. I was put on the floor and I ran giggling and shouting among the yelling crowd. As I would pass each man, I would take a sip from an offered glass. Soon I was drunk.” (21) Ella’s solution to young Richard’s drinking problem was to severely beat him. When this does little to change his behavior, she puts him and his brother under the care of an older black woman and Richard learns to dislike the taste of alcohol soon after.
Another interesting event in Wright’s life occurred when himself, his mother, and his brother moved to Arkansas where Ella’s sister lives. On their way there, they stop in Mississippi where they spend some time with Granny, Richard’s maternal grandmother who Richard is confused by because she is very light skinned and appears nearly white. Granny has a young schoolteacher living with her who is also named Ella, and at one opportunity when Ella is reading a book called Bluebeard and His Seven Wives Richard asks her to tell him about it. Granny, a strict Seventh Day Adventist who is against all secular literature is furious. When she realizes what is occurring, she yells, “You stop that, you evil gal! I want none of that Devil stuff in my house!” (39) She then slaps Richard and says that this will cause him to burn in hell.
A shocking scene occurs when Richard and his family are still staying with Granny. Granny is bathing Richard, and he says something insulting to his grandmother without fully realizing the extent of its rudeness. Young Richard said, “…before I knew if, words-words whose meaning I did not fully know-had slipped out of the mouth. ‘When you get through, kiss back there,’ I said, the words rolling softly but unpremeditatedly…I had no notion at that moment just how awful it was.” (41) Once again convinced that Richard was being influenced by the devil, Granny, Grandpa, and his mother all take turns attempting to beat him for the terrible thing he uttered. Richard’s young life was full of violence, sadly not even from strangers as much as his own family.
The next shocking scene occurs in Chapter Four when Richard moves back to Jackson and begins attending the religious school where his Aunt Addie works as a teacher. Aunt Addie and Richard get into an argument during class one day when she accuses Richard of eating walnuts during class. Richard was not, however he does not want to snitch on the boy who actually was guilty. She beats him in front of the class, and when they return home that night, he tells her who really was eating the walnuts out of anger that the real culprit never came forward. This makes Aunt Addie even angrier that Richard did not tell her the truth before, and she proceeds to beat him again. At this point, Richard had nearly had it with his regular beatings, and attempts to fend off Addie with a knife. They get into a very dramatic and violent fight, that the reader would never normally expect to occur between an adult and a child. Based on Wright’s description of the event, it is amazing that neither one got hurt much worse. He writes, “I bit her hand and we rolled, kicking, scratching, hitting, fighting as though we were strangers, deadly enemies, fighting for our lives.” (108)
There are so many more interesting and dramatic events in Richard Wright’s life that occur over the course of his autobiography. The most interesting of all perhaps is the library scene. In the library scene that occurs at the end of Part I, Richard becomes intrigued by the essayist H.L. Mencken. However, since he is not white he is not permitted to borrow books from the public library. He convinces one of his friends, a white coworker of his named Falk to let him use his library card to check out a few books. Falk is nervous but eventually relents, and Richard heads to the library to check out some books by H.L Mencken. When Richard gets to the checkout desk, he is faced with the woman working there who seems to suspect that his forged note is fraudulent and that his excuse of checking books out for a white man is untrue. Richard finally says, “Oh, no, ma’am. I can’t read.” (247) This seems to be what the librarian expected and wanted to hear, so finally she lets Richard go with his books. The library scene is so important in Richard Wright’s life because when he gets books out of the library it allows him to escape somewhat from the racist world he is unwillingly a part of. Wright is changed at the end of reading Mencken, and says, “I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in my life.” (249) This event in his life probably had a lot of influence on his later decision to become a writer because he truly at this point realized the power of the written word. The library scene in Black Boy is the climax of Part I of the novel, and in it it is easy to see how much Wright has grown as an individual from the beginning up until this point. He has gone under a transformation from a mischievous four-year-old to a literate, intelligent young man and by the end of the book he has gained so much intelligence that he is determined to write and make his mark on the world.
