In Which Richard Wright Makes It As Far As Chicago

This is the first in a two part series.

Apt Pupil

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The compulsion of Negro life in the Deep South is to get up and travel, to get North.

"I never heard him speak of white people," Richard Wright once said of his grandfather, a former slave. "I think he hated them too much to talk of them."

His own father abandoned the family when Richard was three. His mother was penniless; she placed her children in an orphanage for the time being, having no other choice. He ran away, and when police brought him back to the place, the woman in charge of it beat him severely. This was Memphis.

reading to his daughter

His mother took the family to Jackson, Mississippi, where she had various relations. When Richard tried to read a book, his grandmother slapped him across the face. She was a God-fearing woman; Wright would describe her by saying, "She was at war with every particle of reality that ever existed in this world." They moved on, to Arkansas, in a town called Elaine.

They stayed with his mother's uncle and his wife. The man owned a local bar. Shortly after Richard's arrival in Arkansas, white men murdered his uncle. The man who killed Richard's uncle was the town's deputy sheriff.

dinner in Buenos Aires

Near the end of the first World War, the Wright family was still on the move. Richard's mother took a job in a doctor's office, the best gig she had ever had. Being able to do math and read letters meant that at the age of nine, Richard was already substantially more educated any adult he encountered.

His mother suffered a stroke the next year. No one wanted Richard or his brother. His grandmother forced him to write to faraway relatives, beginning them for train fare to some other faraway place. When none arrived, the boys lived in her home, subject to her rules. The women in the house did not hate the boy, things were both worse and better they that. They resented and envied him.

graduation class

He forced his way out of the Adventist school his family favored, and into the public one. His grandmother and aunt largely ignored him. In this new place though, he made friends quickly, and he was an able pupil. His guardians were no kinder to him, but had a wary respect of Richard forced on them. He was still not even allowed to attend his grandfather's funeral.

Reading Black Boy, Wright's powerful chronicle of his upbringing, is a sad affair. It is a lot easier to understand what he went through by his own reckoning. The actual details of his life, stripped of Richard's presence, seem astoundingly alien so many years later. How could he have survived this life?

planning the stage version of "Native Son" with collaborator Paul Green

As he grew older, Richard moved out of his grandmother's house. He dreamed of Chicago, a city he imagined as a relative utopia. Writing had always been an idea in the back of his mind once he learned to read. His first writing was, of course, a memoir, a development that gives all the justification the form ever needed to exist. No one he knew liked the story, but they read it. The white women he worked for told him, "Who on earth put such ideas into your nigger head?"

He graduated middle school at the top of his class. Instead of going on to high school with his friends as he wanted, he had to work. This was Arkansas.

Anger had been an aspect of his life to this point, but he had been too naive to give it the credence it deserved. More knowledgeable and intelligent than any who surrounded him, it would have been silly for him not to be angry, to not realize how fucked things were. Still, he could and would contain it in order to keep a job. The problem was that whites basically wouldn't let him.

Like many of his peers, he turned to small crime in order to pay the bills, taking up various rackets in his line of legitimate work. Once he had enough, he tried to put the southern portion of the United States as far behind him as he possibly could. Unfortunately, this only got him as far as Memphis again.

There he worked as a messenger for the American Optical Company, earning ten dollars a week. Blacks could not take books out of the library in Memphis, so Richard Wright feigned that he was picking them up for a white person. The first book he took out was fortunately a masterpiece: Prejudices, by H.L. Mencken. In order to conceal his reading, he wrapped books in newspapers.

Women took notice of him. At first they were mostly white and mostly married, recognizing his stilted charisma and classic good looks. He had a cynical view of the institution of marriage, informed by his parents' disastrous union. "I'll never forget the way you blew my head off my head when I told you what I think every man eventually wants and you told me of a woman's conceit," the writer Margaret Walker warned Richard. "I'll never humiliate myself further by breathing such a thing to you." As time went on, he mainly dated Jewish women he met at socialist gatherings.

Somewhat recovered from her stroke, his mother and his brother joined him in the small city. From there, he made the bigger jump. This was Chicago, then and now one of the most segregated cities in America. There he found work at a hospital, but layoffs hit soon after, and the family was forced into a painfully tiny attic near the train tracks. For the first time, however, he could purchase books of his own and keep them somewhere. The copies he obtained were mostly secondhand, but between communist pamphlets, Proust, Faulkner and Joyce, it was in this way he began an entirely new kind of education.

In American Hunger he said of Proust that he admired "the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate and psychological structure of the Frenchman’s epic of death and decadence. But it crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people in my environment with an equal thoroughness, and the burning example before me eyes made me feel that I never could." Then later, he wrote, "The writer can now begin to project himself - objectively of course - more and more into his work."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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