Summary
Our too-young and too-new America . .
. insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy
and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black. . . .
Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults
of character!
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Richard arrives in Chicago and finds the city startling.
The city’s bleak industrial landscape depresses him and fills him
with fears for his success. The casual interactions between blacks
and whites bewilder him. He gets a room in the building where his
aunt Cleo lives. He goes looking for a job the next morning, and
finds one as a porter in a delicatessen owned by the Hoffmans, an
immigrant Jewish couple. The work is easy, but Richard has a great
deal of trouble understanding the Hoffmanses’ thick accents. Richard
wrongly assumes that their occasional impatience with him stems
from racism.
Richard muses on the dehumanizing social status of black
Americans. He notices that the Hoffmans own and operate their store
in a whites-only neighborhood. Tortured by the perpetual uncertainty of
his fate, Wright discusses his constant fear that he will inadvertently
offend the whites who tolerate his presence in the neighborhood.
This fear brings Richard closer to sympathizing with other black
people who appear to surrender to racism—people like Shorty. Richard
does not approve of such surrender, but he now understands why it
occurs.
Chicago inspires in Richard new dreams and desires, but
he wonders which, if any, can come true. Rather than focusing on
“external events” like lynchings, Richard comes to understand that
being black in America is a life of constant “psyche pain,” not
merely physical pain. He thinks that few blacks can fully comprehend
or tell the story of their pain.
Richard takes an examination to be a postal clerk. Out
of fear that the Hoffmans will fire him if he dares to look at another
job, he simply stays away from work for three days while he rests
and takes the examination. When he returns, he explains his absence
with the lie that his mother died in Memphis and that he had to
go the funeral. The Hoffmans tell him they know he is lying, but
they let him stay because they like him. They insist that they are
not like Southerners. Richard is ashamed that he has lied out of
fear, but he still cannot admit his lie. He quits his job the following
Saturday, without telling the Hoffmans anything, because he is too
ashamed to work there any longer.
Richard gets a job as a dishwasher in a café. His white
female coworkers seem ignorant, careless, and shallow, but pleasant enough.
They occasionally brush against him as they maneuver around the
restaurant, which stuns him, because a black man touching a white
woman, even inadvertently, is a dreadful offense in the South.
Richard’s white female boss is amused when she finds him
reading the American Mercury—the magazine H. L.
Mencken edits. Richard is horrified to discover that Tillie, the
Finnish cook, spits in the food, and he tells a black girl, recently
hired as a salad chef, about it. Richard and the girl want to tell
the boss, but they wonder if she will believe them in light of the
fact that they are black. The girl finally decides to tell the boss,
and Richard confirms her testimony. The boss observes Tillie spitting
and fires her immediately.
