Required to remain quiet while
his grandmother lies ill in bed, four-year-old Richard Wright becomes
bored and begins playing with fire near the curtains, leading to his
accidentally burning down the family home in Natchez, Mississippi.
In fear, Richard hides under the burning house. His father, Nathan,
retrieves him from his hiding place. Then, his mother, Ella, beats
him so severely that he loses consciousness and falls ill.
Nathan abandons the family to live with another woman
while Richard and his brother, Alan, are still very young. Without Nathan’s
financial support, the Wrights fall into poverty and perpetual hunger.
Richard closely associates his family’s hardship—and particularly
their hunger—with his father and therefore grows bitter toward him.
For the next few years, Ella struggles to raise her children
in Memphis, Tennessee. Her long hours of work leave her little time
to supervise Richard and his brother. Not surprisingly, Richard
gets into all sorts of trouble, spying on people in outhouses and
becoming a regular at the local saloon—and an alcoholic—by the age
of six. Ella’s worsening health prevents her from raising two children by
herself and often leaves her unable to work. During these times, Richard
does whatever odd jobs a child can do to bring in some money for
the family. School is hardly an option for him. At one point, the
family’s troubles are so severe that Ella must place her children
in an orphanage for a few weeks.
Life improves when Ella moves to Elaine, Arkansas, to
live with her sister, Maggie, and her sister’s husband, Hoskins.
Hoskins runs a successful saloon, so there is always plenty of food
to eat, a condition that Richard greatly appreciates but to which
he cannot accustom himself. Soon, however, white jealousy of Hoskins’s
business success reaches a peak, as local white men kill Hoskins
and threaten the rest of his family. Ella and Maggie flee with the
two boys to West Helena, Arkansas. There, the two sisters’ combined
wages make life easier than it had been in Memphis. After only a
short time, however, Maggie flees to Detroit with her lover, Professor
Matthews, leaving Ella the sole support of the family. Hard economic
times return.
Times become even harder when a paralytic stroke severely
incapacitates Ella. Richard’s grandmother brings Ella, Richard,
and Alan to her home in Jackson, Mississippi. Ella’s numerous siblings convene
in Jackson to decide how to care for their ailing sister and her
two boys. The aunts and uncles decide that Alan, Richard’s brother,
will live with Maggie in Detroit. Ella will remain at home in Jackson.
Richard, given the freedom to choose which aunt or uncle to live
with, decides to take up residence with Uncle Clark, as Clark lives
in Greenwood, Mississippi, not far from Jackson. Soon after he arrives
at Clark’s house, Richard learns from a neighbor that a young boy
had died years ago in the same bedroom Richard now occupies. Too
terrified to sleep, Richard successfully pleads to be returned to
his grandmother’s home.
Back at Granny’s, Richard once again faces the familiar
problem of hunger. He also faces a new problem: Granny’s incredibly
strict religious regimen. Granny, a Seventh-Day Adventist, sees
her strong-willed, dreamy, and bookish grandson as terribly sinful,
and she struggles mightily to reform him. Another of Richard’s aunts, Addie,
soon joins the struggle against Richard’s defiance. Richard’s obsession
with reading and his lack of interest in religion make his home
life an endless conflict. Granny forces him to attend the religious
school where Aunt Addie teaches.
One day in class, Aunt Addie beats Richard for eating
walnuts, though it was actually the student sitting in front of
Richard who had been eating the nuts, not Richard. When Addie tries
to beat Richard again after school that day, he fends her off with
a knife. Similar scenes recur with frustrating frequency over the
following months and years. One time, Richard dodges one of Granny’s
backhand slaps, causing her to lose her balance and injure herself
in a fall off the porch. Addie tries to beat Richard for this incident,
but he again fends her off with a knife. Later, another of Richard’s
uncles, Tom, comes to live with the family. One morning, Tom asks
Richard what time it is and thinks Richard responds in a sassy manner.
He tries to beat Richard for his supposed insolence, but the boy
fends him off with razor blades.
Meanwhile, Richard picks his way through school. He delights in
his studies—particularly reading and writing—despite a home climate
hostile to such pursuits. To the bafflement and scorn of everyone,
he writes and publishes in a local black newspaper a story titled
“The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre.” He graduates from the ninth grade
as valedictorian, giving his own speech despite the insistence
of his principal, friends, and family that he give a school-sanctioned
speech to appease the white audience.
As Richard enters the adult working world in Jackson,
he suffers many frightening, often violent encounters with racism.
In the most demoralizing of these encounters, two white Southerners,
Pease and Reynolds, run Richard off his job at an optical shop,
claiming that such skilled work is not meant for blacks. Richard
is upset because the white Northerner who runs the company, Mr.
Crane, has hired Richard specifically for the purpose of teaching
a black man the optical trade, but then does little to actually
help defend Richard against his racist employees.
As his despair grows, Richard resolves to leave for the
North as soon as possible. He becomes willing to steal in order
to raise the cash necessary for the trip. After swindling his boss
at a movie theater, selling stolen fruit preserves, and pawning
a stolen gun, Richard moves to Memphis, where the atmosphere is
safer and where he can make his final preparations to move to Chicago.
In Memphis, Richard has the seeming good fortune of finding
a kind, generous landlady, Mrs. Moss, who determines that he must marry
her daughter, Bess. Richard does not take to Bess, so his living situation
is awkward until Mrs. Moss comes to terms with the fact that her
daughter will never be Richard’s wife. Richard takes a job at another
optical shop, where Olin, a seemingly benevolent white coworker,
plays mind games with Richard and Harrison, another young black
worker, in an attempt to get them to kill each other. These strategies
culminate in a grotesque boxing match between Richard and Harrison.
Another white coworker in the optical shop, Falk, is genuinely benevolent
and lets Richard use his library card to check out books that otherwise
would be unavailable to him. Richard begins reading obsessively
and grows more determined to write. His mother, brother, and Maggie
soon join him in Memphis. They all decide that Richard and Maggie
will go to Chicago immediately and that the other two will follow
in a few months.
In Chicago, Richard continues to struggle with racism,
segregation, poverty, and with his own need to cut corners and lie
to protect himself and get ahead. He suppresses his own morals,
forcing himself to work at a corrupt insurance agency that takes
advantage of poor blacks. He also works in a café and for a couple
of well-meaning Jewish storeowners, the Hoffmans, in a whites-only
neighborhood. Irresponsibly, Richard soon quits to try to get a
job in the post office.
As the Great Depression forces him and millions of others
out of work, Richard begins to find Communism appealing, especially
its emphasis on protecting the oppressed. He becomes a Communist Party
member because he thinks that he can help the Party cause with his
writing, finding the language that can promote the Party’s cause
to common people.
Meanwhile, Richard works various jobs through federal
relief programs. When he begins writing for leftist publications,
he takes positions with federal theater companies and with the Federal
Writers’ Project. To his mounting dismay, he finds that, like any
other group, the Communist Party is beset with human fears and foibles that
constantly frustrate its own ends. Richard’s desire to write biographical
sketches of Communists and his tendency to criticize Party pronouncements
earn him distrust, along with the titles “intellectual” and “Trotskyite.”
After a great deal of political strife and slander that culminates
in his being physically assaulted during a May Day parade, Richard
leaves the Party. Unfazed by the failure of his high hopes, he remains
determined to make writing his link to the world.
