Black Boy

It is 1924, and Wright is 14 years old. His home life is lonely and isolating, and he spends his time working, reading, and dreaming of going to the North. He has a job as a water boy in a brickyard, then another as a caddie. When school begins in the fall, Wright doesn’t have the money to even buy his books at first, and he is as hungry and shabby as ever. He manages to get another job so he can buy his books, but he begins to question the need to go to school since he has few options as a young Black person and school teaches him nothing about how to navigate life in a racist world. He begins to wonder if he has essentially misunderstood something about the world and even considers that maybe his family is right about his poor prospects.

The one bright spot in his life that year is that he finally publishes a story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre” in The Southern Register, a local paper. The editor convinces Wright to accept publicity instead of pay for the story. Despite Wright’s pride in finally breaking into print, he finds that his peers, family, and even the principal of his school disapprove of his aspirations. Granny Wilson and Addie in particular are offended that he has included the word “hell” in his story, leading his grandmother to conclude once again that this kind of writing is “‘Devil’s work’” (168).

The lack of any encouragement over his efforts confounds Wright. On the one hand, he has dreams—he wants to go north and become a writer. On the other hand, each aspect of his life in Mississippi—his family, the educational system, his peers, the Jim Crow laws—seems designed to keep him from his aspirations. He lives his days with dread and tension that even his mostly clueless peers and teachers can sense. At 15, Wright knows that his yearning for a different life places him outside of the mainstream, and to fail to conform is dangerous for a young Black man.

In the summer of 1925, Wright can’t find a full-time job, so he continues working part-time as a servant for a white family. His situation is difficult. An acquaintance of his is lynched that summer after having sex with one of the sex workers at the hotel where he worked, and Wright is once again confronted with the overwhelming presence of death for Black people who violate racial boundaries.

At home, Wright comes to an even greater understanding of his position in the house when he discovers that Uncle Tom has instructed his children to shun Wright, likely because of the time Wright confronted him with the razors. Wright realizes at that point that he must leave home. Wright enrolls in school for his final year (ninth grade) and manages to be selected as valedictorian based on his grades. Ordinarily, valedictorians are shoo-ins for jobs teaching in the school system, but Wright insists on reading his defiant valedictory speech at graduation, which angers the school principal, a man most interested in placating the white school board. Wright gives the speech in a borrowed suit. He is seventeen and has decided that he is through with his family and community.

Having completed his education, Wright is now forced to find full-time work. He runs into Griggs, a high school classmate, who tells him that Wright will only succeed if he learns to be more subservient, especially to white people. Griggs refers Wright for a job in a white-owned optical shop. The owner, a man from Illinois, aims to train a Black person in the trade. Wright is excited about the pay, but he does nothing but clean the shop floor for the entire time he works there. The job ends when his white coworkers threaten him with violence or worse if he shows up again. The owner attempts to intervene, but Wright refuses his offer to keep him on despite the threats. Wright feels ashamed of the sympathy with which the owner treats him, and the nervous tension of dealing with threats of racial violence almost completely overwhelm him.

Wright works a series of jobs at a drugstore, a hotel, and a theater, and at each place, he discovers that his inability to be uniformly subservient or look the other way when co-workers and owners engage in corrupt behavior prevent him from holding on to the job. Desperate to escape from the South, Wright goes along with a ticket stealing scheme at the theater, netting him $50 more for his fund to escape Mississippi. Having violated his own conscious out of desperation, Wright goes even further, reasoning that he will either die in the South because of his failure to fit in or end up in the chain gang unless he manages to leave. Wright steals a neighbor’s gun, recruits two old schoolmates as conspirators, and robs a warehouse of fruit preserves that he then sells. He at last has enough money for a ticket to Memphis, what he hopes will be his first stop before heading to the North. After a brief goodbye to his mother, he takes the train to Memphis that night.