Wright, was born Richard Nathaniel Wright on Rucker’s Plantation, Mississippi, the son of Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson, a schoolteacher in September 1908.. He was in fact their first child.
Richard Wright’s father, Nathan, was born shortly before 1880 to Nathaniel Wright, a freed slave who farmed a plot of land that had been given to him at the end of the Civil War.
His mother, Ella, was born in 1883 and got married to Nathan in 1907 despite her parent’s disapproval.. Ella then gave up school teaching to join her husband to work on the farm. Her father, Richard Wilson, born in 1847 served in the U.S Navy in 1865 and then grew disillusioned as a result of a bureaucratic error which deprived him of his pension. Her mother, Margaret Bolton Wilson, of Irish, Scottish, American Indian and African descent, was virtually white in appearance. A house slave before the Emancipation, she later became a midwife nurse, a devoted Seventh -day Adventist, and the strict head of her Natchez household including eight surviving children.
Wright’s life conformed to the stock pattern of the American success myth. His early life which was harsh and filled with hunger and fear gave him much preparation for his later intellectual outlook and the acute social and political consciousness of his writing . He moved from impoverished and educationally barren early years to legendary achievements as a favored literary touchstone and ancestor figure.
When he was only three and his younger brother, Leon, barely one year old, unable to care for them while working on the farm, their mother took them to live with their grandparents in Natchez. His father rejoins the family there and finds work in a sawmill. Now 4 years old and living with his whole extended family with a bed-ridden grandmother, Richard starts giving vent to much of his childish curiosity and pranks. Curious to know what could be the result, he lit the white curtains which led to the house being half engulfed in fire before escaping to hide under the house to avoid the likely punishment. But his father discovers him there and beats him almost to death.
His family soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee by steam boat. There they lived in a tenement. Whilst his father was working as a night porter it became necessary for him to sleep well during the day. So Richard and his brother are strictly warned against making noise.. But Richard saw as his license to defy the rule and thence his father’s authority, when as a stray kitten begins to make noise, his father yells, ” kill that damn thing. ” Taking him literally to challenge him, he strangles it to death. But his mother forces him to feel the moral horror involved in taking life when by ordering him to bury and pray for it in the evening. Disgusted and afraid, Richard buries it but runs away when she forces him to ask for the Lord’s forgiveness.
While in Memphis, his father abandoned them leaving his mother to support them on her own. An illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, he abandoned his family when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, with hunger gnawing at the entrails of the family as they did not have much to eat. He recalls in Black Boy feeling hunger nudging his ribs, twisting his empty guts until they ached. He would then grow dizzy until his vision dimmed. Richard begins to associate his pangs of hunger with the image of his father. They are now forced as well to be staying often at homes of relatives. His mother, Ella Wilson, moved with her family to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook for white families.
Richard is now left to face the realities of a violent society when sent by his mother to do grocery shopping. Whenever he goes past a corner, a gang of white boys would rush at him, grab him, snatch the basket and take the money from him. On returning home, his mother gives him more money which the white boys again steal on his second attempt. On his return, his mother gives him a large stick along with the money, kicking him immediately out of the house with a stiff warning not to come back without the goods. So this time round he faced the gang stoutly and resolutely, blindly throwing the stick around them and thus hitting them all over. They flee away in fear thus allowing him time to return home with the grocery he had already bought at last.
Richard gets into series of scrapes and mischief-making whilst his mother is at work trying to eke out a living for them. He joins neglected black children peering through holes at the naked bodies of adults using the toilets. He also loiters around the saloon begging for money from its patrons. In this way he soon gets initiated into drinking by the men who with the offer of further monetary inducement would get much entertainment from him. His curious and inquiring mind would never rest as it goes on in quest of new knowledge. Having learned to read and write, his inquiring mind now drifts into unraveling the enigma of race relations between blacks and whites. He was for instance puzzled as to why his grandmother was white when he was black and if the white man who was beating the black boy in the neighborhood was the boy’s father, as in his mind only a father has such unquestionable right to do that..
In September 1915, Richard begins school at Howe Institute. He learns new expletives and profanities whilst listening to the older boys here. On returning home he starts exhibiting his newly found knowledge by scribbling the newly acquired words in soap on windows in the neighborhood. His mother discovering this forces him to go outside and wash every word off.
Richard’s mother now very religious would drag him often to Sunday school. One Sunday evening, Richard’s envy and spite is aroused at the preacher whom his mother had invited for dinner, who seemed to be greedily devouring all the luscious fried chicken without the slightest intention of leaving Richard any that no longer able to hide his disgust, he shouts out thus infuriating his mother.
Richard’s mother falls seriously ill in 1916. His grandmother comes over for a while to care for the family. After the grandmother has returned home, Richard and his brother are placed in the Settlement House, Methodist Orphanage in Memphis run by Miss Simon. Miss Simon adheres to a strict policy of disallowing visits from their mother in order to prevent them from being spoiled by too much attention. Richard finding it boring and unable to do the chores required of him would often stand crying. He eventually attempts to run away but is intercepted and brought back by some white policemen.Their mother’s partial paralysis was what caused their temporary placement in this orphanage as well as necessitated the family to keep shuttling from relative to relative
Richard and his mother confronts Richard’s father for the second time out of court this time for him to provide their support. His father who was accompanied by another woman presumably the one who had enticed him out of his home tries to be endeared to Richard who recoils from them in disgust and shame..
A relatively pleasant summer is however spent at 1107 Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi where the maternal grandparents now live, before going with his mother and brother to Elaine, Arkansas, to live with Richard’s favorite aunt, Aunty Maggie, his mother’s younger sister, and her husband, Silas Hoskins.
At Granny’s two-storied white-painted house a black schoolteacher, Ella, of whom Richard was half afraid and with whom he was half infatuated was engaged. Her appetite for reading further aroused Richard’s quest for literature. One day when Richard found her avidly reading,he asks her what she was reading. She thus starts telling him the fairy tale of Bluebeard from 1001 Arabian Nights. But this had to be done behind Granny’s back as she was known to be violently opposed to stories which she had condemned as “the Devil’s work.” Granny’s sudden materialization there disrupted the reading of the story thus filling Richard who was already absorbed into the story with a sense of emptiness and hunger. But Ella was soon to be dismissed. This happens whilst bathing the boys, when upon Granny ordering Richard to bend over to allow her to scrub his behind and without the least thought Richard tells her to “kiss back there” when through. Concluding those were emanations from the stories Ella was infusing in his mind, Granny forces her to move out of the house immediately.
Richard who has been having a bitter experience of hunger and has as a result been always yearning for food is surprised to find so much food on the ladder at the Hoskins. For Uncle Hoskins owns a saloon catering to blacks working in the sawmills who have a great deal of economic success and are much better off in life. Richard often steals dinner rolls from the table and hides them in his pockets and around the house. One day Uncle Hoskins takes Richard on a buggy ride claiming that he is going to drive into the river until the water level gets very high. Frightened, Richard attempts to jump out. Back on land, he refuses to listen or speak to him.
One morning, Uncle Hoskins who always left for work in the evenings to tend to the saloon, fails to return home. White men who coveted his successful liquor business, it is later learnt, shot him. The family on hearing this quickly pack their clothes and dash into a farmer’s wagon and without according him even a funeral hasten off to West Helena, Arkansas. They then return to Jackson with Aunt Maggie to live with the Wilson’s. Here Richard sees a lot of soldiers as well as a chain gang.
Richard cannot cope with Granny’s strict religious rules which forbids amongst others working on Saturdays, when they the Seventh Day Adventists go to church. This forces him to flee to West Helena where they live in shanties and where the boys visit grocery shops belonging to Jews whom the neighborhood children often sing lewd and racist songs against. Here, Richard’s Mother and Aunt Maggie work as cooks for whites at daytime.
Richard’s eagerness to know much about the curious sex trade going on next door leads to his standing up on a chair to peer through the peep hole to see the naked partners inside the other room. But Richard toppling off the chair startles the landlady and her guests who thus get wise to the tricks of the miscreant boy. As Richard’s mother could not yield to the landlady’s demand that Richard be punished, they move to another house on the same street.
Aunt Maggie and the mysterious and shadowy Professor Mathews are compelled to relocate up North to help Aunt Maggie’s new husband escape detection for murder. Her departure reduced the household income considerably, thus accentuating and prolonging Richard’s experience of hunger. This forces him to try unsuccessfully to sell his puppy, Betsy, for as low as a dollar. When his mother finally secures a higher paying job she sends him to school. One day class is let out early as the whistles and bells swell the air announcing the end of the war. For the first time he looks up and sees a plane which he mistakes for a bird.
Richard now older is associating with a gang of older Black Boys who share a “learned” hostility toward whites and the “degrees of values” assigned to race. He analyzes a typical afternoon with his gang, their conversation, their attitudes, and their ideologies. The gang’s dialogs are on how “the culture of one black household was thus transmitted to another black household.”
With this gang, Richard often engages in fights against white boys, throwing rocks and bottles and wounding each other. One day such a fight almost cost him his life causing his mother to caution him seriously against fighting whites.
One day Richard and his brother found their mother in a comatose state. After calling the neighbors and a doctor, they discovered a stroke had paralyzed her entire left side. On the arrival of their grandmother they moved her to Jackson, Mississippi where all her relatives have gathered.
Meanwhile, Richard has stopped eating and now sleepwalks. Relatives decide to separate them so as to enable the two brothers to live separately with two different families. Leon moves to Detroit to live with Aunt Maggie up north to finish his schooling. Richard chooses to live with Uncle Clarke in Greenwood. There he is able to attend school, and resume his fight for supremacy with fellow kids. After standing his ground well during one such fight he gains acceptance by his peers.
One evening, Mr. Burton the owner and former occupant of the house stops by and reveals how his dead son had once lived in Richard’s room sleeping in Richard’s bed. Richard pledged not to sleep there ever again for fear that the boy’s ghost will come to haunt him. But his uncle did not allow him to sleep elsewhere. Soon he starts having insomnia and nightmares, this affecting his performance at school considerably.
» Read more: Black Boy (Richard Wright’s) Development From Childhood Innocence And Daring Curiosity To Writing
