Black Boyhood

BLACK BOY--Richard Wright--Harper ($2.50).

Richard Wright, 36, is generally accounted the most gifted living American Negro writer. His new book makes it clearer than ever that he has one of the most notable gifts in U.S. writing, black or white: a narrative style that is simple, direct, almost completely without pretense or decoration, yet never flat. In Black Boy, that narrative tells the story of his first 1 8 years, in Natchez and Jackson, Miss., Elaine, Ark. and on Beale Street in Memphis. The story is a brilliant account of how it feels to be a sensitive Negro growing up in the U.S. South.

Author Wright's early books (Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son) won high critical praise. Violent and unsparing, they contained passages (as does this book) too strong for most readers' stomachs.

His fellow Communists first praised Wright to the skies, then turned savagely against him when he broke with the party.

More honest than most Communists, he has never tried to sweeten up his down trodden Negroes. His typical story is of some accidental clash between Negroes and whites springing from the fear and misunderstanding of both people, suddenly flaring into a lynching, a riot, a murder.

Brilliant and melodramatic though these are, they seem to flash by like a scene of violence caught in the spotlight of a passing automobile, clear, vivid, frightening, but without relation to the life around it. Black Boy helps to explain that lack of relation. It is the story of a man set apart from his own race by sensitivity and intellect, yet barred forever from the white race by the color of his skin.

Staggers at Six. At four, Richard Wright tried to burn down the house in which his grandmother lay ill. Restless at being kept indoors, he built up a fire with broomstraws, touched off the window curtains, hid under the house when the fire got out of control. His frantic parents thought he was inside, were so relieved and angry when they found him unhurt that they whipped him until he lost consciousness.

The shock was lasting. "For a long time I was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me." Throughout his childhood, at mo ments of extreme tension, he would be come immobile, in full possession of his mental faculties but without the power to make his hands or his voice obey his will. He was nervous and imaginative in a world where only the strong-willed and easy-going got along. When his mother got a job as a cook he ran wild in the streets of Jackson, sneaked into saloons and begged drinks from the customers, who taught him obscenities and laughed at his drunken staggers. He was then six years old.

Richard's uncles and aunts were solid, successful people: schoolteachers, carpenters, mail carriers. When his mother fell ill, they impoverished themselves to pay for her operations and care. She was in bed for ten years. "My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours. . . . A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me selfconscious, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me."

Prostitutes and Rackets. Richard sold papers, worked in a drugstore, a credit clothing store, a brickyard, an optical factory. He was hopeless at each job. He could not cover up his feelings. He forgot to say "Sir," or said it too slowly. He did not know how to get out of white people's way. One of his bosses said, "Why don't you laugh and talk like other niggers?" The other Negroes privately talked a venomous, unrelieved hatred of the whites, but joked and laughed in their presence. Richard could not. Moreover, in crises--as when a white man hit him in the mouth with a whiskey bottle--his old immobility came back and left him paralyzed.

He did better as a bellboy. The naked white prostitutes paid no attention to him when he delivered bootleg whiskey to their rooms, though their customers sometimes objected. Because he had never been in jail, he was picked by racketeers as front for a movie-ticket racket. He made $50 the first week. But he knew he was headed for the chain gang. He saved his money, stole everything he could lay hands on, pawned it, and fled to Memphis. There he began to read Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and to see the white men around him in a different light.

People without Passion. His reading also gave him a profound awareness of his people's plight. "I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! . . . Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization. . . . I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another."

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