Richard Wright: Voice of independence

1. A book about influence

Richard Wright, who was born on a plantation in Mississippi in 1908, grew up under two powerful influences: the racism of the Jim Crow South and the religious beliefs of his family.

One system told him his only value was as a source of cheap, compliant labor and that he would never be free to think of himself as anything else. The other told him he was not free to form his own beliefs — his family and religious community would dictate them.

I read Wright’s Black Boy when I was a teenager. His story was enlightening to someone who was just beginning to realize that the social forces that shape us are not entirely healthy. 

2. The problem with conforming

Black Boy was written by a Black man who was constantly hungry. I was a white adolescent, not yet a man, who had grown up with so many privileges that I was only vaguely aware of them. Yet I read Wright as if he were speaking to me.

Wright told what it is like to live in terror, to be hungry constantly, to see loved ones, including parents, crushed. He showed me a world I lived in but hadn’t understood.

Wright said that a Black person could not live a fully human life in America. And because of that, no American could live a fully human life. You can’t be complicit in perpetuating injustice and still be fully human.

Any view of humanity that will bow to that kind of injustice is “humanity” without courage. And without courage, a person surrenders any other virtues he might have without a fight. If that’s humanity, it’s a pathetic thing.

I read the book and came away thinking that a person has to have his or her own expectations, own interests, own aims — and must also have the courage to follow them.

When I finished the book, I had a better idea of what I needed to do to grow up.

3. Self-reliance

Wright’s book is, to my mind, the greatest autobiography written by an American, with the possible exception of James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son.” The title of Baldwin’s essay refers to Wright’s novel Native Son. The two knew each other, and for a while Wright was Baldwin’s mentor. Both writers grappled with the notion of self-reliance.

It’s an ancient idea that has a peculiar grip on American minds. Emerson preached it. Thoreau refined it. But African-American writers of the 20th century redefined it. Who can you rely on when an entire society degrades you? What can you do to defend your self or soul?

Black Boy is about self-reliance. It’s told as a collection of vignettes, or scenes. Broadly, there are three kinds:

• Some scenes show what the South was like, a reign of terror against Black people by a white majority. Uncle Silas Hoskins, the only member of Wright’s family who had money, was murdered by whites. When, as a teenager, Wright was earning money by running errands, he learned of the murder of another delivery boy. No one had to tell him what lesson he should learn. Wright marveled that the behavior of countless people could be influenced by the threat of violence.

• Some scenes give a picture of the failures of individuals in the context of a poisoned culture. Would Wright’s father, a sharecropper, have abandoned his family if he hadn’t been shut out of so many opportunities? Would his mother have temporarily put her sons in an orphanage if she’d been allowed to make a living wage?

• Some scenes show the violence we do to each other within families — a more gratuitous violence, uncoerced by the larger society. When Wright’s mother, struggling to keep the children together, had to move into her mother’s house, he learned about the kind of coercion that goes on within families.

“Granny was an ardent member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and I was compelled to make a pretense of worshipping her God, which was her exaction for my keep.” The phrase “exaction for keep” is a lovely phrase for the ugly things we do to the less powerful.

Wright’s grandmother made ends meet by taking in boarders. One, a schoolteacher named Ella, told him the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives. Before Ella could finish, Granny broke in and denounced the book as the devil’s work.

Wright described the violence to the child he had been. It was the first time in his life that he’d been completely committed emotionally to story — or to any work of art. That experience had been crushed.

Wright was defiant. He resisted coercion. He vowed he would become what he wanted to be and had the courage to accept the consequences.

Hunger was one of the consequences. When he finally escaped the South and made it to Chicago, he had not trouble passing the examination to become a postal worker. But he failed the physical exam. He weighed 110 pounds, 15 pounds under the minimum.

Wright was clear about what conformity costs, so he also understood what nonconformity, which can be a kind of freedom, costs. We trade bits of ourselves, bits of our humanity, when we let others dictate how we live. 

4. The Library

Black Boy has so many stories it’s hard to find a turning point — one event that set Wright on the path to becoming a writer. If a turning point exists, I think it’s a story about a library.

At 19, Wright was living in a rooming house on Beale Street in Memphis. He started by washing dishes and then found a job as a delivery boy for an optical company, starting at $8 a week. He paid $2.50 a week for the room and saved every dime, planning to escape, with his mother and brother, to Chicago.

One day, Wright saw an editorial in The Commercial Appeal castigating H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury and a critic of the Jim Crow South.

All his life Wright had heard white people express hatred for Black people. He wondered what a white man could have written to prompt that kind of hatred.

On his errands, Wright passed the public library and sometimes picked up books for the white workers at the optical company. The library, in 1927, was off limits to Black people.

Some of the men in the shop were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Others were sympathizers. Wright approached one of the workers, a man named Falk, an Irish Catholic who was himself hated by the Klansmen. Wright asked Falk if he could use his library card.

Wright forged a note from Falk — using a racial slur so the librarian wouldn’t suspect him — and was given two books: Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces and Prejudices.

Write said: “That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read.”

Mencken opened the door to dozens of writers — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Flaubert — and Wright kept reading. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was his first serious novel.

“Could I ever learn about life and people? To me, with my vast ignorance, my Jim Crow station in life, it seemed an impossible achievement. I now knew what being a Negro meant. I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.”

5. How he learned

The hunger he was describing was the hunger to learn. He needed nourishment to be healthy, and he would do what was necessary to get it.

He read relentlessly — perhaps compulsively. Michel Fabre, a French scholar who is Wright’s best biographer, said Wright read four to five books a week. Even after he became comfortable financially, Wright borrowed most of them from the library. He bought the books he wanted to reread. By 1943, he had 600 books in his library. At his death in 1960, he had thousands.

Wright learned by reading and by writing. He learned mainly by doing. He had to teach himself.

Wright struggled through the Depression in Chicago, working as a laborer and as a caretaker for animals used in medical experiments. After a crash diet to gain weight, he got a job at the post office. He later joined the Federal Writers Project. His first novels were rejected, but his stories found a market. Four were published as Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938.

In 1940, Native Son was published. It was the first novel by an African American to be a Book of the Month Club selection. It created a sensation.

6. How he wrote

Writing was part of learning. Thinking a problem through, coming to understand it and writing it down were all part of learning. He eventually settled on a routine.

Wright rose early, sometimes at 6 a.m., and got to work. He said he liked the hours nearest his dreams.

He didn’t begin work unless his desk was neatly organized. Although he wrote on an Underwood typewriter, he had to have a cupful of pencils, razor sharp, at hand. Julia Wright, his oldest daughter, said his father often observed that Mencken used words as weapons. She thought that, in her father’s mind, sharp pencils were sharp weapons.

Wright wrote American Hunger, which includes Black Boy, in scenes. By my count, Part I consists of 116 scenes — reports, stories or anecdotes of his life in the South. Part II contains 44 scenes of his life in Chicago, making a total of 160. The art of the book is that these brief scenes add up to something more.

Some people remember the smell of glue in Wright’s study. He was fastidious in keeping a clean copy, even in early drafts. He’d rewrite as he went and paste the new, improved paragraphs into place.

Wright wrote daily until lunch. Then it was over for the day. He would read, putter around the house, see a movie — he could watch three a day — or visit with friends, who were ready to talk about books and politics.

He once said that his biggest need as a writer was a quiet life. As he put it, “no fireworks.”

7. American Hunger

The book I read as a teenager turned out to be only half the story. It was the first part of a two-part book Wright called American Hunger.

The book I read described his life in the South and ended with this paragraph: “This is the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.”

The second part dealt with his arrival in Chicago and his introduction to the larger world. It turned out not to be the Promised Land. For years, Wright fought for a more just society through the Communist Party. He left in 1937, convinced that an individual artist needed more freedom than the party would allow.

At the end of Word War II, the country was ready for a story about the evils of Jim Crow South but was not ready for a story about an integrated Communist Party fighting for justice.

Part I of American Hunger was published as Black Boy in 1945. The full text was published in 1977.

Wright wrote about the hunger to learn, to understand himself and his place in the universe. It was a lifetime quest. But the other hunger, the hunger to find in America a culture that nourished him, was never satisfied.

He spent the last years of his life in France, in exile. After Wright’s death, his daughter Julia said exile was a statement. He would never have returned to the United States.

8. A long trip to Paris

In a superficial way, Wright’s story is the kind that Americans love: rags to riches.

After Wright’s father abandoned the family, his mother, Ella Wilson Wright, struggled to make ends meet with two small boys, Richard and Alan. They lived Jackson and Natchez, Miss., Memphis, Tenn., and briefly in Elaine, Ark., which was the site of a massacre of Black people in 1919. Wright’s Uncle Silas Hoskins was murdered a couple of years before the massacre by white men who simply wanted to take his profitable business. Wright wrote of the flight of terrified women and children.

In Chicago, Wright was active in the John Reed Club and learned to write, slowly, by trial and error. After his break with the Communist Party, he went to New York, living in Brooklyn and later Greenwich Village.

He married twice — both to women of Eastern European descent whose social circles were tied to the Communist Party. The first marriage, to Dhima Rose Meidman, was a brief disaster. The second, to Ellen Poplar, lasted until his death and produced two daughters, Julia and Rachel.

Native Son and Black Boy made Wright comfortable financially but not socially. Although he was a best-selling author, he had to go to Harlem to get his hair cut. He had to listen to racial slurs wherever he went.

He decided, in 1946, to go to France.

So many writers have gone to Paris, living on borrowed money and dreaming of writing the great American novel, that the starving artist became a cliché.

By contrast, Wright lived less romantically but more comfortably. His books were selling. Native Son was adapted to the stage. Magazines published his articles.

His family lived in what had once been the home of the composer Camille Saint-Saens and also had a farm in Ailly, about 60 miles west of Paris. His daughters went to good schools, The family employed a maid.

When Wright went to see friends for coffee and conversation, he met Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Albert Camus at the café. Baldwin and Chester Himes were among the American expatriates he befriended.

The prosperity didn’t last. With the McCarthy Era, Hollywood blacklisted Wright. Native Son became a film in South America but not in the U.S. His later novels received rough treatment from critics.

But he remained a public figure. He traveled widely and was asked to speak worldwide. He was interested in Africa, just emerging from colonialism. In 1953, he went to the Gold Coast, a British colony that would soon be Ghana. It was perhaps there that Wright contracted a case of amebic dysentery, which recurred throughout the 1950s.

In 1960, he was sick for months and finally went to a hospital. He appeared to be getting better and told his family he felt fine. He was about to be discharged, when he died of a heart attack at 52.

9. Mysterious death

Many people, including his daughter Julia, believe he was murdered. The CIA was engaged in reckless misadventures — Wright died about six months before the Bay of Pigs Invasion — and Wright was a public figure who was an influential critic of the United States.

On the other hand, Wright had suffered years of malnutrition — what calories he could get were not healthy — and was a lifelong smoker.

Fabre, while stressing that he was a literary biographer rather than a homicide detective, thought Wright most likely died of a heart attack. It’s a reasonable view of the evidence.

But stories of assassination were told early and often. John A. Williams wrote a novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, in which a character based on Wright is given an injection of a toxin that mimics the symptoms of a heart attack. The novel was a bestseller in 1967.

10. The power of a book

 “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?”

It’s a good question, which Henry David Thoreau put into print.

I count myself one of many who began a new era with a book.

I read Black Boy and dropped out of high school. The book convinced me that I was wasting my life trying to conform to the expectations of other people.

I was sitting around in a big, inner-city school, doing nothing except feeling sorry for myself. I was dissatisfied because I was hungry to learn and felt I was being starved.

I didn’t like Wright’s story. I thought it concerned me. If he could make something of himself, why couldn’t I? If he could take responsibility for his own life, including his own education, why couldn’t I?

I spent the years I should have been in high school in the Navy. When I got out, I went to college on the G.I. Bill.

I didn’t go to college to prepare for a career. I went to learn. I took every course that interested me until the money ran out.

11. The biographical problem

When Native Son became a best-seller, it got national attention — including hysterical reviews from segregationists. Reporters were assigned to find out who Richard Wright was. It was an interesting question then, and it’s still debated now.

Two schools of thought have emerged.

The first holds that Wright was enormously gifted and enormously troubled. 

Wright was interested in psychology, read Freud, and was intrigued by the possibility of understanding the damage that had been done to him as a child.

Some biographers have seen Wright as a tortured soul who was trying to come to terms with the countless wounds inflicted on him. Because of those wounds, he had a pattern of difficult relationships with women he loved and with friends. His friendship with Baldwin, which ended badly, is a famous example. Some scholars insist that was the pattern with all Wright’s friendships.

Against that view is Julia Wright’s observation that people tend to confuse Wright with his most famous character, Bigger Thomas of Native Son. Thomas was a damaged character who suffered bewildering storms of fear and rage. By contrast, Julia Wright said her father was mild, introverted and shy. She said the atmosphere of the family home was peaceful.

Wright was a complicated character, but the tortured soul model is hardly a good fit. When the rationing program of World War II ended, Wright bought a dozen white socks and dyed them the colors of the rainbow.

How should we understand him?

When Wright became famous and reporters did track him down, he tried to explain himself. “I’m self-educated, like Lincoln,” he said.

This hunger to learn, described so well in Black Boy, never abated, a fact that gets lost in most of the biographical writing on Wright.

It’s the key feature of his personality, I think. All his life, he talked about the hunger to learn. He encountered things he didn’t understand. He read and inquired relentlessly. He had friendships with Sartre and Baldwin because he was interested in new ideas and new topics — and he wanted to know what others thought. Whatever you make of the Wrights’ marriage, Richard and Ellen Wright loved books and loved to talk about what they had read and learned.

12. Haiku

In the last 18 months of his life, Wright was fascinated by a new delight: haiku.

He wrote 4,000. He captured things he noticed in 17 syllables in three lines. Many scenes, such as a butterfly on cow’s tail, were images from the farm at Ailly. Others described people on the streets of Paris.

In the last months of his life he tried to put the short poems in order, like an artist trying to fit bits of colored glass into a mosaic.

He was absorbed by the project or organizing and reorganizing the short poems, eliminating those with duplicate thoughts. He finally combed the collection down to 811 poems, which fit into an 80-page manuscript.

He had no illusions that the project would make money. He just did it because he loved learning about a form from a different culture and loved capturing image with the smallest of nets. He loved doing it.

13. Bibliography

Richard Wright, Black Boy, New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1998.

Richard Wright, Native Son, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.

Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World, New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. By Isabel Barzun, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.