in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”
in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”
Black Boy is an autobiography written by Richard Wright, a black man born in 1908’s Mississippi. It portrays his life as a boy and as a grownup man, struggling through racial-based atrocities, and his experience as a member of the Communist Party.
Richard, Wright’s protagonist, is very much aware of the racism surrounding him, and he does a pretty good job addressing the problem, as he himself is a victim of cruelty and segregation. It wouldn’t be surprising, if a man that struggles from inequality, would do everything he can to prevent other members of society from being oppressed. Unfortunately, Richard himself performs a role of oppressor towards women in his story, taking the patriarchy of white men and patriarchy in general as something completely natural and utterly needed.
He seems to be upset with women from the very early age, as his mother and grandmother scare him a lot, and do all they can to make him uncomfortable: “All morning my mother had been scolding me, telling me to keep still, warning me that I must make no noise. And I was angry, fretful, and impatient.” (Wright, 3). It is obvious that Wight has an intention to show how his mom didn’t care about his lively mind, and only wanted him to obey.
In addition to that, his grandmother has always tried to stop him from writing or imagining, as she only wanted for him to be with God. Aunt Addie is another torturer of Richard’s childhood and adolescence: she takes every possible chance to beat him up both as a kid and at school, with him consequently developing a fear of talking in public. Finally, returning to Richard’s mother and her biggest failure: in the moments of need she would often leave him alone because of the mysterious disease.
Richard’s narrative, so strikingly brilliant when it comes to racism, is on the flip side filled with fragile broken women, that struggle to think even more than talk. Every woman in this novel serves nothing but a mirror of author’s negative personal traits and life experiences.
For instance, it was his mother and her disease that introduced him to racial segregation. Interestingly, considering the fact that black women in the novel go through things possibly much tougher that black men do, there is no single character among them to fight for their personal freedom and right to be equal to men. Even the fact that very often they are left nameless in the story proves how natural this state of business is for the author, as in their emptiness and aloofness women should merely have a right to be named.
In the duration of Richard’s life that is described in the novel, he often comes across many women that are not a part of his family, but there is very and very few of them about whom author says kindly, and he is often either discouraged or frustrated with the others, and all of women are blind to their positions and accept silently their oppressed lives.
Characters like Bess and her mother Mrs. Moss are told to possess “a peasant mentality”, and accused of having “no tensions, unappeasable longings, no desire to do something to redeem themselves” (Wright, 252).
A nice thing, that such empty creatures aren’t completely useless, and act as a rest zone for Richard to hide from all of the life’s cruelties and rejuvenate in the moments when he needs it the most.
Among the descriptions of his mother Ella, Richard attempts to occasionally speak warmly, but even she is not perfect to his liking, as he still manages to remember her attempts to turn his mind from imagination and creativity to religion and money-based well-being.
Ella is the one who brought Richard and his brother to their stern and illiterate grandmother that had nothing in her mind but religion and would take it so far, that everything that was not mentioned in Bible would become false and unneeded. It is actually a solid reason she despises Richard’s first published story. Certainly, Wright’s mother makes attempts to protect him from the crazy feminine part of their family, but almost all of them fail in face of her paralytic attacks.
In the part of the novel based in Chicago, Richard’s attitude towards women is disturbing. Mrs. Ross’s daughter, Bess is only a teenager when she meets Wright, and it is no big surprise she immediately loves him after seeing once.
What he tells about his feelings towards a poor and uneducated for her age girl should make the reader feel at a very least uneasy: “What could I do with a girl like this? Could I ever talk to her about what I felt, hoped? Could she ever understand my life? I disengaged my hand from hers. I looked at her and wanted either to laugh or to slap her” (Wright, 217 – 219).
Bess, for instance, understands nothing about his books, and the nameless woman that serves as Wright’s sex-doll can’t even hold a book correctly, not to mention her inability to read it. Even author’s mother is portrayed to be ignorant and boring.
Talking about that sex-toy woman. A little fact: black people where often stripped of their own names completely or had them traded for names that were more comfortable to their owners when they were made into slaves. By not giving this woman a name Wright very much acts like the earlier oppressors would, and because of that a woman becomes nothing but a nameless object, like slaves were back in time. Basically, not only Wright goes against everything he states to fight for, but makes the problem deeper for black women, who didn’t have it easy to begin with.
It is quite clear that women have caused many troubles in Richard Wright’s life, and that they all add up to his racial background. Possibly, in his descriptions of women author never intended to put them in a spot of disrespect, and only wanted to describe the true state of things and how it intertwined with his personal experiences of the womankind, but this is what makes his descriptions of women and attitudes towards them even more sickening.
A good example for it would be a scene with the rape of a black woman, that was performed by the two man as a punishment for her unpaid debt. They were not stopped neither by other civilians, not by the police, not by Wright himself. After screams went quiet and woman was allowed to walk away covered in blood, pain, shame and ripped clothes, she was immediately detained by the policemen and accused of being drunk. People did nothing, and the author did nothing, showing not a slightest interest in helping that poor thing.
One would think that man struggling terribly from not being accepted as an equal human being would surely strive to help other people in their pains, but, unfortunately, this is not the way things work: in Wright’s novel at least. His work reinforces patriarchy in its fullest, and, moreover, promotes it.
Racism is undeniably a big problem, but there is no way any problem could be solved in man’s ignorance towards other’s struggles, and if one wishes to change something, he also needs to reflect on stranger’s pains, even if that means stepping down to the poor broken fragile women who can do nothing but have sex and be stupid.
References
Wright, R. (1945). The Black Boy.
