Black Boy

On the strength of a promise of a recommendation from the optical shop owner in Jackson, Wright manages to get an even higher paying job at a Memphis optical shop. Between his work cleaning the shop, Wright earns tips for running errands for the white men who work there. He also becomes more adept at hiding his fear and anger when confronted with racism.

His situation in the rooming house becomes difficult when Mrs. Moss realizes that Wright has no interest in marrying Bess. Wright knows his days at the boarding house are numbered; he saves almost all of his money. His plan is to send for his mother and brother as soon as possible and then move to the North. He is once again always hungry, but he does spend some money to feed his mind with used books and the important literary magazines of the day.

Working at the optical company, Wright learns more about how Black people survive in a world dominated by white supremacist ideology. He watches with disdain as one of his coworkers acts like a clown—going so far as to allow one of the white men to kick him for a quarter. He socializes with the other Black workers, and like them, ruminates on the ways of white people. Underneath their seeming acceptance of their lower status is a deep anger at how rigged the racial and economic systems are.

Wright’s awareness of how debilitating this state of affairs is comes to the fore one day when a white man to whom he is delivering glasses questions him closely about whether he gets enough to eat, his education, and how he deals with the oppressive atmosphere of the South. Wright feels an odd anger at the man for probing Wright about his feelings because doing so might create cracks in the façade of subservience Wright must maintain to survive.

Wright’s efforts to get along fail when the white men in his shop attempt to orchestrate a knife fight between Wright and Harrison, his counterpart at another shop. The two young men warily talk with each other and discover the plot to get them to fight. Once the men at their respective shops learn that the two are aware of the plot, they force the two to fight each other, promising a five-dollar purse for the winner. Despite Wright’s sense of disgust at being made a spectacle for the amusement of white people, he fights Harrison and wins the five dollars. Agreeing to the fight is such a violation of Wright’s desire to live life on his own terms that he feels tainted by what happened.

Wright undergoes a period of intellectual growth. After reading a scathing attack on H.L. Mencken in a newspaper that supports white supremacist notions of what the South should be, Wright decides that he must learn more about Mencken. Wright convinces Falk, an Irish Catholic co-worker who is barely tolerated by the other white men on the job due to his ethnicity and faith, to write him a letter allowing Wright to borrow books about Mencken from the local library which does not loan books to Black people. Eventually, Falk gets Wright a library card in Falk’s name, and Wright gains access all books by pretending to check them out for Falk.

Wright reads Mencken’s Book of Prefaces and is astounded by the clean and incisive writing style of Mencken. Mencken uses “words as weapons”(248) and his approach to criticism convinces Wright that he must learn to write like that as well. From there, Wright reads novels like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. With every book and magazine he reads, his understanding of the world around him broadens. When he reads realistic and naturalistic fiction like Theodor Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, he finally sees his mother’s suffering and his sense that his life is a trap from which he cannot escape represented on paper.

Despite this informal apprenticeship in writing, Wright finds that he still cannot write himself, lacking the technical skills and life experience to do so. He becomes even more conscious of the limitations of life in the Jim Crow South: reading is a “drug” (250) that makes him desire more of life, and writing creates something like a “hunger” (250) for a richer, freer life than the South can provide. Wright grows bitter and tense, and his mood is noticeable to everyone around him. His white co-workers and Mrs. Moss notice his reading in particular, and it makes them uncomfortable. He resolves time and again to stop reading but always goes back to it because he needs the vision of another life to keep moving forward. Reading and his desire for some other life become “a secret, criminal burden” (252) that consumes him.

Wright manages to bring his brother and mother to Memphis, but he knows that his chances are surviving in the South are not good. He cannot foresee being able to maintain the illusion of subservience. He refuses to turn his hatred and violence on his Black peers, will not settle by marrying Bess, cannot become a drug addict, and knows fighting white people is futile. Getting a white-collar job is closed to him because of his race. Ultimately, Wright understands that his reading has alienated him from everyone. The “terror, tension, and anxiety” (253) of such a life and its threat to his survival are more than he can bear for much longer.

Aunt Maggie joins the family in Memphis and convinces them that they should all move to Chicago. The money they’ve saved is not enough, so Wright eventually decides that just he and Maggie will go, then save money to bring the others up. Wright quits his job. He is forced to be subservient and pretend that he is only quitting because of his mother’s wishes to avoid conflict with the boss, who assures him that the North is a perilous place for Black people because it changes them. Falk is both envious and bitter about Wright’s escape.