Black Boy

Wright finally gains enough weight to pass the final step to becoming a postal clerk. His new job stabilizes the family’s finances, and they move to a bigger, nicer apartment. Wright settles into a routine of work in the day and writing fiction about Black people at night. He early on realizes that his writing lacks a theoretical context for understanding the “why” behind the lives of Black people.

He certainly looks for it, first in an Irish co-worker who projects the same kind of universal cynicism Wright claims when confronted with politics. He joins then quickly leaves a group of Black Bohemian would-be artists who seem obsessed with sex. He also encounters Black nationalists (Garveyites) and is impressed with their ambition and passion, although he sees them as wrongheaded in their hope for settlement in Africa and a separate Black state.

Wright ultimately settles on Communism as that theory of life he needs to become a good writer. He is not at first impressed with the stilted delivery of the Black Communists he encounters. They do nothing to engage with the social mores and public speaking traditions (mostly derived from the Black church) of Black people, so they are figures of fun as they harangue people in the streets.

The stock market crashes in 1929. Wright, who has been working selling shoddy insurance policies to unsuspecting Black customers, loses his income. Like many other people, Wright eventually becomes so desperate that he is forced to go to the public welfare office in Cook County to seek aid.

At the relief office, Wright is astonished to see the working-class consciousness of conflict between the laboring and ruling classes coming to fruition. The people standing in the relief lines believe they belong to a group that has received a raw deal. Looking at his peers, Wright does not think they are ready for a full-blown revolution, but he becomes increasingly curious about how the alienation and exclusion of Black Americans from American civic and political life could lead to one. Wright includes long parenthetical statements in which he speculates on the significance of this alienation, especially its potential to lead to a nihilism that could destroy the country.

Wright secures employment at the post office briefly and then a more permanent position via the relief agency as an orderly at a medical institution. Many of his co-workers are Black and forced to accept disrespectful and patronizing racism from the white staff, including the doctors. This situation doesn’t lead to racial solidarity among the orderlies, however. Wright sees the same intraracial conflict—Black people turning on each other instead of the white people who oppress them—that is so familiar to him from other workplaces.

The institute is a harrowing place to work. The work carried out at the institute involves research on animals, and some of the animals used in the experiment—dogs whose vocal cords the researchers cut, for example—are perfect symbols of suffering for Wright. Wright also finds some of his work conditions, including being timed to increase his efficiency as he cleans, to be dehumanizing. After a fight between two orderlies leads to a room of experimental animals escaping their cages, Wright and his co-workers place the animals back in the cages with no attention to where they might actually belong. This outcome is yet another instance in which the white leadership’s unwillingness to give minimal education to the Black staff leads to disastrous results. Wright compares the Black workers to the experimental animals.

Wright decides to pursue more contact with the Communists, who are growing increasingly active as the Depression drags on. He joins the Chicago chapter of the John Reed Club, a Communist Party organization for artists. Wright is shocked by how readily the people he encounters there recruit him to work on editing a magazine and the apparent lack of concern among the white people he encounters about the racial divide. Wright meets many people who go on to become literary and artistic movers and shakers of his generation.

Although Wright wants to assume his old cynicism about efforts of Black and white people to work on terms of equality, the people he initially encounters all seem fully committed to that project. Wright takes home copies of their journals, Left Front and New Masses, and he finds for the first time a vision of a world in which he might be able to escape his alienation. Inspired by what he reads that night, Wright begins writing poetry that reflects a vision of people working in unity.

His mother sounds a note of caution, however, after she discovers the magazines in Wright’s room. She finds the art on the covers to be crude and offensive to her sensibilities as a Black Christian woman. Her criticism forces Wright to re-assess the so-called proletarian style of the magazines, which focuses on representing workers as brutal figures in revolt. Wright concludes that his Communist peers “had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language” (320) that could appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of the Black workers they are trying to organize. Wright decides that the task of finding this language is one to which he is ideally suited. Wright is quickly published in these magazines.

Once Wright engages more deeply, he discovers that there is bitter in-fighting between the artists and a cadre of members (mostly painters) who are secret members of the Communist Party. Wright, over his own protests, is elected to be the club executive secretary, mostly on the strength of being both Black and working-class. In his new role, Wright becomes an advocate for focusing on the art rather than the politics of the party. When the party demands that he join the party officially or step down, Wright agrees to do so with the caveat that the club should be mostly about developing the skills of the young artists and writers. Wright’s white peers are disgusted with the politicking, but for Wright, the internal politics and secret factions are an education in how the modern world works.

The presence of secret Communist Party members in the club leads to a lack of transparency that makes it difficult to determine what is official party action and what is not. The problem with this state affairs is made explicit when Ed Young joins the club and almost manages to convince the club to purge a member in good standing for disloyalty before the members discover he is an escapee from a mental asylum.

Wright is deeply engaged with the John Reed Club and the party during this period, but his insistence on making art leads Party members to view him with distrust. They label him an intellectual, an insult considering intellectuals by this moment in party politics were seen as anti-revolutionary parasites who stand in the way of a true workers’ revolution. He discovers after an uncomfortable meeting during which the attendees snicker as he speaks that his formal diction and neat appearance are considered to be bourgeois (middle-class), setting him apart from the casual, slovenly style favored by some to show their solidarity with the working class. Wright finds this distrust particularly galling since he is inarguably poor and self-taught. He reads with some concern (not enough, as it turns out) of how intellectuals are subject to purges and execution in the Soviet Union.

Still, he persists in his project of serving as an interpreter between Black Americans and Communism by working on a book of biographical sketches of Black Communists. He begins a series of interviews with his first subject, Ross, a Black street organizer who is under indictment for inciting riots. When word gets out about the interviews, a Black party member warns Wright that the American Communist Party is taking its lead from the Soviet Union by drumming out intellectuals for insufficient loyalty to the party’s principles. Wright is dismayed when the party member tells him that writing alone will not be enough to establish his intentions with the party. Later, another party member questions Wright under the assumption that Wright may be passing information harmful to Ross’s defense to the police.

Wright learns that his Communist peers have a naïve and ill-informed understanding of the Black experience in America. The more Wright attempts to illuminate how misinformed they are, the more they view him with suspicion. Wright eventually finds that the sense of suffocation that made him leave the South now exists in Chicago because of the overwhelming presence of suspicious Communists in his life. Nevertheless, this is a fertile time for him artistically. As he listens to Ross and others talk about growing up in the South, he shifts his project from biography to fiction. During this period, he begins writing and publishing a series of short stories based on the lives of Black people in conflict with the South.

Things go from bad to worse when Ross is charged with having anti-revolutionary tendencies that violate his commitment to the party. Wright is sure that he will be charged next. He also grows weary of having to choose between doing political work and artistic work, and he realizes that the party does not see the creation of art as a legitimate revolutionary activity. He and his artist peers are forced to set aside creative work to do things like write pamphlets.

Wright finds the growing restrictions on his self-expression crushing. In 1934, at a congress of the John Reed chapters, the membership decides to dissolve the clubs in accordance with the leadership of the party, which at this point is shifting its strategies to engage more fully with non-Communists and move away from militant, worker-originated actions as the world confronts fascism. In retrospect, Wrights concludes that the “artist and the politician stand at opposite poles” (345) because politicians live in the world of products and material goods, while the artist deals in emotion, passions, and ideas. Wright cannot in good conscience give up on his artistic vision because his “writing was [his] way of seeing, [his] way of living, [his] way of feeling” (346).

One more congress is scheduled for New York, and Wright attends, only to be disgusted to learn that the racism is so rife among members that Wright is forced to find sleeping room in the Harlem YMCA. The congress definitively ends the clubs, and Wright now knows with certainty that he is done with the party. Several Black party leaders attempt to recruit Wright to become a mass leader, but Wright knows this work is not for him. He spends his time writing. In the end, he asks to be removed from the party rolls, but he refuses to denounce the party overtly, hoping that this discretion will prevent them from purging him. His effort fails, and the grapevine in the party labels him as a traitor and counterrevolutionary.

Wright works a series of jobs, one at the Boys and Girls Club of the Southside, another as a publicity agent for the Federal Negro Theater (a project of the Federal Works Administration, which provided work for artists, among others, during the Great Depression). Wright’s insistence that the troupe perform a more realistic play about Black life leads to a revolt among the Black actors, who find the material too confrontational and far from their former relatively innocuous roles in vaudeville theater. The actors threaten both the director and Wright with knives over his actions, and Wright is forced to quit and work at a white theater.

Wright, despite his efforts to avoid his old Communist peers, allows himself to be convinced to go to the public show trial of Ross for anti-revolutionary tendencies. The trial depresses him because he sees a missed opportunity. Communists had managed to overcome the deep-rooted divide between Black and white people, but here it is instituting another divide, one that pits workers against so-called intellectuals like Ross.

Watching the trial, Wright concludes that the party is doomed in in the West because it will never be able to overcome the traditions of “self-achieved literacy” (370), “free thought” (370), and “the self-generating energy” (370) of the Protestant work ethic, individualistic elements of Western culture that did not exist among the Bolsheviks in Russia. In America, these traditions are not the property of intellectuals, and even the lowest person has access to literacy and self-improvement with enough individual initiative. This was not the case for Russian peasants. Ross’s trial—including Ross’s own acceptance of his guilt—ultimately happens because Ross thought of himself as an individual in this tradition. The only difference between Wright and Ross is that Wright refused to overtly oppose the Communists.

Wright is horrified. Ross’s self-denunciation is “a spectacle of glory, and yet, because it had condemned [Wright], because it was blind and ignorant, [Wright] felt it was a spectacle of horror” (34). Wright is once again alienated from everyone around him.

Wright get a job writing guidebooks for the Federal Writers’ Project. He is dogged by attempts of Communist Party members to get him fired. Tired of the harassment, he attempts to get a meeting with the local party leader, but the party has a secretary meet with him instead. She dismisses his concerns. Wright goes back to work, where he serves as the shop chairman for the union at his job, but even here, party members interfere. Things come to a head at the May Day parade of 1936, when Wright’s own union members leave him behind when they go to march. When Wright attempts to fall in line with members of the Southside Communist Party, they beat him to prevent him from marching with them. He makes a lonely walk home and sits down to write with the aim of hewing only to his own vision, “building a bridge of words between [himself] and the world outside, that world which was so distant and illusive that it seemed unreal” (384).