Black Boy

As a Black American, Wright is heir to a rich oral tradition that appears in Black Boy as conversations, verbal battles, and folk beliefs that form one of Wright’s only positive and nourishing connections to Black Southern culture. The words he encounters with his peers are thus an important part of his Black identity. Wright does learn other words as well—curse words from the inhabitants of a Memphis saloon and from the people around him when he lives in Memphis. When he uses these words outside of the context of the street by cursing out his grandmother, he learns that words have the power to provoke and to be used as weapons.

Wright enters the world of written language and literature when he hears the story of Blackbeard from Ella, a boarder in his grandmother’s house. His encounter with the story sets him on a lifelong effort to read and write in order to understand himself and connect with others. As a teen and during his time in Memphis, his encounters with the Memphis library allows him to learn enough to apply a more objective lens about the situation of Black Americans in the South and the United States. Books, newspapers, and periodicals thus become conduits that take him beyond the limitations of the Jim Crow South.

During his sojourn in Chicago with the Communists, Wright learns once again that the power of words has a flipside: when party members label him as a traitor and intellectual (meaning a parasite who does not identify with the values of workers), Wright discovers that these words and labels, wielded by others, can do things like cause him to lose jobs or become the target of violence. In the end, Wright becomes the writer he always wanted to be, but one who sees words, stories, and books as tools for self-expression and the ability to share his solitary world with other alienated souls.

In Black literature and the blues, the train is often associated with freedom of movement, especially for Black men. In Black Boy, the train appears as a symbol for Wright’s resistance to the racial order when the adolescent Wright grapples with the strong disapproval of his family and racial community over his desire to write. He describes his sense of wrongness and alienation as a train that has gotten on the “wrong track” (169), despite every effort of the Jim Crow South to keep him compliant and free of dreams. When Wright begins the first stage of his journey to the North (by way of Memphis), he does so in a segregated rail car and as a young man who has committed robbery to afford the price of a ticket, further underscoring that his aspirations are incompatible with the South.

For a brief time, Wright has a job in a medical institute where doctors and scientists performs experiments on animals, including dogs whose vocal cords the scientists have cut; despite their inability to bark, the dogs still exhibit their nature by raising their heads to the ceiling as if they are barking. Wright compares himself and the other Black employees—people whom the white management and professionals discount because of racism—to the dogs because they lack a voice and presence that will allow them to participate fully in the life of the institute.