Richard Wrights Black Boy - Essay Example

This paper will look at Wrights relationship with his father, the small but highly symbolic interactions with Mrs. Bibbs, his employer, the Principleat school and the recurring themes in Wrights relationships with black people beyond the family and his differences to the other black people around him. The central theme I am using to connect these extracts are hunger, emotional, educational and physical hunger. Richard Wrights “Black Boy” tells the story of his personal struggle as a black boy growing up in 20s America in Jim Crow South. However, it is also a social and political commentary on the historical position of black people in the United States at that time and as such the book offers a wider commentary beyond the personal experience of one boy. The social commentary talks to us about racism, inequality, slavery, violence and oppression. The personal commentary tells us about hunger, the human spirit, coming of age and the development of strategies to find a way to survive as a black boy growing into a man in the racist America of the time. At the time of writing “Black Boy” Wright was also influenced by other writers such as James Joyce (1922), who also used their writing as a means for self-analysis. In an atmosphere of awareness of Freud and Freud’s thinking around the human condition and behavior, Wright shows us much of his inner world through symbols in the external world and the other characters in his wider life, that is, beyond his immediate family. “Black Boy” has many central themes including coming of age, rites of passage, violence, oppression, morals, values and loneliness to name a few. However, in this paper I am focusing on the theme of hunger, Wrights personal experiences of hunger, hunger on an emotional level, and educational level and a physical level. To quote: "Once again I knew hunger, biting hunger, hunger that made my body aimlessly restless, hunger that kept me on edge, that made my temper flare, hunger that made hate leap out of my heart like the dart of a serpents tongue, hunger that created in me odd cravings" (Wright. 119). Holding in mind the influence of Freud in Wrights accounts I am curious about the symbolism surrounding food and nurturance and the lack of food and nurturance. This leads me into a consideration of Wrights relationship with his mother and father. I am aware this paper is to focus on relationships beyond the immediate family but it is essential to offer some beginning to his early relationships in order to look at the meanings and symbols in his experiences beyond the family in later life. One of Wrights earliest experiences was the beating he received from his mother which left him almost dead and hallucinating where he imagined huge udders above his head filled with milk; “…the huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me…. Gripped by the fear that they were going to fall and drench me with some horrible liquid.” (Wright. 6). This beating from his mother had an enormous psychological impact on Wright whereby the mother’s milk, the first symbol of food and nourishment, became to him a terrifying symbol of destruction. Here we are faced with Wrights emotional experience of the struggle of hunger, the separation from the mother, the separation from the source of nourishment. According to Freudian thinking the relationship with the father relates more to the infant’s future experiences of the outside world, the external relationships beyond the family. Indeed in this way of thinking the relationship between Wright and his father became the blueprint for his future relationships with society. Again his relationship with his father was strongly connected, both literally and emotionally, to food and hunger and when his father leaves Richard begins to associate his hunger with his fathers image. Later in the book we see these two relationships with Richards mother and father represented in two relationships beyond the immediate family, that of Mrs. Bibbs and the Principle. In other words, Wrights earliest relationships with people and his relationship to hunger were played out with other people in white society. We see his experience with Mrs. Bibbs, who although not a central character in the text, offers a view of the legacy that Wrights earliest beating from his mother left him in relation to hunger. Wright finds himself berated by Mrs., Bibbs because he can’t milk a cow and here we see a symbolic mirroring between Wrights nightmarish vision of milk devouring him from his mothers breast and here with Mrs. Bibbs he is unable to access milk, the very substance that saves the infant from hunger and Wright from losing his employment. The relationship with the principle and Wrights battle to use his own words in his speech is a symbolic mirror to his earlier relationship with his father where his father refused to support his family financially. Here the principle takes the words from Wrights mouth and then his father took the food from his mouth. Uncle Tom reads the principals speech and Richards’s speech and says, "The principals speech is the better speech." (Wright. 177). The principal considers himself a success but Wright is disgusted by his inability to challenge the code of behavior set for black people and here we see Wright unable to recognize the potential for survival by using strategies that he deplores, such as the strategies also used by characters such as Shorty later on in the text. Wright feels his manhood, his sense of development hinge on not using ‘victim’ based strategies. The characters outside Richards’s family mirror the relationships he had inside his family. The relationships with people in white society were marked by Wrights hunger and needs, both emotional, physical and educationally. Meanwhile his portrayal of other black people showed the need for thinking and strategy that Wright oftentimes failed to use in the same way he failed to milk the cow or say his own words, Wright also failed to use strategy to either stay and fight or to stay and be weak, his only wish is to escape. In other words his early experiences with lack of nourishment from mother, lack of resources from father resulted in a black boy who couldn’t milk the cow and feed himself, who couldn’t negotiate, use words and strategy to feed himself, and in this way Wright presents himself as different to other black people in the text. In conclusion, by looking at and offering an analysis of Wrights descriptions of his earliest family relationships we can look at Wrights relationships with people beyond his family in a more organic and integrated way. Mrs. Bibbs, although clearly not the mother, held and mirrored some of the symbolic early experienced Wright had with emotional hunger. The principle, although clearly not the father, took words from Wrights mouth, thus mirroring Wrights relationship with his father where his father took the food from his mouth. In addition, the principles strategy with white society mirrored back Wrights abhorrence of his fathers’ lack of manhood to provide financially. I chose to focus on Mrs. Bibbs and the principle because I felt that these relationships offered interesting symbolic material for this paper and I also felt these character choices were less predictable than other central characters. Works Cited Wright, Richard. Black Boy. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (1945) Joyce, James. Ulysses. Sylvia Beachs Shakespeare and Company. (1922) Read More