Black Boy

  “Write your name,” the teacher called to me.

  I lifted the white chalk to the blackboard and, as I was about to write, my mind went blank, empty; I could not remember my name, not even the first letter. Somebody giggled and I stiffened.

  “Just forget us and write your name and address,” the teacher coaxed.

  An impulse to write would flash through me, but my hand would refuse to move. The children began to twitter and I flushed hotly.

  “Don’t you know your name?” the teacher asked.

  I looked at her and could not answer. The teacher rose and walked to my side, smiling at me to give me confidence. She placed her hand tenderly upon my shoulder.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Richard,” I whispered.

  “Richard what?”

  “Richard Wright.”

  “Spell it.”

  I spelled my name in a wild rush of letters, trying desperately to redeem my paralyzing shyness.

  “Spell it slowly so I can hear it,” she directed me.

  I did.

  “Now, can you write?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then write it.”

  Again I turned to the blackboard and lifted my hand to write, then I was blank and void within. I tried frantically to collect my senses, but I could remember nothing. A sense of the girls and boys behind me filled me to the exclusion of everything. I realized how utterly I was failing and I grew weak and leaned my hot forehead against the cold blackboard. The room burst into a loud and prolonged laugh and my muscles froze.

  “You may go to your seat,” the teacher said.

  I sat and cursed myself. Why did I always appear so dumb when I was called upon to perform something in a crowd? I knew how to write as well as any pupil in the classroom, and no doubt I could read better than any of them, and I could talk fluently and expressively when I was sure of myself. Then why did strange faces make me freeze? I sat with my ears and neck burning, hearing the pupils whisper about me, hating myself, hating them; I sat still as stone and a storm of emotion surged through me.

  While sitting in class one day I was startled to hear whistles blowing and bells ringing. Soon the bedlam was deafening. The teacher lost control of her class and the girls and boys ran to the windows. The teacher left the room and when she returned she announced:

  “Everybody, pack your things and go home!”

  “Why?”

  “What’s happened?”

  “The war is over,” the teacher said.

  I followed the rest of the children into the streets and saw that white and black people were laughing and singing and shouting. I felt afraid as I pushed through crowds of white people, but my fright left when I entered my neighborhood and saw smiling black faces. I wandered among them, trying to realize what war was, what it meant, and I could not. I noticed that many girls and boys were pointing at something in the sky; I looked up too and saw what seemed to be a tiny bird wheeling and sailing.

  “Look!”

  “A plane!”

  I had never seen a plane.

  “It’s a bird,” I said.

  The crowd laughed.

  “That’s a plane, boy,” a man said.

  “It’s a bird,” I said. “I see it.”

  A man lifted me upon his shoulder.

  “Boy, remember this,” he said. “You’re seeing man fly.”

  I still did not believe it. It still looked like a bird to me. That night at home my mother convinced me that men could fly.

  Christmas came and I had but one orange. I was hurt and would not go out to play with the neighborhood children who were blowing horns and shooting firecrackers. I nursed my orange all of Christmas Day; at night, just before going to bed, I ate it, first taking a bite out of the top and sucking the juice from it as I squeezed it; finally I tore the peeling into bits and munched them slowly.

  3

  Having grown taller and older, I now associated with older boys and I had to pay for my admittance into their company by subscribing to certain racial sentiments. The touchstone of fraternity was my feeling toward white people, how much hostility I held toward them, what degrees of value and honor I assigned to race. None of this was premeditated, but sprang spontaneously out of the talk of black boys who met at the crossroads.

  It was degrading to play with girls and in our talk we relegated them to a remote island of life. We had somehow caught the spirit of the role of our sex and we flocked together for common moral schooling. We spoke boastfully in bass voices; we used the word “nigger” to prove the tough fiber of our feelings; we spouted excessive profanity as a sign of our coming manhood; we pretended callousness toward the injunctions of our parents; and we strove to convince one another that our decisions stemmed from ourselves and ourselves alone. Yet we frantically concealed how dependent we were upon one another.

  Of an afternoon when school had let out I would saunter down the street, idly kicking an empty tin can, or knocking a stick against the palings of a wooden fence, or whistling, until I would stumble upon one or more of the gang loitering at a corner, standing in a field, or sitting upon the steps of somebody’s house.

  “Hey.” Timidly.

  “You eat yet?” Uneasily trying to make conversation.

  “Yeah, man. I done really fed my face.” Casually.

  “I had cabbage and potatoes.” Confidently.

  “I had buttermilk and black-eyed peas.” Meekly informational.

  “Hell, I ain’t gonna stand near you, nigger!” Pronouncement.

  “How come?” Feigned innocence.

  “’Cause you gonna smell up this air in a minute!” A shouted accusation.

  Laughter runs through the crowd.

  “Nigger, your mind’s in a ditch.” Amusingly moralistic.

  “Ditch, nothing! Nigger, you going to break wind any minute now!” Triumphant pronouncement creating suspense.

  “Yeah, when them black-eyed peas tell that buttermilk to move over, that buttermilk ain’t gonna wanna move and there’s gonna be war in your guts and your stomach’s gonna swell up and bust!” Climax.

  The crowd laughs loud and long.

  “Man, them white folks oughta catch you and send you to the zoo and keep you for the next war!” Throwing the subject into a wider field.

  “Then when that fighting starts, they oughta feed you on buttermilk and black-eyed peas and let you break wind!” The subject is accepted and extended.

  “You’d win the war with a new kind of poison gas!” A shouted climax.

  There is high laughter that simmers down slowly.

  “Maybe poison gas is something good to have.” The subject of white folks is associationally swept into the orbit of talk.

  “Yeah, if they hava race riot round here, I’m gonna kill all the white folks with my poison.” Bitter pride.

  Gleeful laughter. Then silence, each waiting for the other to contribute something.

  “Them white folks sure scared of us, though.” Sober statement of an old problem.

  “Yeah, they send you to war, make you lick them Germans, teach you how to fight and when you come back they scared of you, want to kill you.” Half boastful and half complaining.

  “My mama says that old white woman where she works talked ’bout slapping her and Ma said: ‘Miz Green, if you slaps me, I’ll kill you and go to hell and pay for it!’” Extension, development, sacrificial boasting.

  “Hell, I woulda just killed her if she hada said that to me.” An angry grunt of supreme racial assertion.

  Silence.

  “Man, them white folks sure is mean.” Complaining.

  “That’s how come so many colored folks leaving the South.” Informational.

  “And, man, they sure hate for you to leave.” Pride of personal and racial worth implied.

  “Yeah. They wanna keep you here and work you to death.”

  “The first white sonofabitch that bothers me is gonna get a hole knocked in his
head!” Naïve rebellion.

  “That ain’t gonna do you no good. Hell, they’ll catch you.” Rejection of naïve rebellion.

  “Ha-ha-ha…Yeah, goddammit, they really catch you, now.” Appreciation of the thoroughness of white militancy.

  “Yeah, white folks set on their white asses day and night, but leta nigger do something, and they get every bloodhound that was ever born and put ’em on his trail.” Bitter pride in realizing what it costs to defeat them.

  “Man, you reckon these white folks is ever gonna change?” Timid, questioning hope.

  “Hell, no! They just born that way.” Rejecting hope for fear that it could never come true.

  “Shucks, man. I’m going north when I get grown.” Rebelling against futile hope and embracing flight.

  “A colored man’s all right up north.” Justifying flight.

  “They say a white man hit a colored man up north and that colored man hit that white man, knocked him cold, and nobody did a damn thing!” Urgent wish to believe in flight.

  “Man for man up there.” Begging to believe in justice.

  Silence.

  “Listen, you reckon them buildings up north is as tall as they say they is?” Leaping by association to something concrete and trying to make belief real.

  “They say they gotta building in New York forty stories high!” A thing too incredible for belief.

  “Man, I’d be scareda them buildings!” Ready to abandon the now suppressed idea of flight.

  “You know, they say that them buildings sway and rock in the wind.” Stating a miracle.

  “Naw, nigger!” Utter astonishment and rejection.

  “Yeah, they say they do.” Insisting upon the miracle.

  “You reckon that could be?” Questioning hope.

  “Hell, naw! If a building swayed and rocked in the wind, hell, it’d fall! Any fool knows that! Don’t let people maka fool outta you, telling you them things!” Moving body agitatedly, stomping feet impatiently, and scurrying back to safe reality.

  Silence. Somebody would pick up a stone and toss it across a field.

  “Man, what makes white folks so mean?” Returning to grapple with the old problem.

  “Whenever I see one I spit.” Emotional rejection of whites.

  “Man, ain’t they ugly?” Increased emotional rejection.

  “Man, you ever get right close to a white man, close enough to smell ’im?” Anticipation of statement.

  “They say we stink. But my ma says white folks smell like dead folks.” Wishing the enemy was dead.

  “Niggers smell from sweat. But white folks smell all the time.” The enemy is an animal to be killed on sight.

  And the talk would weave, roll, surge, spurt, veer, swell, having no specific aim or direction, touching vast areas of life, expressing the tentative impulses of childhood. Money, God, race, sex, color, war, planes, machines, trains, swimming, boxing, anything…The culture of one black household was thus transmitted to another black household, and folk tradition was handed from group to group. Our attitudes were made, defined, set, or corrected; our ideas were discovered, discarded, enlarged, torn apart, and accepted. Night would fall. Bats would zip through the air. Crickets would cry from the grass. Frogs would croak. The stars would come out. Dew would dampen the earth. Yellow squares of light would glow in the distance as kerosene lamps were lit in our homes. Finally, from across the fields or down the road a long slow yell would come:

  “Youuuuuuuu, Daaaaaaaavee!”

  Easy laughter among the boys, but no reply.

  “Calling the hogs.”

  “Go home, pig.”

  Laughter again. A boy would slowly detach himself from the gang.

  “Youuuuuuu, Daaaaaaaavee!”

  He would not answer his mother’s call, for that would have been a sign of dependence.

  “I’ll do you-all like the farmer did the potato,” the boy would say.

  “How’s that?”

  “Plant you now and dig you later!”

  The boy would trot home slowly and there would be more easy laughter. More talk. One by one we would be called home to fetch water from the hydrant in the back yard, to go to the store and buy greens and meal for tomorrow, to split wood for kindling.

  On Sundays, if our clothes were presentable, my mother would take me and my brother to Sunday school. We did not object, for church was not where we learned of God or His ways, but where we met our school friends and continued our long, rambling talks. Some of the Bible stories were interesting in themselves, but we always twisted them, secularized them to the level of our street life, rejecting all meanings that did not fit into our environment. And we did the same to the beautiful hymns. When the preacher intoned:

  Amazing grace, how sweet it sounds

  we would wink at one another and hum under our breath:

  A bulldog ran my grandma down

  We were now large enough for the white boys to fear us and both of us, the white boys and the black boys, began to play our traditional racial roles as though we had been born to them, as though it was in our blood, as though we were being guided by instinct. All the frightful descriptions we had heard about each other, all the violent expressions of hate and hostility that had seeped into us from our surroundings, came now to the surface to guide our actions. The roundhouse was the racial boundary of the neighborhood, and it had been tacitly agreed between the white boys and the black boys that the whites were to keep to the far side of the roundhouse and we blacks were to keep to our side. Whenever we caught a white boy on our side we stoned him; if we strayed to their side, they stoned us.

  Our battles were real and bloody; we threw rocks, cinders, coal, sticks, pieces of iron, and broken bottles, and while we threw them we longed for even deadlier weapons. If we were hurt, we took it quietly; there was no crying or whimpering. If our wounds were not truly serious, we hid them from our parents. We did not want to be beaten for fighting. Once, in a battle with a gang of white boys, I was struck behind the car with a piece of broken bottle; the cut was deep and bled profusely. I tried to stem the flow of blood by dabbing at the cut with a rag and when my mother came from work I was forced to tell her that I was hurt, for I needed medical attention. She rushed me to a doctor who stitched my scalp; but when she took me home she beat me, telling me that I must never fight white boys again, that I might be killed by them, that she had to work and had no time to worry about my fights. Her words did not sink in, for they conflicted with the code of the streets. I promised my mother that I would not fight, but I knew that if I kept my word I would lose my standing in the gang, and the gang’s life was my life.

  My mother became too ill to work and I began to do chores in the neighborhood. My first job was carrying lunches to the men who worked in the roundhouse, for which I received twenty-five cents a week. When the men did not finish their lunches, I would salvage what few crumbs remained. Later I obtained a job in a small café carting wood in my arms to keep the big stove going and taking trays of food to passengers when trains stopped for a half hour or so in a near-by station. I received a dollar a week for this work, but I was too young and too small to perform the duties; one morning while trying to take a heavily loaded tray up the steps of a train, I fell and dashed the tray of food to the ground.

  Inability to pay rent forced us to move into a house perched atop high logs in a section of the town where flood waters came. My brother and I had great fun running up and down the tall, shaky steps.

  Again paying rent became a problem and we moved nearer the center of town, where I found a job in a pressing shop, delivering clothes to hotels, sweeping floors, and listening to Negro men boast of their sex lives.

  Yet again we moved, this time to the outskirts of town, near a wide stretch of railroad tracks to which, each morning before school, I would take a sack and gather coal to heat our frame house, dodging in and out between the huge, black, puffing engines.

  My mother, her health failing rapidly, spoke constantly
now of Granny’s home, of how ardently she wanted to see us grow up before she died. Already there had crept into her speech a halting, lisping quality that, though I did not know it, was the shadow of her future. I was more conscious of my mother now than I had ever been and I was already able to feel what being completely without her would mean. A slowly rising dread stole into me and I would look at my mother for long moments, but when she would look at me I would look away. Then real fear came as her illness recurred at shorter intervals. Time stood still. My brother and I waited, hungry and afraid.

  One morning a shouting voice awakened me.

  “Richard! Richard!”

  I rolled out of bed. My brother came running into the room.

  “Richard, you better come and see Mama. She’s very sick,” he said.

  I ran into my mother’s room and saw her lying upon her bed, dressed, her eyes open, her mouth gaped. She was very still.

  “Mama!” I called.

  She did not answer or turn her head. I reached forward to shake her, but drew back, afraid that she was dead.

  “Mama!” I called again, my mind unable to grasp that she could not answer.

  Finally I went to her and shook her. She moved slightly and groaned. My brother and I called her repeatedly, but she did not speak. Was she dying? It seemed unthinkable. My brother and I looked at each other; we did not know what to do.

  “We better get somebody,” I said.

  I ran into the hallway and called a neighbor. A tall, black woman bustled out of a door.