But perhaps that is the way it has always been with man …
A better world’s in birth …
The procession still passed. Banners still floated. Voices of hope still chanted.
I headed toward home alone, really alone now, telling myself that in all the sprawling immensity of our mighty continent the least-known factor of living was the human heart, the least-sought goal of being was a way to live a human life. Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness. I would try, not because I wanted to but because I felt that I had to if I were to live at all.
I sat alone in my narrow room, watching the sun sink slowly in the chilly May sky. I was restless. I rose to get my hat; I wanted to visit some friends and tell them what I felt, to talk. Then I sat down. Why do that? My problem was here, here with me, here in this room, and I would solve it here alone or not at all. Yet, I did not want to face it; it frightened me. I rose again and went out into the streets. Halfway down the block I stopped, undecided. Go back … I returned to my room and sat again, determined to look squarely at my life.
Well, what had I got out of living in the city? What had I got out of living in the South? What had I got out of living in America? I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and a dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life. All my life I had been full of a hunger for a new way to live …
I heard a trolley lumbering past over steel tracks in the early dusk and I knew that underpaid, bewildered black men and women were returning to their homes from serving their white masters. In the front room of my apartment our radio was playing, pouring a white man’s voice into my home, a voice that hinted of a coming war that would consume millions of lives.
Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain …
I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
Acknowledgment
The text of American Hunger has been printed from the original page proofs of 1944, as corrected by the author. These proofs are now a part of the Richard Wright Archive in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.
Harper & Row gratefully acknowledges the cooperation and aid of the Supervisory Committee of the Richard Wright Archive: Charles Davis, Michel Fabre, Donald Gallup, Louis Martz, and Ellen Wright.
Also our thanks to John Sterling of Paul R. Reynolds, Inc., Richard Wright’s literary agent.
Afterword
When Black Boy was published by Harper & Brothers in March 1945 and offered as a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, American reviewers responded almost unanimously with enthusiasm. Four years earlier, Native Son had shocked an audience not yet prepared to look beyond the mask of the smiling Negro to discover his hatred and his desire for revenge against white racism. With that book Wright’s reputation as a critic of the American system and as a tough, violent muckraking novelist was established. By the close of World War II, however, racial issues were more often being aired by blacks in terms of the “double victory” campaign–discrimination in weapons factories was attacked by a march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph; segregation in the Red Cross blood banks raised vigorous protest in the black press. From Sinclair Lewis’ Kingsblood Royal and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit to Howard Fast’s more radical Freedom Road, a spate of books dealing with what was now being called “the American dilemma” succeeded, in fiction at least, in showing the concern of well-meaning whites.
Black Boy was a striking achievement: few of its predecessors had exemplified such power and sincerity. Moreover, the quality of Wright’s writing was high. Attacking as it did the blunting effect of racial oppression on Southern childhood, the book could not help but emphasize black resilience and courage as embodied in the author. It thus corresponded to the very American type of success story characteristic of slave narratives–the journey from hard times to freedom, if not exactly from rags to riches. Its success, we can surmise, rested as much on the assertion of a self-realization as on the distinctive character of Wright’s talent and artistic struggle. He himself had wanted his story to stand as a pattern of black survival and he had accepted the onus of becoming a spokesman out of a deep sense of ethnic solidarity. In an interview granted to PM Magazine on April 14, 1945, he stated:
I wanted to give, lend my tongue to the voiceless Negro boys. I feel that way about the deprived Negro children of the South: “Not until the sun ceases to shine on you shall I disown you.”
At the same time, Wright was also attempting to re-create his growth as a writer and a politically conscious citizen who often found himself at odds with the national culture. His writing had already evinced a clearly autobiographical quality in such early pieces as the bitterly satirical “Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” the more humorous vignette “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You,” and in some episodes of Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. As early as 1940, Wright had been told by his agent and friend Paul Reynolds that he should write his autobiography, but he had asked for time to consider this suggestion. Now, finally, at the age of thirty-five, he was convinced of the value and necessity of delving into his own past. A lecture about his formative years which he gave at Fisk University in 1942 created such a liberating explosion of enthusiasm among the blacks and one of such angry resentment among the whites in the audience that Wright realized: “I had accidentally blundered into the secret black, hidden core of race relations in the United States. That core is this: nobody is ever expected to speak honestly about the problem.” He had, no doubt, the exemplary function of the book in mind all the time, and he was fond of repeating: “One of the things that made me write is that I realize that I am a very average Negro. Maybe that’s what makes me extraordinary.” However, the therapeutic role of plunging into his past, of dealing with embarrassing sexual incidents, traumas, and moral dilemmas, and of trying to focus his approach in such a way as to preserve the balance necessary for truthfulness was probably the most beneficial result for the author himself. This is suggested in his description of “The Birth of Black Boy,” which appeared in the New York Post on November 30, 1944:
The real hard terror of writing like this came when I found that writing of one’s life was vastly different from speaking of it. I was rendering a close and emotionally connected account of my experience and the ease I had had in speaking from notes at Fisk would not come again. I found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. If you try it you will find that at times sweat will break upon you. You will find that even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all, fight with yourself; for there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. You’ll find that there are many things that you don’t want to admit about yourself and others. As your record shapes itself an awed wonder haunts you. And yet there is no more exciting an adventure than trying to be honest in this way. The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when you’ve done it makes you know that.
Wright’s nearly psychoanalytical explanations for his own motives, which run like an unabating burden throughout the autobiography, are the
clear recognition of the power and weight of one’s past. His explanatory comment does not really blend with the story’s dialogue, its descriptions, its action, or its lyrical outbursts; it is a reflexive voice which enables the reader to gauge the passage of the author’s life and the ensuing change in his perspective. It constitutes a meditation on Wright’s growth from his Mississippi environment in the 1910s, when he had his first recollections, to setting them down on paper in New York in the mid-1940s. This sense of Wright’s having reached a degree of success is essential to the reader because it enables him to look back from a given point of achievement in order to pass judgment on the obstacles conquered and on the perseverance and energy needed in the process. The sense of exhilaration associated with consolidation and growth is most strongly communicated in the conclusion of Black Boy, where Wright capsulizes his Southern ordeals and wonders about his future:
I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom…. I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.
It should be pointed out that this final paragraph of Black Boy represents little more than a statement of aims, a nearly mystical expression of hopeful potentialities. When Wright muses that the novelist’s personality will be allowed “perhaps to bloom” in Chicago, the reader is tempted to focus on the blossoming and to overlook the emphasis on the mere possibility of such realization. Thus one can jump a little too readily to the conclusion that Wright, who certainly deserved whatever luck he had, finally found in the United States the kind of soil where his blackness could bloom, where his racial suffering could be redeemed. Such an optimistic reading of the novelist’s flight to Chicago is definitely influenced by the knowledge that Wright had, by 1945, established his reputation as the leading Afro-American novelist. In this light, the very success of Black Boy as a best seller is taken to demonstrate the soundness of whatever optimism lies in Wright’s “hazy notions” of a better environment. Black Boy is commonly construed as a typical success story, and thus it has been used by the American liberal to justify his own optimism regarding his country.
It is true that Wright did stress the appeal of the North, developing the dream of escape to a better land, which had sustained generations of fugitive slaves on their way to Canaan. It is equally true that Wright, because he placed his autobiography in the literary tradition of slave narratives, expressed hopes so powerful that one might easily overlook the depth of the disappointments he was to experience. Yet when Wright reflects upon his Chicago experience in American Hunger, his perspective is in fact extremely critical of the American system as a whole. Superimposed on the spectrum of his fiction, this latter section of his autobiography evokes a range of human possibilities restricted to the ludicrous shallowness of Jake Jackson caught in the squirrel cage of Lawd Today or the dramatic horror of Bigger Thomas’ violent fate.
The opening pages of American Hunger describe the complete unpreparedness of the Southern migrants who came up to flood the Midwest metropolis. Through scattered references to his family and their inability to respond to his needs, Wright makes clear his own uprootedness, his loneliness among the black masses whose struggle he had already evoked in Twelve Million Black Voices: “We were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone….” That is the tragedy of black migration. Turned loose to fend for themselves, such youngsters as Wright were likely to turn into “bad guys” or complacent do-nothings. The conditions of life in an urban neighborhood, overcrowded and decaying from the outset, made rural folk culture, previously a sustaining force, largely irrelevant. And finally it crumbled in face of the materialistic survival values of city life, injecting Wright and others like him with a sense of solitude among their own people. For Wright, such loneliness resulted as well from his inability to participate in the unsophisticated life around him and to lose himself in such anaesthetic diversions as Saturday-night wenching and carousing. He was, moreover, frustrated by the realization that mass civilization, as it had been established in the United States, had nothing enduring to offer:
Everything seemed makeshift, temporary. I caught an abiding sense of insecurity in the personalities of the people around me…. Wherever my eyes turned they saw stricken, frightened black faces trying vainly to cope with a civilization that they did not understand.
Indeed, white people suffered just as much from alienation. Of the white waitresses with whom he worked in a restaurant, Wright remarked:
They were an eager, restless, talkative, ignorant bunch, but casually kind and impersonal for all that. They knew nothing of hate and fear, and strove instinctively to avoid all passion…. Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life…. Perhaps it would be possible for the Negro to become reconciled to his plight if he could be made to believe that his sufferings were for some remote, high, sacrificial end; but sharing the culture that condemns him, and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms to rolling in his soul.
Wright’s sentiments here are far from those in the potentially rosy ending of Black Boy. American Hunger in no way lends itself to being interpreted as a success story. In fact, the complete original version of Wright’s autobiography (“Black Boy” plus “American Hunger”) takes him not only to the Middle West in 1927 but to the hectic heart of New York City in 1937 with no increase in his general satisfaction. Not only does it range further than Black Boy alone, showing Wright’s tempering and emergence as a left-wing writer; it also provides a much fuller picture of American life. The stunting experiences suffered in Black Boy are followed by more overtly disturbing occurrences in the North; American Hunger represents the culmination of Wright’s disappointment. While Black Boy is illuminated by a quotation from Job stressing the blindness of racism, the epigraph to American Hunger raises the question of the basic sanity of the American system through a lightly ironic folk verse: “Sometimes I wonder, huh/Wonder if other people wonder, huh,/Just like I do, oh, my Lord, just like I do.”
It was only at the time of the decision to publish the first section of the autobiography separately that the five present concluding pages of Black Boy were added. These new pages allow a rather more optimistic interpretation than the original rather sober ending, which they now follow: “This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.” The second part ended, as it still does, with Wright’s desperate attempt, after his failure to work hand in hand with the Communists, to raise an echo by hurling his words to the world. Wright’s original title for the section, “The Horror and the Glory,” which may apply to the policies of the C.P.U.S.A. as well as to the fluctuating conditions of life during the Depression, is far from hopeful. Thus, the final pages of the entire autobiography, instead of pointing, as does Black Boy, to Wright’s success as a writer and to his achievement as a black American, actually extended his argument into the existential quandary of a politically conscious human being confronted with a barren social and spiritual horizon.
One may indeed wonder how Wright allowed Black Boy to be published as it finally was in the spring of 1945, since the two-part work–Black Boy plus American Hunger–seems better to correspond to his original aim. It is necessary to recall the genesis of the book in late 1942. For some time, Wright kept unusually silent about it, although he commented freely on the progress of another work, a novel about domestic workers, which he was eventually to discard. On December 17, 1943, he sent his manuscript to Paul Reynolds with a terse
and surprisingly unsure comment:
Here is another manuscript, the value of which I do not know. Read it and if it is worth showing to Harper’s, then let them see it; if, however, you think that such a book ought not to be published by me at this time, then hold it. I don’t think that there is much that I will ever be able to do on this script. Perhaps a section or two here and there will have to be pulled out. But, on the whole, the thing will have to stand as it is, for better or worse.
I called it American Hunger, but later I thought that Black Hunger would be a better title.*
Reynolds reacted enthusiastically. Edward Aswell, Wright’s editor at Harper’s and his well-heeded friendly adviser, accepted the book at once and scheduled its publication for the fall of 1944. It was Aswell who suggested the subtitle “The Biography of a Courageous Negro,” to which Wright preferred “The Biography of an American Negro.” On January 22, 1944, he wrote Aswell: “I would let the reader decide if I have been courageous or not. I think the phrase ‘Negro American’ keeps the book related to the American scene and emphasizes the oneness of impulse, the singleness of aim of both black and white Americans.” This reveals that Wright’s criticism of the United States was cultural in a large sense, not merely racial.
By mid-1944 the autobiography had been set in page proofs and a jacket was ready for American Hunger. In the meantime, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had been considering the work, finally accepted it as a dual selection for March 1945. It is not quite clear whether the club accepted the autobiography on the condition that it would include only Wright’s experiences in the South, or whether Aswell himself made the suggestion. At any rate, as early as January 1944 Aswell had expressed the view that Wright should publish the first section of his autobiography separately and develop his Chicago and New York experiences into another volume. Wright seems to have agreed to do so at the time.