Black Boy

Black Boy (American Hunger)
by Richard Wright
read: 2012

I recently discovered iTunes U and I decided to follow a Yale English course taught by Amy Hungerford, "The American Novel Since 1945."  The first book covered in the class is Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger), which is unusual as it's normally classified as an autobiography, not fiction.  Professor Hungerford points out two things: 1) there are elements of the book that are fictionalized, exaggerated, or happened to other people, and 2) an autobiographer has to make many of the same decisions a novelist does.  What stories should be included, and which should not?  How much of the subject's internal thoughts should be revealed?  Even the voice of the work is subject to manipulation, as the autobiographer can write about early events from his perspective at the time or from his perspective now, looking back.  And in both the novel and the autobiography, there is the fundamental question behind all art: why make it at all?  What is the artist trying to convey?

Wright mentions throughout the novel that he is looking for a model for how a young black man can live of a life of dignity in American, but he cannot find it.  The books he takes his refuge in are the classics as written by Dead White Men.  While he finds some kindred spirits in the Communist organizations he joins in Chicago, he finds their oppression of the individual for the sake of the party's goal nearly as constricting as the overt racism he encountered in the South.  He is looking to grow as a man, but it does not seem inevitable that he will do so; he is surrounded by people who gave up on the path to self-actualization, whether the submissive religion of his family, the accepted ignorance of his co-workers (most clearly rendered in the elevator man who literally let a white man kick his ass for a dollar), or the blind allegiance of the Communists.  Black Boy suggests that perhaps the quest itself is a triumph in its own right.

And if it is, if Wright succeeds in creating a model for young black men to pursue a live of dignity and a never-ending quest for self-improvement, does it detract from the accomplishment that he plays fast-and-loose with the truth at times?