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A review by bradley_pough
Black Boy by Richard Wright
5.0
I really wish I had read this one sooner. This is the kind of book you come back to many times over and each time discover some new insight or nugget that you completely missed the last time around. Loosely based on Richard Wright's life, Black Boy tells the story of a young man's escape from the Jim Crow South to Chicago in the early 1900's. And yet, while this book takes the form of an autobiography, describing it as the story of Richard Wright's life seems to miss the point. It is, instead, the story of a mind evolving as it interacts with the world around it.
That mind -- inhabiting the body of a young black man -- struggles throughout the book to make itself known to the external world on its own terms. But that world has its own agenda and its own conception of who "Richard" is. The black world has one understanding, the white world another, the Southern world something else, the Communist world something else still. Those conceptions of Richard are almost entirely uninfluenced by the "mind" inside of Richard's head narrating the tale. The book is, therefore, the story of how that mind comes to grips with the fact that it hardly understands the world around it and that the world around it has almost no interest in actually understanding the mind.
In this way Black Boy reminds me of Richard Wright's description of his short story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre" -- "It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, an stemmed from pure feeling." Although the book is so much more than that, it does feel more like the autobiography of Richard Wright's id as opposed to the story of the man himself -- raw, emotional, and cerebral.
Indeed, Black Boy recalled for me W.E.B. Dubois's theory of "double consciousness" -- the idea that African Americans move through the world as divided parts of a whole person. We are both the person who the world sees and the person in our heads who sees the world. I always thought that the double consciousness theory was a not only a powerful encapsulation of the black experience, but the human experience and Wright's "Black Boy" turns Dubios's theory into a tangible and relatable narrative. Definitely worth the read.
That mind -- inhabiting the body of a young black man -- struggles throughout the book to make itself known to the external world on its own terms. But that world has its own agenda and its own conception of who "Richard" is. The black world has one understanding, the white world another, the Southern world something else, the Communist world something else still. Those conceptions of Richard are almost entirely uninfluenced by the "mind" inside of Richard's head narrating the tale. The book is, therefore, the story of how that mind comes to grips with the fact that it hardly understands the world around it and that the world around it has almost no interest in actually understanding the mind.
In this way Black Boy reminds me of Richard Wright's description of his short story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre" -- "It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, an stemmed from pure feeling." Although the book is so much more than that, it does feel more like the autobiography of Richard Wright's id as opposed to the story of the man himself -- raw, emotional, and cerebral.
Indeed, Black Boy recalled for me W.E.B. Dubois's theory of "double consciousness" -- the idea that African Americans move through the world as divided parts of a whole person. We are both the person who the world sees and the person in our heads who sees the world. I always thought that the double consciousness theory was a not only a powerful encapsulation of the black experience, but the human experience and Wright's "Black Boy" turns Dubios's theory into a tangible and relatable narrative. Definitely worth the read.