Black Boy
Black Boy Quotations Analyzed
1. “I finally found my grocery list and the money and went to the store. On my way back I kept my stick poised
for instant use, but there was not a single boy in sight. That night I won the right to the streets of Memphis.”
After Richard’s father walks out on the family in chapter 1, his mother informs him that he’ll have to take over
the chore of going to the corner grocery store. When a local gang of boys repeatedly rob Richard of his grocery
money, his mother gives him a stick and tells him to fight back. This early childhood trial taught Richard to be
tough, and from this point on in the novel his is never afraid to fight when challenged by other boys. In time
Richard will come to see that violence isn’t the answer; esp. at the end of the book when he is living in Chicago.
2. “A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with a strange woman
and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a
sharecropper, clad in ragged overall, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands – a quarter of a century
during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk
to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face,
though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language,
living on vastly distant planes of reality.”
This bittersweet memory from the very end of chapter 1 finds Richard musing on the forces that shaped his life.
His father’s abandonment of the family plunged Richard’s childhood into poverty, but it also shaped him. Could
he have grown to be the intellectual and author he would become if raised by a man so totally alien? Yet his
fatherless childhood was marked by starvation and deprivation, and his father’s ultimate fate could have been
his, too. This “flash forward” at the beginning of the novel serves to add emphasis to the extraordinary journey
that Richard will undertake to leave the behind the South and the sharecropper mentality.
3. “I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I
could not quite understand it. I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never
touched, it seemed, except in violence. Now, there was my grandmother . . . Was she white? Just how white was
she? What did the whites think of her whiteness?”
Richard’s childhood curiosity about race in chapter 2 introduces this important theme. He is confused by his
grandmother’s light skin (he later learns she has some European ancestors) and by the terms “black” and “white.”
His mother’s discomfort with the topic upsets him as well; she avoids giving him straight answers to his questions
about race. Does she have her own scars from racism that make her unable to discuss the subject, or does she
merely avoid it to protect Richard and teach him how to behave? In time Richard would come to understand the
effects of racism more poignantly than all but a few others of his generation.
4. “I stood fighting, fighting as I had never fought in my life, fighting with myself. Perhaps my uneasy
childhood, perhaps my shifting from town to town, perhaps the violence I had already seen and felt took hold
of me, and I was trying to stifle the impulse to go to the drawer of the kitchen table and get a knife and defend
myself. But this woman who stood before me was my aunt, my mother’s sister, Granny’s daughter; . . .”
Richard’s disastrous, short tenure at the Seventh-day Adventist school run by his Aunt Addie in chapter 4
reached its tragic climax in the walnut shell incident. Blamed for a crime he didn’t commit by his own aunt,
Richard decides to defend himself despite the peril it will bring. Richard is fighting here not only against the
hypocrisy of his incompetent Aunt, but also for his freedom in the ultra-religious household in which he was
raised. While he went on to win this fight, the consequences were an emotional separation from his only family
that left him even more isolated and alienated than he was before.
5. “As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives I feel that for white America to understand
the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet
known. . . . Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color
hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. . . . Am I
damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America,
adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe
into its most fundamental beliefs.” [chapter 15, beginning of part 2]
Richard’s work in a restaurant in Chicago in chapter 15 provides him the opportunity to study different kinds of
people with whom he has never had close contact. Ruminating on the lives of the waitresses with whom he
worked launches him on a deep consideration of the state of racial tension in the United States. First Published in
1945, Black Boy revealed Wright’s prophetic thinking that predicts the civil rights movement and Martin Luther
King, jr. Wright was well aware of the psychic toll that his own upbringing in the racist South had on him, and he
condemns himself as well as America at large.
6. “Stocks Crash – Billions Fade Most of what I had seen in newspapers had never concerned me, so why
should this? Newspapers reported the doings in a life I did not share.” [chapter 16]
Richard’s resettlement in Chicago promised a better life and freedom from the poverty that he experienced as a
boy in the South, but the Great Depression stole that newfound comfort from him. His alienation is made clear
once again as he expresses his belied that events that happen in the newspapers don’t affect the poor, black
underclass. Unfortunately, this news story affected the rich and the poor alike.
7. “The more I learned of the Negro Communists the more I found that that they were not vicious, that they had
no intention to hurt. They just did not know anything and did not want to learn anything. They felt that all
questions had been answered, and anyone who asked new ones or tried to answer old ones was dangerous. The
word ‘writer’ was enough to make a black Chicago Communist feel that the man to whom the word applied
had gone wrong.”
Again and again Richard’s attempts to “belong” and end his long alienation are foiled by his own intelligence
and integrity. While he wants to fit in with the Negro Communists in Chicago, even their experienced leaders are
less knowledgeable and philosophically wise than he. Their devotion to orthodox communist doctrine is as
opposed to free thinking as his grandmother’s Seventh-day Adventism was, and so they, too, reject his
journalistic and literary aspirations. While the promise of belonging to this group holds out the possibility of
finally feeling accepted, Richard ultimately is forced to separate himself from this group too.
8. “I picked up a pencil and held it over the 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 build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so
distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.”
These sentences from the penultimate paragraph in the final chapter (20) mark the ending of Richard’s coming
of age and the beginning of his career as a writer. All of the trials and tribulations of his childhood and
adolescence have equipped him with the temperament and determination necessary to devote himself to this
most demanding craft. Richard’s memoir Black Boy does not have a typical plot arc with a powerful movement
towards a resolution; rather it ends quietly with Richard as alienated as ever, but at peace with himself and his
purpose.
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1. “I finally found my grocery list and the money and went to the store. On my way back I kept my stick poised
for instant use, but there was not a single boy in sight. That night I won the right to the streets of Memphis.”
After Richard’s father walks out on the family in chapter 1, his mother informs him that he’ll have to take over
the chore of going to the corner grocery store. When a local gang of boys repeatedly rob Richard of his grocery
money, his mother gives him a stick and tells him to fight back. This early childhood trial taught Richard to be
tough, and from this point on in the novel his is never afraid to fight when challenged by other boys. In time
Richard will come to see that violence isn’t the answer; esp. at the end of the book when he is living in Chicago.
2. “A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with a strange woman
and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a
sharecropper, clad in ragged overall, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands – a quarter of a century
during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk
to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face,
though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language,
living on vastly distant planes of reality.”
This bittersweet memory from the very end of chapter 1 finds Richard musing on the forces that shaped his life.
His father’s abandonment of the family plunged Richard’s childhood into poverty, but it also shaped him. Could
he have grown to be the intellectual and author he would become if raised by a man so totally alien? Yet his
fatherless childhood was marked by starvation and deprivation, and his father’s ultimate fate could have been
his, too. This “flash forward” at the beginning of the novel serves to add emphasis to the extraordinary journey
that Richard will undertake to leave the behind the South and the sharecropper mentality.
3. “I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I
could not quite understand it. I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never
touched, it seemed, except in violence. Now, there was my grandmother . . . Was she white? Just how white was
she? What did the whites think of her whiteness?”
Richard’s childhood curiosity about race in chapter 2 introduces this important theme. He is confused by his
grandmother’s light skin (he later learns she has some European ancestors) and by the terms “black” and “white.”
His mother’s discomfort with the topic upsets him as well; she avoids giving him straight answers to his questions
about race. Does she have her own scars from racism that make her unable to discuss the subject, or does she
merely avoid it to protect Richard and teach him how to behave? In time Richard would come to understand the
effects of racism more poignantly than all but a few others of his generation.
4. “I stood fighting, fighting as I had never fought in my life, fighting with myself. Perhaps my uneasy
childhood, perhaps my shifting from town to town, perhaps the violence I had already seen and felt took hold
of me, and I was trying to stifle the impulse to go to the drawer of the kitchen table and get a knife and defend
myself. But this woman who stood before me was my aunt, my mother’s sister, Granny’s daughter; . . .”
Richard’s disastrous, short tenure at the Seventh-day Adventist school run by his Aunt Addie in chapter 4
reached its tragic climax in the walnut shell incident. Blamed for a crime he didn’t commit by his own aunt,
Richard decides to defend himself despite the peril it will bring. Richard is fighting here not only against the
hypocrisy of his incompetent Aunt, but also for his freedom in the ultra-religious household in which he was
raised. While he went on to win this fight, the consequences were an emotional separation from his only family
that left him even more isolated and alienated than he was before.
5. “As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives I feel that for white America to understand
the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet
known. . . . Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color
hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. . . . Am I
damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America,
adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe
into its most fundamental beliefs.” [chapter 15, beginning of part 2]
Richard’s work in a restaurant in Chicago in chapter 15 provides him the opportunity to study different kinds of
people with whom he has never had close contact. Ruminating on the lives of the waitresses with whom he
worked launches him on a deep consideration of the state of racial tension in the United States. First Published in
1945, Black Boy revealed Wright’s prophetic thinking that predicts the civil rights movement and Martin Luther
King, jr. Wright was well aware of the psychic toll that his own upbringing in the racist South had on him, and he
condemns himself as well as America at large.
6. “Stocks Crash – Billions Fade Most of what I had seen in newspapers had never concerned me, so why
should this? Newspapers reported the doings in a life I did not share.” [chapter 16]
Richard’s resettlement in Chicago promised a better life and freedom from the poverty that he experienced as a
boy in the South, but the Great Depression stole that newfound comfort from him. His alienation is made clear
once again as he expresses his belied that events that happen in the newspapers don’t affect the poor, black
underclass. Unfortunately, this news story affected the rich and the poor alike.
7. “The more I learned of the Negro Communists the more I found that that they were not vicious, that they had
no intention to hurt. They just did not know anything and did not want to learn anything. They felt that all
questions had been answered, and anyone who asked new ones or tried to answer old ones was dangerous. The
word ‘writer’ was enough to make a black Chicago Communist feel that the man to whom the word applied
had gone wrong.”
Again and again Richard’s attempts to “belong” and end his long alienation are foiled by his own intelligence
and integrity. While he wants to fit in with the Negro Communists in Chicago, even their experienced leaders are
less knowledgeable and philosophically wise than he. Their devotion to orthodox communist doctrine is as
opposed to free thinking as his grandmother’s Seventh-day Adventism was, and so they, too, reject his
journalistic and literary aspirations. While the promise of belonging to this group holds out the possibility of
finally feeling accepted, Richard ultimately is forced to separate himself from this group too.
8. “I picked up a pencil and held it over the 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 build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so
distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.”
These sentences from the penultimate paragraph in the final chapter (20) mark the ending of Richard’s coming
of age and the beginning of his career as a writer. All of the trials and tribulations of his childhood and
adolescence have equipped him with the temperament and determination necessary to devote himself to this
most demanding craft. Richard’s memoir Black Boy does not have a typical plot arc with a powerful movement
towards a resolution; rather it ends quietly with Richard as alienated as ever, but at peace with himself and his
purpose.
Back to Main Page