One evening I heard a tale that rendered me sleepless for nights. It was of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob. It was claimed that the woman vowed she would avenge her husband’s death and she took a shotgun, wrapped it in a sheet, and went humbly to the whites, pleading that she be allowed to take her husband’s body for burial. It seemed that she was granted permission to come to the side of her dead husband while the whites, silent and armed, looked on. The woman, so went the story, knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the sheet; and, before the white men realized what was happening, she had taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shooting at them from her knees.
I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let go with my gun and kill as many of them as possible before they killed me. The story of the woman’s deception gave form and meaning to confused defensive feelings that had long been sleeping in me.
They call Black Boy a memoir, and autobiographical account of Wright’s youth and young adulthood, peppered with honest and awful accounts of racial prejudice, oppression, and violence.
Perhaps. In its bones the story is undoubtedly that. But more to the literary point, I say Black Boy is actually the weapon that Wright had long dreamed of smuggling into white consciousness, unfolding it from its sheet just as it was convinced that he had been crushed, that he had accepted its cruelty as the law of his life.
In this regard, its power comes far more from its emotional truths than its factual ones.
For example, if you can, read the scene in which Wright’s white employers engineer and egg him on to fight another young black man working nearby. Read that one with this perspective in mind, that what you are reading is less a description of what actually happened and more a crystallization of what is emotionally true, and you might get a sense of what makes Black Boy so powerful.
I had to make my rounds of errands to deliver eyeglasses and I stole a few minutes to run across the street to talk to Harrison. Harrison was sullen and bashful, wanting to trust me, but afraid. He told me that Mr. Olin had telephoned his boss and had told him to tell Harrison that I had planned to wait for him at the back entrance of the building at six o-clock and stab him. Harrison and I found it difficult to look at each other; we were upset and distrustful. We were not really angry at each other; we knew that the idea of murder had been planted in each of us by the white men who employed us. We told ourselves again and again that we did not agree with the white men; we urged ourselves to keep faith in each other. Yet there lingered deep down in each of us a suspicion that maybe one of us was trying to kill the other.
“I’m not angry with you, Harrison,” I said.
“I don’t wanna fight nobody,” Harrison said bashfully, but he kept his hand in his pocket on his knife.
Each of us felt the same shame, felt how foolish and weak we were in the face of the domination of the whites.
This is not a story about the facts of two men fighting. This is a story about the emotions of shame and weakness they feel.
Eventually, Wright and Harrison do fight.
I lashed out with a timid left. Harrison landed high on my head and, before I knew it, I had landed a hard right on Harrison’s mouth and blood came. Harrison shot a blow to my nose. The fight was on, was on against our will. I felt trapped and ashamed. I lashed out even harder, and the harder I fought the harder Harrison fought. Our plans and promises now meant nothing. We fought four hard rounds, stabbing, slugging, grunting, spitting, cursing, crying, bleeding. The shame and anger we felt for having allowed ourselves to be duped crept into our blows and blood ran into our eyes, half blinding us. The hate we felt for the men whom we had tried to cheat went into the blows we threw at each other.
And that’s really the allegorical key to the scene. The fear, the shame, the hatred -- expertly turned against each other by the power that they are both defenseless against.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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