In a scene in his autobiography Black Boy, a 16-year-old Richard Wright is being lectured by a friend, Griggs, who works as a janitor at a jewelry store.
Wright, who grew up in extreme poverty and hunger, can’t seem to keep a job in his small Mississippi town in 1924. Griggs offers advice he believes will not only allow Wright to stay employed, but to stay alive. Griggs tells Wright to try harder to hide his intelligence and his hatred of vicious, violent Jim Crow. Wright has heard this before. As he listens to Griggs, the two of them standing on the sidewalk outside the jewelry store, his mind wanders.
“I sighed, looking at the glittering diamonds in the store window, the rings and the neat rows of golden watches.”
The sentence seems like an aside. But it is essential Wright, juxtaposing what he called Black Americans’ “enforced severance” from society and that society’s excesses.
Black Boy was published in 1945, five years after Wright’s novel Native Son. Between these two acclaimed books, Wright finished The Man Who Lived Underground, a short novel set in Chicago, destination for so many Southern Blacks during the Great Migration. Wright settled in Chicago just a few years after that conversation outside a Mississippi jewelry store.
The Man Who Lived Underground opens with white policemen viciously beating a Black man, Fred Daniels, until he falsely confesses to the murder of a white couple. While the officers are creative at torture, they’re inept at policing and Daniels is able to escape. He hides in Chicago’s sewers, sneaking to the surface occasionally to snatch food, light and, once, jewelry from a store. He later nails the rings and watches to the walls of his cave-like hideout creating what I imagine as a surreal art installation.
As we learn more about Daniel’s ingenuity and as his awareness of self and surroundings grows, readers begin to see the spiritual and psychological weight of a system that imprisons him in a life of poverty and manual labor. He is an artist robbed of the opportunity to realize his potential.
Wright describes Daniels coming to the realization that “though he were innocent, he was guilty; though blameless, he was accused; though living, he must die; though possessing faculties of dignity, he must live a life of shame; though existing, in a seemingly reasonable world, he must die a certainly reasonless death.”
In the end, Daniels confronts the police officers who tortured him. They had forgotten him and found another scapegoat, an immigrant, on whom to pin the murders. But one of the officers recognizes that Daniels, during his sojourn in the sewers, had come to an understanding of America that could inspire revolution. The officer kills Daniels, explaining, ”You’ve got to shoot his kind. They could wreck things.”
Wright’s editors published only the half of Black Boy devoted to Wright’s childhood and adolescence in the South, rejecting passages about his life in Chicago. His novel Native Son is set in Chicago and its central character Bigger Thomas has committed two murders after living a life degraded by whites “whose hate for him was so unfathomably deep that, after they had shunted him off into a corner of the city to rot and die, they could turn to him … and say, ‘I’d like to know how your people live.’”
Wright’s editors could tolerate Black Boy as an indictment of the South. They may have identified with the white leftist lawyer and a Communist activist who defend Bigger in Native Son. But editors weren’t ready, or perhaps believed readers weren’t ready, to face Wright’s broader critique of America when he finished The Man Who Lived Underground in the 1940s, shortly before he left for Paris to escape American racism.
The Chicago section of Black Boy was excised from the autobiography until a 1991 edition. It was only this year that The Man Who Lived Underground was published in full, though Wright saw versions of the novel appear as short stories before he died in 1960.
Reading The Man Who Lived Underground inspired me to re-read Black Boy – the complete version - and Native Son. In all three, Wright portrays the alienation of working class white as well as Black Americans. In an essay about Native Son, Wright wrote that whether the American everyman will “follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who’ll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he’ll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-union or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America.” What would Wright make of where America is drifting now?
Wright found hope in communism’s promise of a world order based on shared humanity. He was too independent a thinker to embrace the Communist Party’s or any politics. He is essentially an artist. Wright, who was just 52 when he died of a heart attack, ends Black Boy with a golden pledge to be an artist above all.
“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.”