Towards the end of the book about his childhood in the American South in the first quarter of the 20th century, Richard Wright (1908-1960) asks if words can be weapons.
The incentive that leads this African-American teenager employed by whites in an optical store in Memphis, trapped in racial segregation and poverty, to consider whether perhaps he too could use his pen in this way is reading A
book of prefaces
by the critic, journalist and essayist Henry Louis Mencken.
“What surprised me was not what it said, but how on earth anyone had managed to muster the courage to say it,” Wright writes in
Black Boy
.
The same can be said of his memoirs, published in 1945 with overwhelming success and becoming a classic of American literature (now recovered in a new translation by Eduardo Hojman).
Born on a plantation, the grandson of slaves who were freed after the Civil War, Wright's story scores high in the macabre
ranking
of literary childhoods marked by extreme poverty, hunger, lack of affection and violence, both family and systemic.
But this is not the chronicle of a victim, but the story of someone who insists on being an agent of his own life, even though the wind blows hurricane-forcely against him.
From the fire that he himself caused when he was barely four years old and that resulted in an almost fatal beating by his parents, Wright reconstructs his story with simplicity and clarity.
There is nothing didactic or instructive, although the environment that surrounds and marks its history, that South of the Jim Crow laws against which the Civil Rights Movement rose, is shown in all its rawness from the personal point of view, in the story. of a child and his family.
The taverns where he is drunk at the age of six, the abandonment of his father, the orphanage where he spends a few months, the strokes that incapacitate his mother and the successive moves take place in a child's world in which the protagonist still does not fully understand the weight of the race.
This forms the young rebel.
Wright describes with well measured scenes in the house of his maternal grandparents, a home marked by the fear of sin, in the Methodist church where they push him to be baptized, in the schools and, later, when he has awakened to the reality of segregation, in white people's homes where they look for work, or in the office where white people want to have fun watching a black fight as if it were a cockfight.
That fear of an African-American boy being murdered, the spigot of the Black Lives Matter movement, is a central nerve in the story of this book.
In literature, and not in the church, is where Wright finds his path of salvation and that route leads him to Chicago, on one of those many trains that took the descendants of the slaves from the South to the North, in the so-called Great Migration.
When
Black Boy
appeared, Wright was already known for his book of short stories
Uncle Tom's Children
and his controversial novel
Son of This Land
,
recently recovered, as well as his travel chronicle
Pagan Spain
(Big Sur, 2022).
A year after the publication of his childhood memoirs, in 1946, he moved to Paris and would never return to the United States.
There he befriended Sartre and Camus and set the path that others, such as James Baldwin, followed.
An indispensable figure in the intellectual circles of the Great Depression and in the genesis of African-American writers of the 20th century, his membership and early disagreements with the Communist Party, as well as his contacts with the CIA in the late 1950s during his exile, were surrounded by controversy. his figure.
But, in case there was any doubt, all that doesn't matter:
Black boy
resists.
Look for it in your bookstore
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