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Richard Wright, grandson of a slave was born and spent the first years of his life on a plantation
near Natchez, Mississippi. The family's extreme poverty forced them to move to Memphis,
Tennessee, in 1913 when Richard was six years old. Soon after moving, his father, a former
sharecropper, abandoned the family, leaving his mother to support them alone.
His family moved to Jackson, Mississippi to live with relatives. Wright's entire life was fraught with
such continual moving from town to town and staying with relatives, being boarded in
orphanages, and hostels, incurring cleavages with family members and teachers, fighting
incessantly with bullies, white street gangs,as much as his constant fight against hunger,
hypocrisy, parental neglect and the trauma of living in a household of multiple sick members and
coping with the drudgery of Christian fundamentalism
So when at the age of 15, Wright started expiating his feelings by writing his first story "The
Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre", and it was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper,
he had little support and encouragement from his family He had to develop a high level of
motivation and daring , to go ahead forging notes with the signatures of whites to borrow books
from the library for him to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for great literature.
Richard keeps steadily growing physically, socially, psychologically as well as emotionally. He
begins to feel his hormones surging forth in church and he starts lusting after the elder's wife and
is sexually stimulated by the "sweet sonorous hymn."
Richard soon starts finding new ways of spending his leisure hours until one day, he decides to
write a story about an Indian girl who commits suicide by drowning herself. As he reads the story
to a young woman next door, Richard experiences a strange feeling of gratification at his
accomplishment.
Richard enters the fifth grade of the Jim Hill School in Jackson, at the age of 13 two years behind
his age group. On his first day, at the school, he takes the challenge to fight with two of the school
bullies. In spite of all this, he does well in school, gains confidence and within two weeks is
promoted to the sixth grade. . In addition, he delivers newspapers and works briefly with a
traveling insurance salesman.
Most of Richard's schoolmates work mornings, evenings and Saturdays to earn enough money for
buying clothes, books and lunch. But his Granny, being a Seventh Day Adventist, does not allow
him to work on the Sabbath. Unable to work, Richard goes hungry during school while all his
schoolmates buy and eat their lunch.
Richard begins friendships here, some of which were to last into his adulthood. (Dick Jordan, Joe

2. Brown, Perry Booker, D.C. Blackburn, Lewis Anderson, Sarah Mc Neamer, and Essie Lee Ward.)
A classmate seeing Richard's unfortunate condition, and wanting to help him out of it tells him to
take up a job selling papers published in Chicago. Richard realizing that he could thus make
money as well as read the magazine/comic strip accompanying it, welcomed the idea. With
Granny's approval, he starts selling the papers in the "Negro areas for a dime each, reading only
the magazine supplement until a family friend points out to him the racist orientation of the articles
in it. Richard then throws his paper away and never sells them again.
Richard continues to excel at his studies and keeps reading through volumes of books. Once
whilst his Granny was trying to slap him for interceding in a religious debate between her and Aunt
Addie, Richard ducks in time to avoid her blow whilst Granny slides down the porch steps, a long
drag that left her barely conscious and bed-ridden for six weeks. An irrate Aunt Addie then
confronts Richard: "You are evil! You bring nothin' but trouble!" threatening to beat him, thus
forcing Richard for a month or so to be carrying a kitchen knife with him to bed for protection.
Family life continues to be difficult, although his mother's health improves slightly. He travels
briefly during summer in the Mississippi Delta region as "secretary-accountant' to an insurance
agent, Brother Mance, this permitting him to know the rural South much better. But he was greatly
dismayed at the illiteracy, ignorance and naiveté he encountered among the black
plantation families there. The money he earned quickly disappears and Brother Mance dies
leaving Richard jobless once again.
The next year Richard begins the seventh grade. He begins to feel his hunger gnawing at his
stomach once again. His grandfather falls seriously ill and dies. After being wounded in the Civil
War, he had never received his disability pension in spite of decades writing to the War
Department for it. For decades, Grandpa would write to the War Department to claim his pension,
with no luck. Whilst his grandpa was ill, the family wrote letters, drew affidavits, and held
conferences in an ill-fated attempt to claim his pension. After coming home from school one day,
Richard is told to go upstairs and say good-bye to Grandpa. After that Richard is sent to tell Uncle
Tom who upon his arrival with the news, shows nothing but anger thus reinforcing Richard's
realization that he always seems to provoke hostility in others.
Richard's Granny now gets compelled to allow him to work after school and on Saturdays,
although reluctantly. He was first interviewed for the job of chore boy by a white woman who had
the temerity of asking him if he steals and serves him stale bread and moldy molasses for his
breakfast Richard confirmed her racist intolerance when she expressed her astonishment at his
desire to be a writer by asking him rather audaciously, "Who put such ideas into your nigger
head?" Richard decided against the job at once and never returned to it. He now took another one
running errands and serving food for a white family. After work he would be so tired that he found
it hard to keep up with his studies. He thus managed to earn enough to buy textbooks, food, and
clothes. At midday recess in school he would now show off by buying his own lunch and school
books and putting on his new clothes.
His mother begins to recover and is soon well enough to attend a Methodist church to Granny's
disapproval. Richard keeps accompanying her there until to please her he gets himself baptized
there. He obliges not because of faith, but because all his schoolmates socialized at church
meetings. During a religious revival, Richard is forced to converting and being baptized by his

3. mother as well as the entire black community. In the meantime, Richard avidly reads pulp novels,
magazines, and anything he can get his hands on.
His uncle, Thomas Wilson and family came in and rented the upstairs in Spring 1923. He
threatened to beat up Richard for being rude which makes the defiant and horrified Richard to take
with him two razor blades threatening in turn to fend him off with..
Towards summer 1923 Ella Wright suffered another paralytic stroke, and the family moved from
Natchez to Jackson, then to Elaine, Arkansas, and back to Jackson to live with Wright's maternal
grandparents, who were restrictive Seventh-day Adventists. The next year Richard obtains a job in
a brickyard bringing pails of water to the thirsty black laborers. But one day he is bitten in the thigh
by the white boss's dog. He receives no treatment, but a cool racist rebuff when he reports the
matter to the supervisor,: "A dog bite can't hurt a nigger."
Wright experienced sporadic schooling throughout his young life due to their family's constantly
moving. He attains the eighth grade at Smith Robertson Junior High School, Jackson, a school
founded and built by a former slave by that name who became a successful local barber and
community leader. It is the first black institution of its kind in Jackson dating back to 1894. Until he
could afford a bicycle Wright had to walk several miles daily to and from the school.
He soon begins working for the Walls, a white family whom he finds kindly and so served them for
two good years. Then out of job again he begins brooding over the prospects of a Negro living in a
white-dominated society like theirs. In the process during the winter he came to write a short story,
entitled, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre," published in the spring of 1924 in the Jackson Southern
Register, a local black newspaper in three parts, with no surviving copies left. Wright was at the
age of fifteen, when he wrote it.
When his fellow pupils read it they remained baffled as to Richard's motivation for writing. His
staunchly religious grandmother, kept books out of the house and thought fiction was the work of
the devil had brought all the household over to her conviction against Richard's creativity. So even
his family did not give him any encouraging words as they joined his grandmother in believing the
story was part of the devil's work. Richard thus grows more isolated by his progress from his
immediate family and friends. But this did not frustrate his quest for advancing in that realm. His
dream of writing continues to grow, despite the many forces against him: the stifling educational
system in the South, discouragement from those around him and the stifling Jim Crow laws. He
soon realized that with proper reading materials he could teach himself well.
Various demeaning jobs, one of which involved him delivering racist newspapers to the colored
community, and family alienation, accelerated his escape into horror and mystery short stories and
novels.like those of Edgar Allan Poe. He said that as a youth he "could not read enough of them."
This sparked Wright's interest in defining his experience, through writing, as a poor black boy in a
southern state, experiencing racial tension. He continued writing his own short stories. These
frightened his simplistic grandmother who could not understand why her grandson was interested
in writing about mystery and horror. Wright as a defensive move, kept any aspirations he had to be
a writer to himself after his first experience with publication.
Richard now begins to seriously reflect upon the fact that racism and prejudice are products not
only of the attitude of whites in the South but are products of the educational system. Black

4. children are taught in ignorance, with no goals or motivation to grow as intellectuals. To Wright,
the educational system that nurtured him was corrupted since it was solely geared to teaching
them to remain ever subservient. He thus kept wondering as to why the whites decided to keep
blacks in perpetual darkness. Here, he formed some lasting impressions of American racism
before moving back to Memphis in 1927. While in Memphis he worked as a dishwasher and
delivery boy and for an optical company. Tired of segregation law he became determined to leave
the South before he would irretrievably overstep the bounds of the Jim Crow restrictions on blacks.
Richard's inability to cope with the tedium of Mr Bibb's job forces him into idleness again It is
summer again and Richard now inquires of Mrs. Bibbs - his employer - whether her husband has a
job opening at the sawmill. But the next day, Richard is warned of the hazards of working there by
a black saw mill worker revealing his own hand with three fingers missing. Richard leaves and
does not return.
The next afternoon, Richard seeing Ned Greenley, his classmate, sitting on his porch gladly
approaches him but is shocked to learn from him that Ned's brother, Bob, who has been a hotel
porter has been murdered by some white men who disapproved of his activities with a white
prostitute. Richard thus becomes more conscious about the brutality of the racially oppressive
South. The murder of Bob Greenley is elevated to myth-like status in Richard's mind. Because he
has never witnessed the racial brutality and misconduct of Southern whites, his fears are
heightened. But he soon realizes that he must learn to behave "correctly" for the sake of
preserving his own life.
Richard's isolation from his family becomes more apparent to him when one day after talking to his
cousin Maggie, he accidentally overhears Uncle Tom scolding her for conversing with him and
warning her that Richard is a "dangerous fool" from whom he expects her "to keep away." When
Richard's brother, Leon, returns home from Chicago, having become aware that the family seems
to love and approve him more than they do him, joins Uncle Tom and the other family members in
their opposition to Richard..But his isolation from his own family became a source of Richard's
strength. At a young age, he learned out of necessity to be independent and willing to fight.
When Richard graduates from school, he is elected valedictorian of his class. The school principal
approaches him with a pre-written speech to read at the graduation ceremony which Richard
refuses to read thus forfeiting an opportunity to attain a teaching position. When the principal
summons him into his office and hands him an already prepared speech, Richard is stunned. He
refuses to read it, despite pressure from his family and peers like Griggs, another boy in school,
who decided to recite one of the principal's speeches.. So on the day of graduation, Richard not
caring a bit about possible consequences delivers his own speech 'The Attribute of Life' , dressed
in a new suit, and leaves the platform immediately afterwards.
Anxious to earn money, Richard starts working as a porter in a clothing store catering to "Negroes
on credit" under an unrepentantly racist boss who contemptuously slaps, kicks and sacks blacks
at the slightest instance. One morning, he witnessed the boss and his son brutally kicking,
slapping and dragging a black woman into the back of the store to rape her. A white policeman
looks on unperturbed until at the end of their act when he arrested the woman charging her for
being drunk.
Another incident occurs when Richard was returning from delivering supplies to negroes and he

5. was approached by a car filled with white boys who whilst questioning him over his bicycle that he
was pulling along, asked him whether he cared for their whisky. Upon his answering them without
addressing them as "sir." Richard has a whisky bottle broken on his head and left bleeding.
Each day, hatred builds in Richard for the whites. The boss's son even fires Richard for not
laughing and talking "like the other niggers."
Next time he runs into whites was on one Sunday evening while returning from a delivery trip
when he is accosted by white youths who warn him to tell his boss to stop sending him to white
neighborhoods at night.
Richard who continues to witness the wrong and brutal treatment of black s everywhere is driven
off several jobs because white people do not approve of the way he acts; for he does not know
how to laugh or talk like "the other niggers.". This was what he learnt when Richard runs into his
old classmate, Griggs, who criticizes him for not learning to get around "white folks." Warning that
he was already in their black books he told him that he would do well for himself to think before he
speaks and, to think before he acts, Griggs reveals that underneath his innocent demeanor, he too
hates white people, but keeps it concealed.
Griggs then obtains Richard a position as an intern in an optical shop. The boss, Mr. Crane, a
Yankee, hires Richard immediately and he starts earning five dollars a week. Though Mr.Crane, is
decent,. Pease and Reynolds ¬ two white workers at the shop ¬keep harassing Richard
and causing nothing but trouble for him. Both make degrading racial comments in front of him and
threaten to kill him for failing to call Pease "Mister Pease" (even when Richard had not
forgotten).In the end Richard who was really serious in learning leaves the job out of fear crying on
his last walk home from work.
Richard experiences racial violence firsthand when he begins to work in town. Inexperienced in his
new environment, he finds it difficult to act "properly" the way Griggs acts. Even when he tries to
conform, he is not subservient enough. Richard must learn to mask his hatred and true feelings to
be able to survive.
Richard's next job is that of a helper in a drugstore. But without knowing the right words to say to
his white boss, he loses this job soon enough. He grows more conscious of the roles that other
Black Boys assume in their jobs. Soon, Richard takes a job as a hall boy at the same hotel where
Bob Greenley had been killed by whites. At his job, Richard socializes with the other black
workers. To avoid confrontation, Richard had to obey the white watchman and ignore their action
when they slapped the behind of one of the maids that he was escorting home one night..
Determined to make more money, Richard sacrifices his morals and begins to sell bootleg liquor to
white prostitutes in the hotel.. He takes another job at the theater in town, where he gets involved
in a ring scamming tickets. As a ticket collector, Richard saves tickets to re-sell at the front
counter. Quickly, he amasses enough money to move out on his own. He does so, promising to
send for his mother when he earns enough.
Richard comes to realize the social cycle in the relationship between whites and blacks. The black
workers that Richard observes fall into stealing and cheating because they feel justified by the
poor treatment they receive from their white bosses. In turn, the white bosses feel justified in their

6. racist attitude to black workers who cheat and steal. Richard then falls in line with the typography
when he steals a gun and in concert with others, robs a college store stealing foodstuffs and fruit
juice and thereafter leaving Jackson.
In November of 1925, Richard arrives in Memphis, Tennessee ready to live on his own. He walks
down Beale Street - a street notorious for its bad reputation - until he sees a large house with a
sign: "ROOMS." Not knowing whether it is a boarding house or a whorehouse, he is hesitant to
enter until a large "mulatto" woman beckons him in. The woman, Mrs. Moss, lives with her
daughter, Bess, in the house.. Both soon strike Richard as the nicest, simplest people he has ever
met. Richard secures a room for himself here. They rent the upstairs room to Richard. His
landlady, Mrs. Moss, wishes to have Richard marry her daughter, Bess. But Richard shows no
interest..
Even when they invite him to eat meals with them,.Richard refuses. He is uncomfortable with the
over-loving attitude of Mrs. Moss toward him. Richard is irritated by her "peasant mentality," but is
tempted to take advantage of her. When he tells Bess that he wishes to be friends, she decides
that she hates him. Although Mrs. Moss and Bess express compassion and love toward Richard,
he regards them with contempt. Mrs. Moss and Bess seem simple and uneducated, almost to the
point of ignorance to him. They seem to be in a world of their own. With a house of their own, they
can afford to live comfortably without being afraid - or even aware - of the racial prejudice of the
South.
Remembering his failed attempt at becoming skilled in the optical trade, Richard decides that he
will try to break into the trade again in Memphis, which is not such a small town like Jackson.
While running errands and washing eyeglasses, he learns how to contain the tension he felt in his
relations with whites. "The people of Memphis had an air of relative urbanity that took some of the
sharpness off the attitude of whites toward Negroes," but there was tension nonetheless. There,
Richard obtains a job at another optical company. His job is progressing until one day, the head
foreman ¬ Mr. Olin ¬ lies to him that Harrison another black boy ¬is going to kill him.
Mr. Olin constantly tries to provoke the two black boys into killing each other; until finally, he offers
them five dollars each if they will box with each other. Harrison and Richard agree, fighting to the
point of exhaustion. Richard is afraid that Bess has told her mother about their fight. Mrs. Moss
questions Richard why he does not like Bess, saying that she only wishes that her daughter would
marry somebody like him. Fed up with her pressures, Richard threatens to move out of the house
but both Mrs. Moss and Bess beg him to stay.
Richard finds a job as a cleaning boy at a hotel in town, where he encounters other black boys his
age. One boy named.Shorty surprises him by degrading himself,in allowing a white man to kick
him in the ass for a quarter. Richard leaves to take a job at the theater, where he is involved in a
ticket scam.from which he makes enough to move to Memphis
Meanwhile, Richard finds a dishwashing job at a cafe in Memphis. On his way to work, he
encounters another young black man looking for a friend. The two wander down toward the rivers
edge and find a bottle of bootlegged liquor which they sell to a white man nearby, agreeing to split
the five-dollar profit. It is only when the other boy does not return with the money, Richard realizes
that he has been scammed.
With more than he ever had before, Richard is able to buy magazines and books from

7. secondhand bookstores. At his job, he would observe the other Black Boys who work around him.
This included Shorty, the fat pale-faced, Chinese-looking boy who operated the elevator. He would
entertain the white men by allowing them to kick his behind for a quarter. Other men who worked
in the building were: an old man named Edison; his son, John; Dave, the night janitor. They
discuss the rules of the whites with a sense of hatred, but accepted their boundaries because they
realize the importance of money.
Richard is now reading very widely Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury and other
magazines. While reading a critique on a white writer, H.L.Mencken titled "Mencken is A Fool"
written by a fellow whiteman, Richard impressed by the criticism on Mencken long noted as a critic
of the whites in the south becomes interested in H.L. Mencken. He goes to an Irish-Catholic man
Mr. Falk and asks him to lend him his library card as blacks were forbidden from borrowing books
from the library. So using this card Wright forged notes to the librarian : "Dear Madam: Will you
please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" Through this method Wright
seeks out Mencken's Prejudices and A Book of Prefaces and is particularly impressed by
Mencken's iconoclasm and use of words as weapons.Thus entering the realm of literature,. he
began to read contemporary American literature as well as commentaries by H. L. Mencken,
which struck him with particular force. After reading Mencken's A Book of Prefaces, Richard
yearns to know more about the authors he alludes to: Conrad, Lewis, Dostoyevski, Flaubert,
Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson,the elder Alexander Dumas, Frank Harris,
and O. Henry.. Richard sits up in his room, eating out of cans while reading great literary works
and feeding his hunger. During these years he read widely as he had decided to become a writer.
However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in
Memphis. "My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror,
tension, and anxiety," he later wrote in his autobiography BLACK BOY .
A turning point in Richard's growth and maturation is when he discovers the power of words - a
discovery that changes his entire outlook on his own life and those around him. Whereas his
hunger had previously consumed him, Richard finally begins to satiate his thirst for knowledge
through his reading, learning more than any of his years in formal schooling had ever taught him.
Although his reading isolates him even more from those around him and the black community, he
develops a profound understanding of himself and his environment.
Soon, Richard decides to leave for the North. That winter, Richard's mother and brother move
down to live with him. His brother obtains a job and the two decide to start saving to move North.
Richard tells none of the white men on his job of his plans, knowing it would put him in danger. He
tries to think of a way to live and refuses to stay in the south, to submit and be a slave, thereby
forgetting all what he had read. He wonders how much longer he will have to stay in the South.
Her husband having deserted her Aunt Maggie visits the family in Memphis. Her visit formed a
practical basis for Richards plan to move north. Aunt Maggie and Richard would go North first.
Richard then told his boss and white co-workers that he was being forced to take his paralyzed
mother to Chicago. The white men then warn him that the north is no place for a black man to live.
Wright recalls: "This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled."
In a northbound train, Richard tries to reflect on the various forces that led him up to that point: his
isolation from the Southern environment, with the only thing managing to keep him alive being the
books he read. But he then realizes that he can never leave the South behind emotionally

8. because it is the South that had raised him. The novel ends with Richard heading North: "With
ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived
with dignity, and that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to
confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they
might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the
stars."
Arthur Smith was born and was schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He has taught English since
1977 at Prince of Wales School and, Milton Margai College of Education. He is now a Senior
Lecturer at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing English language and Literature for
the past eight years.
Mr Smith's writings have been appearing in local newspapers as well as in various international
media like West Africa Magazine, Index on Censorship, Focus on Library and Information Work.
He was one of 17 international visitors who participated in a seminar on contemporary American
Literature sponsored by the U.S.State Department in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections
on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org
His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works
Celebrating Black Dignity, and 'The Struggle of the Book' He holds a PhD and a professorship in
English from the National Open University, Republic of Benin.
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