Until Wright's Native Son, most black fiction was pretty much limited to historical, period pieces. Whether it belonged to the plantation tradition or the Harlem school of literature, most of it could be classed as only historically interesting. A primary reason for this is that the audience those writers addressed themselves to was middle class and "liberated" from the struggles of the poor. Since such an audience asks to read about itself, and since its spokesmen have to be "liberated" too, the writing of that time was largely restricted to a facade, a falsification of black life. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule—Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes—but as a rule, middle-class writing, black and white, was designed to entertain, not to disturb, its middle-class reader.
Therefore, when Richard leaves the South in Black Boy, it marks a turning point not only in his own life, but in the history of black literature. Much of the theme of his autobiography is summed up in his essay, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in which he describes with awful honesty the effects of the caste system on black people. No one before Wright had written of this subject as he did, and, consequently, the essay had a revolutionary value.
Wright explained how it is necessary for a people living in a society founded on free enterprise and individualism to have a background of education in one's own personal values and free access to the surrounding society. Without those qualities, and without a history of free choice, black Americans are forced to remain in close-knit, pre-individualistic groups; there, the possibility of survival is even greater than it would be if each person tried to make it on his own.
The title of Black Boy sums up the whole pre-individualistic ethic—or the ethics of living Jim Crow. Obviously, Wright did not think of himself as a black boy. The very term is a social judgment, not just used by white society but inherited by the black folk in Richard's life. Richard's family saw him as bad ("black"), just as the whites did, because he expressed himself as an individual. At the same time, he was viewed as a boy, one who waited for and obeyed orders before he acted. The irony of this is that Richard quite clearly never did have a childhood, in the sense of a time free of responsibility or fears. His sensitivity to experience made him a man almost at birth. In the pre-individualistic, Jim Crow society he grew up in, Richard was considered evil and irrepressible.
It is important to view his autobiography in historical terms in order to understand its full significance. With the arrival of the first slaves in the seventeenth century came a culture that would be the ultimate test of the American dream. The first slaves brought with them from Africa many different ways of worshipping God and different idioms, but a common language. They also brought with them a life style which emphasized community before individualism. Under slavery these people, with their strong cultural backgrounds, were forced to absorb many of the Western customs, and they consequently evolved a culture which was completely unique—the Afro-American culture.
The devastating consequences of slavery were many, and in the two centuries preceding the Civil War, black people were integrated into society only by rape. They were disbanded, sold, and castrated by their masters. Whatever sense of community had come to these shores with them was subjected to the severest tests. One of the inevitable results was a family structure not based on blood ties, but on a larger sense of brotherhood; another result was an almost complete sense of alienation from white society. Yet another offspring of slavery was an original art form—the Blues—which incorporated African cultural forms (both linguistic and musical) with Western forms.
It wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that the first Blues recordings were made and that extraordinary art form was discovered by white America. The Blues had traveled underground for many years. During the Civil War, the Blues singers were like modern troubadours traveling from city to city. These poets described the effects of the war, its aftermath, the liberation of the slaves, and the work on the railroads; they described the cities and the lives within them. The songs were necessarily sad, with themes of abandonment and loneliness. The form of the Blues has since gone through many transformations, but it is always recognizable by its tone of irony and sorrow.
When Richard Wright was growing up and when he moved North, the Blues had come up from underground and set the pace of the times. Louis Armstrong, Mamie Smith, and Bessie Smith all sang of that era and its significance for the many blacks moving into the northern ghettos. Unlike their rural predecessors—Sonny Terry and Big Bill Broonzy—the new Blues singers dealt primarily with urban life.
Therefore, just as the spiritual music of the South inspired Wright, the Blues influenced the tone of his recollections. His portrait of his father is particularly relevant to that era, as is his picture of his mother, her sickness, and his grandfather's death. These are standard examples of black experiences in the beginning of this century.
And just as the Blues is expressed as a tone in Black Boy, folklore is expressed as a style. Every culture has its folklore, which precedes and often influences the first stages of its literature. Folklore consists of stories taken from real experience, common to the group involved, and passed on by word of mouth until the story reaches the proportion of legend. Like a joke, its origins are unknown. Much of its effect is sustained by the use of dialect and references to particular group rituals. Folklore is intended to be understood only by the people in the given group, and therefore it has a cultish quality that is not conducive to reaching large audiences of people.
