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.
In Black Boy and certainly in a great deal of literature that came before it, folklore is a natural offspring of the social climate. Since black people were set apart from the large body of Americans, Wright expected much of his autobiography to be instantly understood by blacks, but only intellectually grasped by whites. In the incidents related to his family life in particular, this is the case. There are certain things he doesn't bother to explain because he assumes his reader will understand what he is saying. For this reason, the love between him and his mother and brother is not mentioned. Instead, he talks about only the qualities of his home life which disturb him. He takes it for granted that his black reader will know that affection exists between them. But the absence of its expression gives the book a barren and cynical tone which whites sometimes mistake for general ill will.
