The first chapter of the book establishes its theme and conflicts. It is not necessary to search for symbolic meanings. Each incident describes, in close detail, the emotions of the narrator. It is enough to be sensitive to his emotions and to the situations from which they spring. Since he is just a small child when these events occur, he is unconscious of their effect on his later manhood. However, the voice of the author—no matter how objective—provides order to what is otherwise chaos.
In the very first words of the book, Richard Wright establishes his distance from the four-year-old boy who sits in his grandmother's house in Mississippi. His grandmother is sick, and he has been warned several times by his mother to keep quiet; however, his rebellious personality is immediately revealed in the dramatic gesture of setting the house on fire. The reader then is immediately conscious of the nature of the narrator—not only by the scene he describes, but by his tone, which is objective and cool. It is clear that the child he was then is no stranger to him now. The writing serves as a telescope: it is the medium by which the past is clarified.
The punishment by his mother doesn't surprise the boy, except in its degree. She has almost killed him, and in his unconscious state he hallucinates about the udders of great white cows hanging over his head. He is terrified that they will drench him in some terrible liquid—surely a psychological reaction to his mother's ruthless beating, an aversion to life itself, her milk.
As the very first scene of the book, this episode establishes Richard's position as a rebel within his family; after surviving this beating, no amount of punishment can break his spirit. It is as if his mother's punishment has the reverse of the desired effect. By going to the limits of brutality with him at such a young age, she has released in him the power to survive beyond the normal bounds of human endurance.
Right off, it must be made clear that the complexity of the pre-individualistic society is such that love and hostility go hand in hand, as do cruelty and kindness, reward and punishment. Richard never questions his mother's love for him, and although he rarely mentions demonstrations of affection and stresses the negative aspects of his family life, the love between him and his mother is taken for granted. The perversion of this love—as an effect of slavery and oppression—is what upsets him and serves as the theme of the book.
The family's move to Memphis causes horrifying effects on the entire family. Richard's father becomes alienated and violent and, taking one of his father's careless commands at face value, Richard cruelly kills a kitten. Afterward he is horrified by what he has done, and his horror is underscored by his mother's religious, superstitious nature. She warns him of the dire consequences of taking a life and fills him with a sense of sin and guilt that will never leave him.
In these events lie clues to Richard's reactions to other events later on. For instance, although he is unconscious of the lifetime effect which his father's behavior will have on his psyche, in this one act—killing the kitten—Richard is responding to that effect. His father's place is restricted. He is a rural black, a man who has been uprooted and transplanted into an urban setting, completely out of his element. His bad temper and impatience is directly related to his personal frustrations, and Richard reacts to him likewise. If his father can't be decent, then Richard will be worse and, in that way, prove his own powers of aggression.
