This becomes the model for Richard's relationships with other men throughout the book. He will have no patience with their cowardice and will not fear humiliating them with his own masculinity. He is disgusted by males who allow themselves to be castrated by white society. His father is by no means the only one.
His mother's method of punishing him—with God and a beating—are also clues to Richard's later behavior. The God she chastises him with is a merciless oppressor—a kind of supernatural manifestation of white society. He has strict codes of conduct, demands instant obedience, and, when defied, gives instant punishment. Richard's mother, here and elsewhere, uses God as another, more awesome term for white people in order to impress on her son the necessity to "stay in his place." God becomes many things; to whatever Richard's mother is unable to cope with or explain in human terms, He is introduced as the solution.
Under the circumstances, God is bound to fail very quickly. He is supposed to provide food when they are hungry, but He doesn't. Instead, it is clear to the boy that his father—and later his mother—is the breadwinner, not God. The whole question of food is not dropped there. When a preacher comes to dinner and greedily consumes the food Richard is longing for, he is, as God's representative, only increasing Richard's loss of faith. His hunger will remain throughout the book as a reality in itself and also as a cause for his alienation.
Richard begins to feel a constant hunger, soon associated with the disappearance of his father, who has deserted the family. Richard's mother goes to work, and he is forced to learn to make it on his own in the streets of Memphis. When he discovers that he can give as much violence as he has taken, he is free to go where he wants.
At six years old, Richard has no consciousness of racial differences: people are people. His grandmother can be termed white only because that is her natural color. And so the distinctions remain invisible to him. Life in the streets leads him to become a drunkard, hanging around a saloon and begging pennies from pedestrians. His mother beats him, prays for his salvation, and finally puts him in the care of an old woman. It is during this time that he develops a new kind of hunger—the hunger for knowledge—and with it comes his awareness of whites as separate from blacks.
Again, in each of these events are hints of larger revelations to come, especially as his consciousness develops. His mother's influence on him is naturally strong. The way she forces him to become independent, even tough, is something he finally appreciates. Above all, Richard wants to be a man. In the streets, in the saloon, in his explorations of the city, he exerts his masculinity, always unconsciously aware of the imminent castration of black boys and men. Yet, at the same time, he is developing a fascination with words—the secrets of the drunks—that will increase throughout his boyhood.
The frustration of his curiosity is described with the same cool fatalism as the other humiliations he endures. It comes from every direction—from his mother, as well as from white people—and whatever he tries to understand as information or moral truth results in only deeper misunderstanding. The world he occupies can only be described as hostile. And Richard begins to return this hostility with hostility. Sometimes it takes the form of shyness. When asked to perform in school, or to accept the attention of Miss Simon at the orphanage, he turns cold and cannot respond. He has learned to be suspicious of other people, and there is a real danger that this suspicion will make him like the other members of his family—that is, incapable of giving and responding to love. Only by being conscious of the terrible consequences of such suspicion can he free himself as a man.
When he witnesses his father bowing and scraping, being an Uncle Tom before a white judge in order to avoid feeding his family, he can see clearly what he himself might become. It is a repulsive image to him, as is the image of his father, laughing with his new woman, all sensuality and no love. Later, he can excuse his father for this; he will be able to see him as an environmental prisoner. Now, however, as a boy, Richard has no tolerance for such a man.
In the conclusion of this chapter is a summary of Wright's philosophy on environment and humanity. It is a vision of society that encompasses the whole book, his whole childhood, and the people in it. Through his father's life he witnesses history and the present—the continuing effects of slavery on the children of slaves and their children too. The humiliated, disrupted lives of blacks under slavery did not end with emancipation. Although the people endured, they did so without the benefits of a civilized society. Civilization was left in Africa. All the traditions, habits, laws, and loyalties of a civilized society were removed from black people when they arrived as slaves in the New World. They were forced to live at the most elemental level. And Richard's father represents to him the effects of history—slavery—on the individual. Later he will forgive his father for neglecting his family, but it will not be a Christian forgiving; rather, it will be because of historical, Marxist reasons. This Marxist attitude is fundamental to the entire book and forms the basis for the Wright School of Literature. Naturalism is the aesthetic form the attitude takes because it excludes any preconceived ideas of morality. The narrator simply presents the facts, as history simply presents the facts, and they must speak for themselves.
