The terrible price of this awareness is that Wright knows that he is what he is forever. And he will always be a southern product, perhaps transplanted in another climate, perhaps to blossom there away from home, but always southern. It is this past which he must struggle to understand and by understanding, forgive, as he lives in the North and elsewhere. He has some faith that this will happen, and, when it does, he will at least feel that those people who have done everything in their power to destroy him will, by his survival, have to change their ways. This is his revenge to take the whole of himself, and so much of himself is the South, away; to do more than endure; to flourish as an individual.
He has won a victory over the cruelty of humanity just by leaving the place of his birth. By his voluntary release, he has proved the whole system to be a fraud and a failure. This might, for some men, be sufficient cause to rejoice. But it takes the wisdom of Richard Wright to find no pleasure in victory. Instead he maintains, to the very end, his austere and poetic response to the whole of humanity.
