Although Chapter 1 establishes the conflicts basic to the book as a whole, it does so primarily in terms of Richard's immediate environment. His mother's efforts to make him comply with the standards set by a pre-individualistic society succeed only insofar as Richard can take care of himself. They fail, however, in keeping him unconscious of his own individuality. He is ready to measure his condition against others, and Chapter 2 demonstrates his growing awareness of a world outside his own.
His mother tries to protect him from seeing his condition for what it is. She wards off his questions about white people and succeeds in keeping their reality remote. But the results of this protection are to make white people fantastic and unreal in his imagination; even his relationship to other blacks is unrealistic. In two separate incidents, he sees blacks in uniform as soldiers and prisoners and he is terrified by the reality of the nightmare. They seem more like animals than people, and he wants to understand why they are what they are. His mother evades him, but lets him know vaguely that white people are somehow responsible. She does not tell her son about white oppression and crushed black dignity, yet his innocent eyes see the truth: slavery in its rawest form the slaves themselves. Thus the attempts to keep Richard ignorant continue to have the opposite of the desired effects. The murder of Uncle Hoskins, the silence about the white world, and religious explanations for natural events only serve to fire his imagination.
It is easy to see how Richard develops an aversion to Christianity which lasts throughout his life. An awareness of guilt and sin is brutally imposed on him by his grandmother. Even his mother finally finds the atmosphere at the grandmother's too oppressive for them. Richard's greatest sin is his curiosity, and every opportunity his imagination has to expand is promptly squelched. His grandmother, for instance, beats him for a foul-mouthed remark he utters in complete innocence; his difficult relationship with her will play a large part in his development. To Granny, any deviation from her concept of the norm is subjected to the most severe punishment. The hypocrisy of these hard judgments, couched in Christian ideology, does not escape the boy, and he will not forget them as a man.
