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.
