the careless boy

nostalgic choice

It has been said by Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, that most writers have one thing in common: they both love and hate the place of their origins. Richard Wright certainly fits into this category; but it is only toward the end of his autobiography that the conflict in his feelings becomes clear. Up until now, the reader has picked up only distant strains of nostalgia and affection for the South. Love has been but a minor refrain throughout the book. Yet its presence is always felt and it accounts for the Blues-like quality of the book.

Now, in the thirteenth chapter, Richard enters into a state of mind which will bring both an attachment to, and a liberation from, the South. First, he happens to read an article about H. L. Mencken, and the very fact that Mencken is being attacked draws Richard toward him. He longs to read him, but it is only by the most circuitous method that he can achieve the simple satisfaction of getting into a library. A white coworker, who is Catholic and therefore maligned by most southerners, lends Richard his library card. This is the beginning of his self-education.

Through Mencken's essays, Richard learns the names of other American writers, as well as learning how prose can be used as a weapon. This is all Richard needs. To discover that the pen can be as mighty as the sword is a terrific surprise to him; and then to read these other writers (who also feel themselves alienated from the American scene) is a revelation.

Through reading Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and the major European writers, Wright not only begins to understand himself better, but to understand white people too. They are no longer so strange and impenetrable to him. Yet he must conceal from everyone what he is learning. He continues to work and to read and to play dumb for the benefit of his own survival and in order to bring his mother and brother to Memphis. But he is undergoing the final stage in his painful growth, and his secret world is his most important world.

What should have been a joy, a liberation, and a means of communication, however, are for Richard just the opposite. He has no one with whom he can talk about his discoveries or his dreams. There is no guarantee that they will come to fruition. He considers the alternatives, however, to pursuing these dreams, but they are so horrible that he ends up without a choice. He is coming to realize just how unalterable human character is. And although he is conscious of the many forces that have conspired to make him what he is, there still remains a mystery as to why he should be so profoundly alienated from ordinary people. He cannot change who he is or what course he must follow. Any other course would make him not only miserable, but he wouldn't even be successful pursuing it. Yet he cannot feel any relief in knowing who he is. To be both an American writer and an American black is to be permanently in exile, an outsider on one's own native soil. Richard has no choice now in being a writer, just as he has never had a choice in being the man or the color that he is.

it is now only a matter of money and opportunity before Richard will go North. These problems are resolved because he has learned how to play the role which his family and white people expect of him. He can play it in spite of the tension and deception it involves, now that he sees a light at the end of the tunnel. His people are no more aware of his inner life than are the white folks he works with. And so, always isolated and secretive, he makes his escape under a completely false pretext.

The voice of the boy Richard and the man Richard Wright have now merged into one. In flight he feels no elation or promise, but only the tension and fear he has grown accustomed to living with. He is not going toward something so much as away from something else. His whole life so far has been one of upheaval, travel, and flight, so this experience in itself is far from new to him.

Yet, as he moves, he is at least conscious of what the motive means. This is the difference, and the only one, between his journey now and all the ones that came before. He knows what it means to be leaving the South, to be American, to be black, to be a writer. He is nobody's victim, not even his own, as long as he can maintain this consciousness. It is the only freedom he knows and it began with that first overwhelming revelation he had at his mother's bedside: the "conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering." Henry James has said that consciousness is the only thing left to a man in the end. And this is Wright's conclusion now; to be conscious of meaninglessness is preferable to faking a meaning that is, it is the only possible state of mind for him.

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.