Black Boy and Seven Decades
of Wisdom
Published by Harper and Brothers in 1945 as Black
Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth and by the Library of America in 1991
as Black Boy (American Hunger),
Richard Wright’s classic autobiography has been a monument to intelligence,
discipline, the exercise of relatively free will, and admirable use of
self-reliance for seventy years. It has
provided us with the racial wisdom that is most definitely needed in 2015 as we
resist Cosmic Evil and conduct an endless quest for harmony in our lives.
Non-scholars and scholars alike have given critical
attention to Wright’s masterpiece since 1945. They have applauded Black Boy; they have quarreled with it. It has existed as a superb instance of black
writing, of American literature, and of work that people from many nations have
translated into their native languages.
It will continue throughout the twenty-first century to be a source for
cautious hope as well as, to borrow wording from Wright’s novel The Outsider, “that baleful gift of the
sense of dread.”
Black Boy is
one of Richard Wright’s major gifts to time past, present, and future. It is a gift to be treasured. It is a gift for everyday use and equipment
for living and for dealing with one’s trublems.
Black Boy is a
powerful model of how to think about one’s location in historical time and
complex environments and of how to write about one’s location with an honesty
that is at once aesthetic and didactic.
Teachers of rhetoric and composition can use the text to help adolescent
writers, in particular, to gain mastery of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, images,
and figures of speech as they struggle with the problems of narrating their
life histories. All writers, of course,
can learn valuable lessons about perspective from Richard Wright, just as
visual artists can learn about excellence in drawing from Charles White and
musicians can absorb how to use physics in the composition of sounds from John
Coltrane. All of us can learn from Richard
Wright what Chinese sages have known for several thousand years ---the flow of dao and tian and yin and yang that gives positive meaning to our
suffering beneath the stars.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January
8, 2015
PHBW BLOG
