A Portrait of the Artist as a Black Boy

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A BLACK BOY Adrian Weiss Richard Wright's Black B°y has l°ng been recognized as one of the classics of protest literature because it exposes the negative impact of a racist environment upon the development of the human personality on even die most basic levels of physical and social maturation. This dieme of the autobiographical Black Boy has a corollary, namely, that such a racist environment almost inevitably precludes die development of the human personality on the higher planes of existence, such as the intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic, because it forces the individual to concentrate his full energies upon the task of merely surviving. Wright had originally entided his autobiography "American Hunger," a title which better focused the multi-level nature of Richard's quest for selfactualization in the midst of an overwhelmingly hostile environment. Most obvious is the connection between that environment and Richard's struggle for the bare essentials of subsistence— food, clodiing, shelter, friendship, and security. But unlike Shorty and Griggs, who have been "stunted" by that environment and emerge in Black Boy as individuals concerned entirely with the bare essentials of physical survival, Richard constantly struggles to transcend the limitations of diat environment. Wright presents the young Richard as an individual driven to seek out the "grand design" of life, at first as a means of understanding his peculiar personal circumstances and experience, and, by the story's end, as the basis for an artistic vision which will serve him in his struggle to become an artist. As in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, to which Black B°y owes much, imagination plays a key role in young Richard's relationship to external reality. From the very outset of Black Boy, Wright endows Richard with an active and fertile imagination diat gradually creates in the hero an organic awareness that life's possibilities are not limited to the bleakness of the reality in which he lives. More specifically, in Wright's controlled description of life in die Soudi, environment characteristically limits Richard's experience in almost every incident to the negative dimensions of boredom, hunger, anger, and hatred, all of which are barriers to experience of a positive nature. Imagination becomes Richard's only tool or weapon for wresting from such an environment experiences which could be characterized as positive and healdiy. 93 94RMMLA BulletinDecember 1974 At first, Richard's imaginative activity is unfocused, but it is always linked to his urge to overcome the bleakness of experience occasioned by his immediate environment. Black B°y begins with the first of a long series of incidents in which imagination functions in this manner. Resentful of his mother's constant scolding and the restrictions placed upon his play activities, the young boy of four idly throws straws into the fire, and becomes fascinated widi this "new game." He wonders "just how the white fluffy curtains would look" and sets them afire widi catastrophic results. Significantly, Wright notes the mental transference of the blazing fire from straws to curtain in these terms: "My idea was growing, blooming" (1O).1 Then too, imagination in the young hero is cast in a vaguely Wordsworthian nature by Wright, since it functions as a means of perceiving the implications and wonder inherent in the phenomena of the external world. Wright's description of this function leaves little doubt as to its source in imagination: Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. . . . There was the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow dreaming waters of the Mississippi. . . . There was the great joke I felt God had played on cats and dogs by making them lap their milk and water with their tongues (Hf). Because of his emphasis upon the role of imagination in the young hero, Wright creates the impression that Richard is driven from the very beginning of his development as an individual to look and reach beyond...