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Dangerous Refuge: Richard Wright and the Swimming Hole
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 1, Spring 2017
- pp. 27-40
- 10.1353/afa.2017.0002
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay looks at Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” as a story about swimming—that is, about a natural world claimed as white property and marked “No Trespassing”—finding in Wright’s swimming hole an oblique echo of other bodies of water segregated by violence, from Lake Michigan to municipal pools.