2.Richard Wright’s Schoolhouse
The area in downtown Jackson where Richard Wright grew up isn’t far from Eudora Welty’s home. You can leave Welty’s house on Pinehurst Street and, in less than fifteen minutes, reach the section of Jackson State University where the house Richard Wright lived with his grandparents and mother once stood. But there is no marker for Wright, no visitor center or tour guide. Wright’s childhood address, 1107 John R. Lynch Street, is now part of a blank grassy lawn that rings the cheery downtown school, a historically black college where Jubilee author Margaret Walker Alexander used to teach. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you would have no idea that one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century had grown up there. Wright and Welty were born just a year apart, and both spent a large portion of their childhoods in Jackson. But the worlds that Welty and Wright lived in are as far apart as it is possible to be while remaining in the same town.
THOUGH RICHARD WRIGHT grew up in Mississippi, like so many Southern black writers, he had to flee his home state in order to embark on a literary career. In his late teens, Wright started moving away from Jackson in stages, moving first to Memphis, then to Chicago and then New York and, ultimately, Paris, in order to escape the crushing racial injustice of his upbringing. By the time he was thirty-five, Wright was an international literary sensation and the first bestselling black writer in America, thanks in part to his incendiary protest novel Native Son, which sold at the rate of 2,000 copies a day upon publication in 1940.
But in his home state, Wright’s success was not widely celebrated. Southerners met Wright’s work not with ambivalence but with outright hostility. Native Son was banned from libraries in Birmingham, and not received much more warmly in Jackson. Where Eudora Welty was hailed as a hero, Wright was denounced as a pariah. Welty’s house is a National Historic Landmark; Wright’s was bulldozed. It wasn’t until after Wright died that the state began to recognize his achievements and embrace him as one of their own. In 1985, fifty-eight years after the nineteen-year-old Wright left Mississippi more or less for good, the governor proclaimed a week in his honor. In 2007, the city of Jackson named a branch of their library after Wright, though black people had been barred from using the facility when he lived there.
Wright’s childhood in Mississippi was a miserable one. The constant anxiety and complexity of navigating race relations was compounded by the transience of his living situation and a household run by a strict Adventist grandmother, who often viciously beat him. In 1945, Wright published his autobiography, Black Boy, detailing the difficulties of his childhood before he moved from Jackson to Memphis and, finally, on to Chicago. (The original manuscript included a second part about his years in Chicago; this section was published posthumously under the title American Hunger.)
Native Son is usually presented as the entry point to Wright’s work, the obvious high school reading-list choice. A story illustrating the suffocation of segregation, Native Son is a brave book, one of the first novels to describe exactly how disastrous the regime of American racism has been for its citizens. As Irving Howe observed in Dissent, “Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture. A blow at the white man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his submission.”
But Black Boy, a book so vivid and unflinching that it is occasionally painful to read, is the Wright book that hooked me. It is a coming-of-age tale where the happy ending—Wright becomes a bestselling author living in Europe—seems impossible. Wright describes a society that has been systematically and thoroughly rigged against him, the unending struggle to nourish himself in the face of people set on his starvation. Robert Park, the sociologist and colleague of Booker T. Washington, once famously greeted Wright with the question, “How in hell did you happen?” Black Boy is Wright’s answer, and it’s an incredible one.
Wright’s life didn’t begin in Jackson, and neither does Black Boy. It opens in Natchez, Mississippi, where Wright lived with his grandparents and mother as a small child. The opening pages of the book are Wright’s account of a time when, as a bored four-year-old with instructions not to bother his sick grandmother, he fed straw from a broom into the fireplace and accidentally set the house ablaze. That house, improbably, is still standing and bears the historic marker that the patch of earth in Jackson lacks. I decided to follow the trail that Wright sets out in Black Boy, from Natchez back up to Jackson, to see what traces of his life remained there.
Natchez is about two hours south of Jackson, a pleasant meander down the Natchez Trace Parkway, a winding road laid down on old sections of a trail originally cut through the Mississippi woods by Native Americans. It’s a route that’s slower and less direct than the interstate, but it makes up in scenery what it lacks in efficiency. On the way down, I spotted a pickup truck with its bed crammed full of sweet potatoes, as well as several crews of motorcyclists, who favor the parkway for its lower speed limit, ban on commercial traffic, and lack of stop signs. Along the road are the remnants of Rocky Springs, an abandoned Civil War town where picnickers stop to eat sandwiches amid the ruins. Not too far from the Trace, just past the town of Port Gibson, are the Windsor Ruins, the moss-encrusted columns of a Greek-style antebellum mansion that burned to the ground in 1890. The Trace lures a certain breed of Southern ghost hunters and romantics; it’s a trail where the history of the state seems much closer than the endless rows of Walmarts and gas stations that dot the interstate. As I wound off the Trace toward the town, I took a detour to the junction of US Routes 84 and 61 North, where, in 2008, the state put up a marker to designate a section of the road “Richard Wright Memorial Highway.” The blue sign flashed in the sunlight as I drove past.
Wright was born on the Rucker Plantation in Adams County, an area that has now been almost entirely consumed by the Natchez State Park. His grandparents had all been slaves, brought through Natchez when the town was at the center of the Southern slave trade. Wright’s ancestors are scattered around Adams County. Wright’s second cousin, Charles Wright, is still a Natchez resident, and at the annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, he leads a Richard Wright ramble—a tour of the physical places where Wright and his Mississippi relatives once lived. One of the stops on the tour is Forks of the Road, the slave market just outside of Natchez, where Nathaniel Wright, Richard’s grandfather, arrived from Virginia to be sold.
At the time that Wright’s ancestors were forcibly relocated to Mississippi, Natchez was a teeming port city, stuffed with wealthy planters and businessmen making the most of its location on the edge of the Mississippi River. Originally a French settlement, Natchez was the original capital of the state and its first economic center. Plantation owners loaded cotton onto steamships in Natchez for distribution downriver in New Orleans. Forks of the Road became a nexus for the Southern slave trade, funneling men and women from the Upper South to farms and plantations in Mississippi. From 1830 until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, tens of thousands of black men and women were bought and sold there, including Wright’s grandfather, Nathaniel. After the Union Army took control of Vicksburg, Nathaniel Wright volunteered to serve as part of the troops occupying Natchez.
Forks of the Road is now a series of sun-bleached informational plaques across from a strip mall filled with auto-repair shops and barbecue restaurants. The slave trade had been banned from the city proper in the 1830s for fear of cholera, so traders set up their human wares just outside the boundaries of Natchez. The plaques, in the matter-of-fact language of historical markers, explain the stomach-churning cruelty of the slave trade, the oldest and deepest American wound: children separated from their parents, men and women taken against their will, vicious and ongoing abuse from plantation owners. Forks of the Road was more of a showroom than an auction house; buyers would inspect the pool of people and select one or more for purchase. Where those showrooms stood is now a thick line of trees. One of the placards listed the Union troops who had helped forcibly end operations of the slave trade at Forks of the Road. Nathaniel Wright’s name was on the list.
Richard Wright’s maternal grandfather, Richard Wilson, also fought for the Union Army, though he never received his promised disability payment from the government. Wright describes Wilson in Black Boy as a man with a quick temper who harbored lingering resentment against the shoddy treatment he received from the War Department. Wilson kept his Army gun loaded in the corner of his room, on the off chance that the War Between the States might resume. Wright also describes Wilson’s daily visits to the mailbox in hopes that the government would make good on their pension promise, and his grandparents’ ongoing bitterness over yet another mistreatment from white people in charge. “I never heard him speak of white people; I think he hated them too much to talk of them,” Wright wrote.
Downtown Natchez is a place that screams “quaint” from every cornice. Old plantation homes wrap around a downtown crammed with antique stores and cafés and ritzy hotels. Riverboat casinos float along the Mississippi River. But outside the blocks downtown, it’s clear that Natchez is a tattered town, mended in strategic places. The house where Wright lived is in the historic black neighborhood of Woodlawn. Scattered among the well-tended homes on his block are houses with plywood nailed over the windows and rotting screen porches. The place where Wright lived with his maternal grandparents, the one that he accidentally set fire to, is painted an upbeat bright yellow. I counted five sets of wind chimes on the porch, alongside a multicolored miniature hot-air balloon, put in place for the town’s annual River Balloon Race.
Wright’s childhood memories of the house are full of mixed emotions. His grandmother was quick with the lash, once beating Wright so badly that he lost consciousness. But Wright also details, in Black Boy, scenes of beauty, of “the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi River” and “vast hazes of gold washed earthward from star-heavy skies on silent nights.”
Before I left Natchez, I walked downtown to the Museum of African American History and Culture, where I met David Dreyer, a historian who had helped Charles Wright lead his ramble and who had helped curate the museum’s wall of Wright-related memorabilia. The museum has copies of Wright’s books and a replica of the typewriter he favored, but, unsurprisingly, there isn’t much in the way of artifacts. At the museum, Dreyer sat down and flipped through a binder of documents related to Wright’s time in Natchez, including a photo of Wright’s daughter, Julia, who had flown from Paris to unveil the highway marker. Dreyer was part of a group of local historians and Wright academics who had pushed for the establishment of the sign. His work at the museum is a counterpoint to the tourist industry that presents a whitewashed version of Natchez’s past, the romantic vision of proper gentlemen and Southern belles sipping iced tea in their spacious homes. In 2009, Dreyer wrote an editorial in the Natchez Democrat protesting the town’s motto, “Where the Old South Still Lives,” as one that glorified the town’s racist past. “It may seem like an insignificant difference, but if you had told me that Natchez was ‘the cradle of Mississippi,’ rather than a place where slavery and Jim Crow were still honored, I might have discovered the secret sooner and moved here ten years earlier,” he wrote.
Embracing Richard Wright is part of the museum’s mission to present the history of the region without glorifying the trappings of slavery. Dreyer showed me a map of the world, on which he had tracked Wright’s travels, from Mississippi to the Northeast and beyond, then later travels to Senegal, Japan, and India. There’s a picture on the wall of a Wright family reunion where Wright’s father had been in attendance. As best as scholars can figure out, Wright had returned to Natchez just once after the beginning of his successful writing career. “He gave his father, who was a sharecropper, a set of false teeth,” Dreyer said. “But his dad didn’t have much use for them, so, the story goes, he hung the teeth in a tree in his backyard.”
From Natchez, Richard Wright’s family had moved to Memphis. But his time there was brief and full of tragedy. His father left the family and took up with another woman, leaving Wright’s mother to try to find enough work to support her two children. Wright, left to his own devices, began sneaking into Memphis saloons to beg drinks off strangers and tussle with street gangs. Wright’s mother was barely making ends meet. “Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly,” Wright wrote. Eventually, his mother temporarily placed Wright and his brother in an orphanage until the family moved away, back to Mississippi.
But Memphis, years later, also became the place where Wright began reading the novels that would fuel his writing career. After Wright finished middle school, he saved up to move North; Memphis was his first stop. He found work at an optical company there, and, one day on the job in 1925, spotted an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal lambasting an article by the critic and essayist H. L. Mencken. Wright’s curiosity was immediately piqued: “Were there, then, people other than Negroes who criticized the South?” he wondered. Wright, determined to find out more about Mencken, hit upon a strategy to circumnavigate the segregated public-library rules that prevented him from checking out books. He found a sympathetic white Irish Catholic coworker (referred to in Black Boy as Mr. Falk) who loaned Wright his library card. With the help of the card and some forged notes to the librarian, Wright suddenly had access to all manner of riches. He checked out Mencken’s Prejudices and A Book of Prefaces, and was quickly enraptured by Mencken’s prose and strong opinions. “I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean sweeping sentences,” Wright notes in Black Boy. “He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.”
Mencken, an outspoken critic of the cloistered culture of the post–Civil War South, is a pivotal figure in Southern literature thanks in part to his blistering essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” published in 1917, in which Mencken decried “that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate” below the Mason-Dixon line. “In the North, of course, there is also grossness, crassness, vulgarity. The North, in its way, is also stupid and obnoxious,” Mencken wrote. “But nowhere in the North is there such complete sterility, so depressing a lack of all civilized gesture and aspiration.” Wright was not the only Southern writer who was motivated by Mencken’s indictment; many novelists, such as Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, wrote in opposition to Mencken’s statements. But Wright is unique in seeing Mencken’s writings not as a challenge but as a foothold. Wright looked up the names of writers whom Mencken mentioned, and soon began devouring books. Thanks to the library card, Wright’s perspective on his life in Memphis began to shift. Reading Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Wright wrote, made him see his boss as a particular type, one that closely resembled Lewis’s conformist middle-class protagonist George F. Babbitt.
Wright began sneaking books into work wrapped in newspaper, and his reading confirmed his own experiences of discrimination in the South, strengthening his resolve to leave. “I no longer felt that the world about me was hostile, killing; I knew it,” he wrote. The place that fueled these revelations, Cossitt Library, still stands today in Memphis, just on the edge of the Mississippi River, though a 1958 renovation has dramatically altered its appearance since Wright’s days there. (Because of its association with Wright, the library became Tennessee’s first literary landmark registered with the American Library Association.) It’s not too far from Beale Street, the famous thoroughfare where Wright lived in a room with a woman named Mrs. Moss. Beale Street, once an ill-reputed area full of after-hours clubs, jazz venues, and brothels, is now Memphis’s main tourist drag, a mixture of Times Square and Bourbon Street with a busker-provided saxophone soundtrack. But even now, visiting Memphis, you can imagine it: a wide-eyed Wright, fresh off the train from Jackson, taking in the crowds and the music, a copy of Sister Carrie wrapped in newsprint under his arm as he wandered home.
AFTER THEY LEFT NATCHEZ, Wright’s family moved several more times, including a brief stay in Elaine, Arkansas, where Wright had one of his first serious brushes with the harsh logic of racism. A group of white men murdered Wright’s uncle Hoskins in order to take over his blossoming liquor business, and his mother and aunt were forced to flee town without attending to his funeral or claiming any of his assets.
This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.
It is scenes in Black Boy like this one where Wright makes plain the awful weight of the Jim Crow South, the nameless and omnipresent fear that it fostered. Wright’s mother and grandmother were strict disciplinarians; they did not hesitate to use the lash when Wright broke their rules. But what’s made hauntingly clear, as Wright looks at his childhood from the vantage point of an outwardly successful adulthood, is that this was an inherited kind of violence. Those whippings were a crude kind of protection: As much as Wright suffered at the hands of his mother and grandparents, it was nothing compared to the anguish that a white man could inflict suddenly for the tiniest, most mysterious violation of a largely unspoken social order. These hard lessons were intended to save Wright’s life. Talking back to his grandmother would earn him a sound beating, but talking back to a white man, as Wright learned, could result in his death. Even though Wright rebels against the rules at home, he recognizes that they were a way of teaching the brutal truth of what it meant to grow up black in the South in the 1910s and 1920s. This was the structure of Wright’s childhood, the cycle of violence perpetuated by white Southerners. In Black Boy, again and again, Wright faces down the menacing senselessness of racism. After the incident in Arkansas, he writes, a dread of white people was cemented in his mind. “I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will.” This was what struck me when I first read Black Boy as a white woman growing up in a South where the icons of the civil rights movement had been turned into statues and museum exhibits while the legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Wright’s writing presents the racism for what it is: not a hidden, intangible facet of society, not something that is inevitably going to end, but a constant, shifting horror, as inescapable as the weather.
Wright moved to Jackson again after his mother suffered a paralytic stroke, forcing the family to separate him from his brother and place them in separate family households. What followed was the only unbroken stretch of schooling that Wright managed to attain, at the Smith Robertson School in Jackson, a time that sparked his curiosity in the written word, though did not exactly nourish his ambitions. His grandmother’s devotion to her church is a constant sticking point in Black Boy. Wright hears his first novel read aloud, Bluebeard and His Seven Wives, courtesy of a woman named Ella, a boarder in his grandmother’s house. “The tale made the world around me throb, live,” Wright writes. But Wright’s grandmother catches the two mid-reading and informs Wright that fiction is “the Devil’s work,” and ultimately evicts Ella. Wright was hooked, though he could not afford to begin to read seriously until he left Jackson for good.
In his grandmother’s household, Wright rebelled against her Seventh-Day Adventist fervor. The reasons he gives in Black Boy are simple: He wanted to work on Saturday, the Adventist Sabbath, in order to earn enough for more than his standard meals of greens and gravy, which barely sustained him. His grandmother’s promises of hellfire and hope for his salvation did not impress Wright as much as the more urgent concerns of his everyday life. Though he was eventually baptized as Methodist to please his mother, Wright maintained a deep suspicion of religion as a tool for the oppression of black people in the South. As he explained in one lecture,
I lived my childhood under a racial code, brutal and bloody, that white men proclaimed was ordained of God, said was mandatory by nature of their religion. Naturally, I rejected that religion and would reject any religion which prescribes for me an inferior position in life; I reject that tradition and any tradition which proscribes my humanity.
But Wright’s rejection of his grandmother’s faith made growing up even more difficult. His stance against the Church meant that Wright found himself alienated from most of his family, a lost cause inside his own home.
Smith Robertson Junior High School in downtown Jackson is one of the few architectural remnants of Wright’s childhood that remains, the place where he had most of his formal education. It was my first stop on the way back from Natchez, driving back from the wooded Trace into the familiar traffic of downtown Jackson. Wright used to walk the mile and a half to Smith Robertson and back until he obtained a bicycle. During his time there, the school had been a simple brick building, but in 1929, the school had gotten an Art Deco facelift from a local architectural firm. I parked in front of the locked gate and peered inside. The white cement façade is a remnant from a time of a different Jackson, one where the downtown did not empty back into the suburbs every night. The school is now a museum dedicated to Jackson’s African American heritage, though it seemed a forbidding place to potential visitors.
Inside that school building is where Wright made his first steps toward a writing career. While attending Smith Robertson, Wright had written his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre,” and published it in the black weekly newspaper the Southern Register. This first literary triumph was met with suspicion from his friends and admonishment from his grandmother for using the word “hell.” No copy of it remains. When Wright graduated from Smith Robertson, he was named valedictorian of his class. But the honor led to another clash with authority. Wright refused to give a speech that the principal had written for his graduation, drawing up his own instead. Despite pressure from his classmates and teachers, Wright delivered his own speech. “I did not care if they liked it or not; I was through,” he writes.
Not far from the school is Farish Street, Jackson’s historic black district. After Wright graduated from middle school, Wright threw himself into working in order to earn enough money to relocate from Jackson. One of his gigs was as a ticket taker in a theater on Farish Street, then a busy shopping district and nighttime hub. Now, as I walked down the street where Wright used to work, the district was largely empty, caught in a legal battle between the city and developers who hoped to revive the area. Construction of some of the storefronts had stopped abruptly, their glinting windows empty, the insides still full of stacked plywood. Some of the buildings’ roofs had long ago collapsed in, the walls reclaimed by vines. Only three storefronts gave a hint of the Farish Street that was around when Wright lived here: a shoe-repair store, the Jackson Police Museum, and the Big Apple Inn, a diner famous for its tamales and pig-ear sandwiches. Medgar Evers used to have an office above the space. Today, part of the structure looks on the verge of collapse.
While I was walking among the ruins of Farish Street, I thought about Welty’s house, preserved right down to the knickknacks, the care and expertise that had been put into her legacy, and the sharp contrast between Welty’s visitor center and the grassy patch of unmarked earth where Wright’s house once stood and the abandoned storefronts on Farish Street. I thought about the logic behind destroying one landmark and pouring funds into another; the slow, almost grudging acknowledgment of Wright’s brilliance; the library named for him in Jackson that he could not have entered without fear of violence. Alice Walker, who grew up near Flannery O’Connor in Georgia, wrote an essay about her visit to O’Connor’s abandoned house: “What I feel at the moment of knocking is fury that someone is paid to take care of her house, though no one lives in it, and that hers, in fact stands, while mine—which of course we never owned anyway—Is slowly rotting into dust.” Walker wrote, “I think: it all comes back to houses. . . . I think: I would level this country with the sweep of my hand if I could.” And I wondered: If Wright had not died in 1960, if he had returned to Jackson from his life in Paris as a world-famous novelist, if he had somehow visited the Welty house and wandered down to Farish Street, would he, too, be stunned by the injustice of it all? Would he think it all comes back to houses? Or would he walk through the streets knowing that, physical evidence or no, he had left a mark on this place?
Wright survived the punishments meted out to him by his white employers and finally accumulated enough money to move to Memphis, where his mother would later join him. On my way out of downtown Jackson I stopped at the train station, just south of Farish Street, where I imagined Wright making his escape, finally beginning his lifelong self-extrication process from the Jim Crow South. But the South, even as he built his new life and rocketed to success, continued to haunt Wright. In the original ending of Black Boy, one excised when the book was posthumously expanded to include his later memoirs, Wright speeds away to the hope of the North.
I was not leaving the South to forget the South . . . In leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and perhaps, to bloom. . . . And if that miracle ever happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the blackest of the southern night.
The South that Wright imagined, a place that can accept and celebrate, whatever their race, all its native children, hasn’t come to pass—not yet. The burden remains, as does the fear and the legacy of violence. But into that Southern swamp, Wright’s work shone a light.