American Hunger (16 page)

Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain …

I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

The text of
American Hunger
has been printed from the original page proofs of 1944, as corrected by the author. These proofs are now a part of the Richard Wright Archive in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.

Harper & Row gratefully acknowledges the cooperation and aid of the Supervisory Committee of the Richard Wright Archive: Charles Davis, Michel Fabre, Donald Gallup, Louis Martz, and Ellen Wright.

Also our thanks to John Sterling of Paul R. Reynolds, Inc., Richard Wright’s literary agent.

When
Black Boy
was published by Harper & Brothers in March 1945 and offered as a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, American reviewers responded almost unanimously with enthusiasm. Four years earlier,
Native Son
had shocked an audience not yet prepared to look beyond the mask of the smiling Negro to discover his hatred and his desire for revenge against white racism. With that book Wright’s reputation as a critic of the American system and as a tough, violent muckraking novelist was established. By the close of World War II, however, racial issues were more often being aired by blacks in terms of the “double victory” campaign–discrimination in weapons factories was attacked by a march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph; segregation in the Red Cross blood banks raised vigorous protest in the black press. From Sinclair Lewis’
Kingsblood Royal
and Lillian Smith’s
Strange Fruit
to Howard Fast’s more radical
Freedom Road,
a spate of books dealing with what was now being called “the American dilemma” succeeded, in fiction at least, in showing the concern of well-meaning whites.

Black Boy
was a striking achievement: few of its predecessors had exemplified such power and sincerity. Moreover, the quality of Wright’s writing was high. Attacking as it did the blunting effect of racial oppression on Southern childhood, the book could not help but emphasize black resilience and courage as embodied in the author. It thus corresponded to the very American type of success story characteristic of slave narratives–the journey from
hard times to freedom, if not exactly from rags to riches. Its success, we can surmise, rested as much on the assertion of a self-realization as on the distinctive character of Wright’s talent and artistic struggle. He himself had wanted his story to stand as a pattern of black survival and he had accepted the onus of becoming a spokesman out of a deep sense of ethnic solidarity. In an interview granted to
PM Magazine
on April 14, 1945, he stated:

At the same time, Wright was also attempting to re-create his growth as a writer and a politically conscious citizen who often found himself at odds with the national culture. His writing had already evinced a clearly autobiographical quality in such early pieces as the bitterly satirical “Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” the more humorous vignette “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You,” and in some episodes of
Uncle Tom’s Children
and
Native Son.
As early as 1940, Wright had been told by his agent and friend Paul Reynolds that he should write his autobiography, but he had asked for time to consider this suggestion. Now, finally, at the age of thirty-five, he was convinced of the value and necessity of delving into his own past. A lecture about his formative years which he gave at Fisk University in 1942 created such a liberating explosion of enthusiasm among the blacks and one of such angry resentment among the whites in the audience that Wright realized: “I had accidentally blundered into the secret black, hidden core of race relations in the United States. That core is this: nobody is ever expected to speak honestly about the problem.” He had, no doubt, the exemplary function of the book in mind all the time, and he was fond of repeating: “One of the things that made me write is that I realize that I am a very average Negro. Maybe that’s what
makes me extraordinary.” However, the therapeutic role of plunging into his past, of dealing with embarrassing sexual incidents, traumas, and moral dilemmas, and of trying to focus his approach in such a way as to preserve the balance necessary for truthfulness was probably the most beneficial result for the author himself. This is suggested in his description of “The Birth of
Black Boy,”
which appeared in the New York
Post
on November 30, 1944:

Wright’s nearly psychoanalytical explanations for his own motives, which run like an unabating burden throughout the autobiography, are the clear recognition of the power and weight of one’s past. His explanatory comment does not really blend with the story’s dialogue, its descriptions, its action, or its lyrical outbursts; it is a reflexive voice which enables the reader to gauge the passage of the author’s life and the ensuing change in his perspective. It constitutes a meditation on Wright’s growth from his Mississippi environment in the 1910s, when he had his first recollections, to setting them down on paper in New York in the
mid-1940s. This sense of Wright’s having reached a degree of success is essential to the reader because it enables him to look back from a given point of achievement in order to pass judgment on the obstacles conquered and on the perseverance and energy needed in the process. The sense of exhilaration associated with consolidation and growth is most strongly communicated in the conclusion of
Black Boy,
where Wright capsulizes his Southern ordeals and wonders about his future:

It should be pointed out that this final paragraph of
Black Boy
represents little more than a statement of aims, a nearly mystical expression of hopeful potentialities. When Wright muses that the novelist’s personality will be allowed “perhaps to bloom” in Chicago, the reader is tempted to focus on the blossoming and to overlook the emphasis on the mere
possibility
of such realization. Thus one can jump a little too readily to the conclusion that Wright, who certainly deserved whatever luck he had, finally found in the United States the kind of soil where his blackness could bloom, where his racial suffering could be redeemed. Such an optimistic reading of the novelist’s flight to Chicago is definitely influenced by the knowledge that Wright had, by 1945, established his reputation as the leading Afro-American novelist. In this light, the very success of
Black Boy
as a best seller is taken to demonstrate the soundness of whatever optimism lies in
Wright’s “hazy notions” of a better environment.
Black Boy
is commonly construed as a typical success story, and thus it has been used by the American liberal to justify his own optimism regarding his country.

It is true that Wright did stress the appeal of the North, developing the dream of escape to a better land, which had sustained generations of fugitive slaves on their way to Canaan. It is equally true that Wright, because he placed his autobiography in the literary tradition of slave narratives, expressed hopes so powerful that one might easily overlook the depth of the disappointments he was to experience. Yet when Wright reflects upon his Chicago experience in
American Hunger,
his perspective is in fact extremely critical of the American system as a whole. Superimposed on the spectrum of his fiction, this latter section of his autobiography evokes a range of human possibilities restricted to the ludicrous shallowness of Jake Jackson caught in the squirrel cage of
Lawd Today
or the dramatic horror of Bigger Thomas’ violent fate.

The opening pages of
American Hunger
describe the complete unpreparedness of the Southern migrants who came up to flood the Midwest metropolis. Through scattered references to his family and their inability to respond to his needs, Wright makes clear his own uprootedness, his loneliness among the black masses whose struggle he had already evoked in
Twelve Million Black Voices:
“We were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone….” That is the tragedy of black migration. Turned loose to fend for themselves, such youngsters as Wright were likely to turn into “bad guys” or complacent do-nothings. The conditions of life in an urban neighborhood, overcrowded and decaying from the outset, made rural folk culture, previously a sustaining force, largely irrelevant. And finally it crumbled in face of the materialistic survival values of city life, injecting Wright and others like him with a sense of
solitude among their own people. For Wright, such loneliness resulted as well from his inability to participate in the unsophisticated life around him and to lose himself in such anaesthetic diversions as Saturday-night wenching and carousing. He was, moreover, frustrated by the realization that mass civilization, as it had been established in the United States, had nothing enduring to offer:

Indeed, white people suffered just as much from alienation. Of the white waitresses with whom he worked in a restaurant, Wright remarked:

Wright’s sentiments here are far from those in the potentially rosy ending of
Black Boy. American Hunger
in no way lends itself to being interpreted as a success story. In fact, the complete original version of Wright’s autobiography (“Black Boy” plus “American Hunger”) takes him not only to the Middle West in 1927 but to the hectic heart of New York City in 1937 with no increase in his general satisfaction. Not only does it range further than
Black Boy
alone, showing Wright’s tempering and emergence
as a left-wing writer; it also provides a much fuller picture of American life. The stunting experiences suffered in
Black Boy
are followed by more overtly disturbing occurrences in the North;
American Hunger
represents the culmination of Wright’s disappointment. While
Black Boy
is illuminated by a quotation from Job stressing the blindness of racism, the epigraph to
American Hunger
raises the question of the basic sanity of the American system through a lightly ironic folk verse: “Sometimes I wonder, huh/Wonder if other people wonder, huh,/Just like I do, oh, my Lord, just like I do.”

It was only at the time of the decision to publish the first section of the autobiography separately that the five present concluding pages of
Black Boy
were added. These new pages allow a rather more optimistic interpretation than the original rather sober ending, which they now follow: “This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.” The second part ended, as it still does, with Wright’s desperate attempt, after his failure to work hand in hand with the Communists, to raise an echo by hurling his words to the world. Wright’s original title for the section, “The Horror and the Glory,” which may apply to the policies of the C.P.U.S.A. as well as to the fluctuating conditions of life during the Depression, is far from hopeful. Thus, the final pages of the entire autobiography, instead of pointing, as does
Black Boy,
to Wright’s success as a writer and to his achievement as a black American, actually extended his argument into the existential quandary of a politically conscious human being confronted with a barren social and spiritual horizon.

One may indeed wonder how Wright allowed
Black Boy
to be published as it finally was in the spring of 1945, since the two-part work–
Black Boy
plus
American Hunger
–seems better to correspond to his original aim. It is necessary to recall the genesis of the book in late 1942. For some time, Wright kept unusually
silent about it, although he commented freely on the progress of another work, a novel about domestic workers, which he was eventually to discard. On December 17, 1943, he sent his manuscript to Paul Reynolds with a terse and surprisingly unsure comment: