Black Boy (43 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.

This volume presents the text of Richard Wright’s autobiography
Black Boy (
American Hunger
) from a complete set of page proofs dating from the spring of 1944. This is the last version of the text that Wright prepared without external intervention by the Book-of-the-Month Club. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of this work, including typescripts, proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University and in the Harper and Brothers archive in the Firestone Library at Princeton University.

Wright began intensive work on his autobiography, initially entitled “Black Confession,” in 1943. On December 17, 1943, he delivered the manuscript, now titled American Hunger, to his friend and agent, Paul Reynolds. It was divided into two sections: “Southern Night,” treating his life in the South before he moved to Chicago in 1927, and “The Horror and the Glory,” continuing his story in Chicago into the 1930s. The work was accepted by Edward Aswell of Harper and Brothers in January 1944. By early May 1944 the book was in page proofs and scheduled for fall publication.

Aswell sent bound sets of page proofs to other authors for promotional statements in May. Around this time a copy was also sent to the Book-of-the-Month Club for consideration. Aswell had earlier gotten Wright’s agreement to revise one scene in the book he thought might be considered obscene. By late June the club’s judges had expressed interest, but they asked Aswell if Wright would agree to publish only the first section of the work. Wright sent Aswell the altered version of the scene (see
note to pp. 188.16–24) and agreed to shorten the book if the club decided to adopt it. (The title page in a sheaf of page proofs of
American Hunger
, now held at Beinecke Library, bears written instructions, under the heading “If the Book Club Takes It,” for the replacement of the objectionable passage and the elimination of the second section, with the proviso “Hold till Book of the Month decides.”)

The book jacket had already been designed when Wright wrote to Aswell on August 10 to suggest changing the title to
Black Boy
: “Now, this is not very original, but I think it covers the book. It is honest. Straight. And many people say it to themselves when they see a Negro and wonder how he lives. Black Boy seems to me to be not only a title, but also a kind of heading of the whole general theme.”

Late in August 1944 the work was formally accepted by the book club and re-scheduled for release the following spring under its new title. Wright supplied several pages of new concluding material, working with Dorothy Canfield Fisher of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Though Wright was pleased with the book’s selection by the club and the income it generated, he wrote in his journal that pressure from Communists had led the book club to ask him to drop the second section, which dealt with his involvement with the Communist party in Chicago. Although “The Horror and the Glory” remained unpublished, selections from it appeared in magazines at the time: “I Tried to Be a Communist” in
Atlantic Monthly
(August–September 1944), “American Hunger” in
Mademoiselle
(September 1945), and “Early Days in Chicago” in
Cross Section
(1945). These articles were reprinted numerous times during the 1940s and 1950s. The entire text of the second section was first published by Harper and Row in 1977 from the surviving page proofs, under the title
American Hunger
, which Wright had originally applied to the work as a whole. The present volume for the first time brings together the complete text of Wright’s autobiography, using the page proofs set before the intervention of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

This volume presents the proof and typescript text chosen for inclusion without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often are expressive features and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of the typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 29.26, asker; 165.18, now.”; 264.16, Dont’; 264.30, too; 274.5, mixed,; 274.7, thing; 311.21, talk; 314.30, value; 315.12, artist; 367.33, enemy, “1; 378.10, but not.