*Mississippi Goddam- The Saga of Author Richard Wright

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for author Richard Wright.

Book Review

February is Black History Month

Black Boy, Richard Wright, Library of America edition, 1991

Every time I read a book about the plight of blacks in the South in the early part of the 20th century as Jim Crow society solidified I have to shutter in disgust. I have just finished reading communist Harry Haywood’s autobiography Black Bolshevik. I have read Malcolm X’s words on the fate of his forebears in the post-bellum South and now I have read Richard Wright’s autobiographical sketch Black Boy. I will make no defense of the unequal treatment of blacks in the North. There is none. However, Wright’s descriptions of the physical and psychological damage, as presented by his own experiences of Jim Crow, done to blacks by Southern whites are positively feudal. There was no room for illusions about the goodness of humankind in that world. To believe so was to face personal humiliation, or worst-the lynching tree.

Wright, after great personal struggle within himself, is able to reflect on his experiences and to articulate the effect that Jim Crow had on him as a black, as a man, as a human being. It was not pretty. One can only image the fate of those less articulate than brother Wright as they try to comprehend a world not of their making but which they early on must learn to navigate. The description of this grinding struggle is heart of the first part of the book.

Wright goes back to the mist of time in his early youth to dissect the hunger, psychological as well as physical, than never was far from his door; the effects on him of a sick and helpless mother; of an absent ne’er-do-well father; and, an overbearing and religiously-driven grandmother on his early development. And those are just the problems in the house. Once Wright steps outside those comparably comfortable confines he faces the outside world of Mississippi reality that he must put on a mask in order to survive in a world that will literally cut him down if he does not learn the code. Although Wright gives many examples of how this system robbed blacks of their personality the most graphic descriptions, by far, are those that deal with the need to have to put on the mask when whites are around. And the consequences if one did not.

And what of the great escape to the North (via Memphis) to Chicago-the Promised Land that forms the basis for the second part of the book? We have seen that urban story portrayed in other locales as well, for example, in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Claude Brown’s Man-Child in The Promised Land. That is where my statement about the treatment, or rather mistreatment, of blacks in the North comes into play. In effect, Wright articulates the contours of a psychological feudalism in the North where the special oppressions of blacks as a race are met with indifference by whites. What makes Wright’s case special is that through self-education and willpower he breaks out of the endless and destructive turning in on oneself to articulate his experiences and those of other blacks like him displaced from the rural life of the South to the uncertainties of urban life.

On the face of it seems incongruous that Wright would find a solution to his angst in the American Communist Party during the heyday of the ‘third period’ in the early 1930's. I have mentioned elsewhere, most recently in my review of Harry Haywood’s Black Bolshevik (part of which also deals with this period in the American party), that on reading memoirs and autobiographies of the older generations of radicals and revolutionaries I am looking for the spark that broke them from the norms of bourgeois society. I have found that there is a great range of reasons from racial and class hatreds to intellectual curiosity. I find that in the end that Wright’s relationship to communism, not without some bumps and bruises along the way, came from intellectual curiosity as much as any sense of racial or class injustice.

In Chicago, in many ways the embryonic black proletarian core of the country in this period, Wright continued his struggle for physical daily survival and for intellectual understanding. His fortuitous linking up with the local John Reed Club helped, at least initially, stabilize his intellectual life. His description of the inner workings of the Communist Party and its role in its own front group creations, like the Reed Club, jibes with other accounts that I have read. The tremendous pressures to conform to party life and the party line are chilling for what, in the final analysis, was a voluntary political organization and not a cult. Moreover, one of the characters portrayed in this section bears a striking resemblance to the above-mentioned very real Harry Haywood. Wright’s take on Haywood is very, very different from how old Harry portrayed himself in his autobiography. Surprise.

One of the charges brought against Wright by fellow black party members was that he was an intellectual. Self-taught, yes, but an intellectual nevertheless. One would think that recruiting such a fairly rare person, black or white, would have had the comrades spinning cartwheels. No so in Wright’s case. Tremendous pressure was placed on him to conform to party dictates. Or else. This seems counter-intuitive. The relationship between communism and intellectuals and artists has always been a somewhat rocky one. But know this-then and today we need as many intellectuals as we can get our hands on to write, think and lead the struggles of humankind. Ignorance never did anyone any good. Enough said on that. If you want to get a real feel for what that old expression Mississippi God Damn from Nina Simone's song really meant read this well written and thoughtful book.