Richard Wright - Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition]

To honor and bear witness to the living presence of Richard Wrights classic American story Black Boy, I offer the following excerpt from my current work.

Because I was a child I was certain that if I stood alone and listened, quiet enough, long enough, beside my grandfathers coffin, he would speak to me. I was just as certain I lacked the courage to enter alone the room where they had put the box in which they put him. I was ten years old and literally frightened speechless by my grandfathers death. The rest is learning time, learning words, learning to forget a life I could have lived if I had not been so afraid, if I had trusted my grandfathers love of me, my love of him, and had entered the rooms stink and dark and silence, waited for my grandfather to speak. Or not to speak.

Rooms in which I grew up full of stories. Mostly womens voices. Men seldom around during daytime when I was a small boy with nothing better to do than hang around listening to my grandmother, aunts and great aunts, neighbor ladies, my mother. Listening though I never wanted to be caught listening. Best stories shushed if Mr. Rabbit Ears around, stories I wasnt supposed to understand (often didnt) whether I heard them or not. Stories as much about absent men as about women present in a room telling them. Stories that could embarrass or shame me because I was too little to possess any of my own to tell myself or tell back at others when their words made me feel in dangera boy, alone, angry, afraid. How did the women know so much about me I didnt know, couldnt speak. My story absent like the men, and is that one reason why I needed to listen very hard. Why womens stories that made me laugh could also make me want to cry. Or run away. Far, far away where the only voice my own. To silence where men might be hiding. Talking. Laughing. Talking back.

Sarah, a woman interviewed in a magazine article, claims she hears voices of people nobody else able to hear or see. Tells the articles writer that one of her voices is Tom and she and Tom have known each other a long time. Writer asks how long. Sarah pauses, gives writer a little smile before she replies, Hes saying, in the Sumerian period.

My story, too, could begin in Sumer. First problem, I do not speak nor write the Sumerian language. But neither does anyone else, it turns out. Language a convenience not a necessity. Often inconvenient. As useless often as it is useful, the second man I encountered in the city of R in Sumer assured me as his eyes swept over me, past me, letting me know that more than language separated us. Galaxies swirl in the space between the planet you occupy and mine he told me without uttering a single syllable. His silence louder than babble of buying, selling, braying, hallowing, bells, screams of a busy marketplace in the bright, hot middle of a day in which I am a stranger, so much a stranger I know better than to ask others in this crowd of strangers any questions about particulars of place or time or why they are here, why I am here, my eyes, ears, the entire piece-meal body that I am inside or its inside me or me floating just above it, two more strangers milling, swelling the crowd and whatever question I asked, no one could answer because the language here is Sumerian and I dont speak it and who does.

Sumer an Empire I once read about, ancient as counting, ancient as words and writing, Sumer, and I find myself there, in a city that holds my grandparents row house, not their house, they didnt own it, never owned more than a couple sticks, though my grandfather worked hard enough and drank hard enough year after year from the very first day he arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, fresh emigrant from Culpepper, Virginia, to earn, to own the entire city where he grew old and died, too poor still after decades of work and drinking gallons, tons of Dago red, no money to pay an undertaker to display his dead body in a funeral parlor after doing whatever undertakers do to preserve lifeless flesh as a kind of human-size doll, no display arranged unless surviving family can afford extra cash to supplement burial insurance that has been paid in weekly installments to one of those usually bespectacled, usually Jewish men whose speciality insuring low rent row-house dwellers like my grandparents, collecting nickel by nickel for decades if the family could afford to keep up with premiums, or if not keep up exactly, beg as my grandmother told me she did Mr. Cohen, a nice man, really a nice, nice man, she whispered to me, begged him many a week, then sometimes the next two or three empty-handed weeks, to please grant more time or more like take pity on her while profusely, sometimes not dry-eyed, she literally begged to the point of almost dropping down to her knees but he was a nice man and could see the abjection coming and a family man with bills himself so desired no part of it and let her off with a weary nod as she stood there wavering in her housecoat, him always in my grandfathers easy chair just inside the front door where he had settled, crossed one leg over the other and opened his coupon book first time she let him in the house, Mr. Cohen nice enough to shut sometimes the large book propped on his knee, saying her name sometimes while he slowly wagged his head, a halfway frown, halfway smile, Freeda... Oh Freeda, letting her off this once or twice or more until she saved up the nickel or majority of a series of delinquent nickels, and seated now on a wooden kitchen-chair, her knees bare, pressed together under her thin housecoat, on the rooms piece of furniture furthest from the man, but too close anyway, she counted out coins, rose and delivered them to his palm from a kerchief in her lap she had opened as if opening Fort Knox, the way she might open her lips or legs to a stranger to feed her starving family then kill herself immediately afterwards or maybe not.

Not the way she opens that flowered kerchief with its twisted corners and withdraws blood money, a few crumpled bills smelling like talcum powder, and hands them to me first year I left home and went away to college...

Invited by Richard Wrights daughter and grandson to compose a foreword to the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Black Boy, I felt extremely privileged and fortunate. Then intimidated. I reread Black Boy to help me decide whether I should accept the invitation or not. Experiencing again the unsettling power of Wrights autobiography didnt exactly help me make up my mind. Whats left to say about this great book, great man. Why should I trust myself to find appropriate thoughts, words to respond to the books disturbing intensity and honesty.

My response to such questions, and response to a generous invitation, was to begin this foreword to Black Boy with the excerpt above you have just read, my own work in progress that aspires to contribute in some helpful way to the ongoing tradition that Richard Wrightin the spirit of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melvillehas enriched mightily with his indispensable books that define unique dimensions, transcendent values of American literature.

When a writer of geniuslike Wrightcreates a master text, other writers are both compelled and freed, consciously or not, to render their versions of the masters classic. Seventy-five years have passed since Wright published Black Boy, and thus it feels strangely disconcerting and exhilarating, though perhaps inevitable, to find myself attempting to write Black Boy again. Attempting to learn from Wrights example, even if I cannot sustain the simplicity, severe intelligence, the wounding reality his narrative achieves. What this echoing, this need, this emulation, this repetition, this dependency means, I will leave for you to decide. Ill be content if my words above, included in this foreword to