Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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The racism that inspires Wright’s recollections is certainly a part of the national fabric, but it is much more a part of southern landscape, southern territory, southern history, southern law, and southern customs. As a life narrator, therefore, Wright is shaped by that territory, and his narrative reflects that shaping. While that territory and that shaping were certainly communal, collective factors, I argue nonetheless that Wright determines to carve out an individualistic response to that territory and that shaping. Other blacks might suffer racism, but Wright presents them as too mentally dulled to feel it to the depths of their beings as he does. In one instance in Black Boy, for example, Wright recounts witnessing a black man’s allowing a white man to kick his rear end. Wright is disgusted, but the presumed victim explains that he has earned a quarter in the process, and quarters are hard to come by. In another instance, Wright depicts an encounter with a black mother and daughter; the mother is desperate to get Wright to marry her daughter, even though he has met her only a few hours before. In Wright’s estimation, these are pathetically un-understanding black peons whose intellectual capacities and abilities to comprehend their impoverished life circumstances and conditions of oppression are far beneath his own. Unlike Douglass, Wright does not feel sympathy for these black people. He wants to get away from them. Ironically, his lack of emotional identification with them does not preclude his using them in penning his life narrative, using them in fact as examples less to show pervasive racism than to show his intellectual superiority.