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

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The same is true with his presentation of his family in Jackson, Mississippi. He depicts his sanctimonious grandmother as a severe hinderer to his intellectual development, curiosity, and emotional well-being. His mother, although a teacher, has little to offer in the way of intellectual guidance or life lessons. Again, Wright portrays his family members, as with other black folks he encounters, as having compromised the essence of their beings. They have made peace with racism, made peace with discrimination, settled into their roles as second class citizens outside the mainstream of American democracy, and self-segregated themselves into the geographical niches that whites have suggested is their natural lot in life. Throughout his narrative, therefore, Richard Wright presents himself as the individual, highly intelligent young man who has challenged—sometimes directly but more often indirectly—the system of inequality and injustice under which he and fellow blacks are forced to live. Those other blacks, though, do not have the intelligence, the critical and analytical skills to see their circumstances for what they truly are. On the soil of the South, therefore, Richard Wright presents himself as an exception, as perhaps the exception, to acquiescence to racial injustice. Wright is the conqueror who will go forth to save himself and write about other blacks, while they are content, ignorantly so, to remain in the places southern racism has assigned to them.