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

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There is an irony in Wright’s impulse to creativity, however. Even as he presents himself as the exception, he is showing the circumstances under which other blacks live. Astute readers, be they black or white, will be inclined to sympathize with and perhaps desire change for those black folks from whom Wright wants to escape so desperately. To Wright, early twentieth century conditions of black existence in the South are not changed appreciably from days of slavery, so he follows the North Star into Memphis and Chicago in the hope of better things. He becomes a part of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and one of the first to write about it. While many of those who moved north during the Great Migration succeeded in helping their families—and even Wright himself did that—the initial impulse was for individualistic gain. Go North, get a good job, make some money, and then help others if you can.

While it might be argued that the segregated, Jim Crow, racist South could in many ways be viewed as a new form of slavery, as Douglas Blackmon argues in Slavery By Another Name (2008), it still did not inspire in Wright the desire for immediacy of transformation that Douglass and Jacobs expressed in their narratives. Drinking from water fountains marked black, or using toilets similarly marked, apparently did not resonate the way that receiving 39 lashes for not meeting a quota for picking cotton during slavery may have resonated.