Suffering: Black Boy By Richard Wright

Suffering affects how people act, and it changes their outlooks on life. Suffering influences Richard right in his memoir Black Boy. Wright is an African American boy in the Jim Crow South. His family is poor and faces many hardships, such as his father abandoning them. Richard — and most African Americans of the time — face racial prejudice. The book details his youth, in which his family has no permanent home and often cannot afford meals. Hence, Wright suffers from a lack of basic necessities, affection and attention, and equal treatment.
Throughout the memoir, Richard suffers from not having enough food, and does not have a suitable home. Wright’s family is impecunious, especially after his father, the only source of income, leaves. Throughout

his childhood, Wright’s mother constantly shifts between low-paying jobs, often leaving Richard and his brother without proper meals. Soon after his father leaves the family, Richard complains to his mother that he is hungry. He describes the suffering, detailing that, “I would feel hunger nudging my ribs, twisting my empty guts until they ached” (Wright 1.14-15). Richard is not just hungry — he is starving, which is clearly painful. But his mother knows she has no money for food, and makes the hunger into a joke. However, Wright does not see this as a joke; he is becoming nauseous from hunger. However, this is only the beginning. As time progresses, Richard’s food source becomes smaller and smaller, and he often explains the panging agony of starvation, but knows that he is helpless in his need of more food. Later, Wright moves with his mother and brother to Arkansas with his Aunt Maggie. Her husband, Uncle Hoskins, makes enough money for their to reliably be food, but just to be safe, Richard hoards food in his pockets (and later around the house) in fear of the food disappearing. Richard for years is starving so much that it takes his a while to even grasp the concept of food always being available. However, the good comes to an end when Uncle Hoskins is killed, and Richard goes back to starving. Additionally, Richard does not have a suitable home, which is evident through his constant migration from relative to relative, and his brief bout in an orphanage. His mother becomes ill and often can not afford to raise her children on her own or to pay rent, so Richard effectively had no home for his childhood. At one point, Richard’s mother runs out of money from her mother. Because they have no money, Wright explains that his family “could no longer pay the rent for our dingy flat… my mother made rounds of the charitable organizations seeking help” (1.28). Richard cannot afford food or shelter, and charity is not enough, so his mother drops him off at an orphanage, where his conditions are marginally better; he receives two meals a day and has to pluck grass out of the lawn. Richard clearly has poor living conditions throughout his childhood and suffers from not having enough food or a home.
In addition to lacking basic necessities, Richard suffers from not receiving the love and affection a child deserves.

Wright’s earliest memories of his father are of him being a moody beer-bellied drunk. Richard never has a loving relationship with his father; in fact, they barely had any relationship. Wright recounts him as “always a stranger… always somehow alien and remote” (1.10). Richard never feels love or affection from his father, who to him seems like an alien in his own house. Richard’s father spends most of the day sleeping, so Richard spends little time with him. But again, any time they spend together involves either yelling or beating. Matters get worse when his father abandoned the family, leaving Richard in an uncomfortable situation with no father and an uncertain future. Aside from not having a loving father, Wright deals with often abusive relatives. His Granny and Aunt Addie beat him, and his grandfather threatens to shoot him. His mother, who does all she can to raise Richard and his brother alone, still beats him occasionally. But worse, she often becomes ill, including becoming paralyzed after a stroke, leading to Richard relying on distant family and himself much more than an 11-year-old boy should. Before the stroke, as mentioned earlier, Richard moves into an orphanage because his mother cannot afford to raise him. Their, Wright receives little parental love, which is reduced more when his mother is no longer allowed to visit him. Eventually, Richard realizes he has nobody to love. At this point, he is “rapidly learning to distrust everything and everybody” (Wright 1.29). He is losing his family, and is turning into an introvert who has no one that loves him. Clearly, Wright suffers from not having strong family and not getting the affection a family should

provide.
In the memoir, Richard suffers from not having basic necessities, not getting care and affection, and also not receiving equal treatment. Wright is an African American in the segregated South, and discovers at a young age that blacks are not treated equally to whites. Throughout his childhood, Wright does not understand what makes a black person any different than a white person, and why African Americans accept abuse from whites. Richard’s first experience with racial injustice is when he hears that a white man beat a black boy. After learning that “beat” means more than lightly whipping and that the man is not the boy’s father, Richard begins to ponder race, and soon learns how deep the inequality is in South. When waiting in a train station, Wright notices “that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a ‘white’ line and a ‘black’ line” (Wright 2.46), and once on the train, that the “Negroes were in one part of the train and that the whites were in another” (Wright 2.46). These are the first of many experiences of racial segregation. Richard becomes curious about why skin color matters, and begins to ask questions about it that people do not answer. Later in life, Richard reflects that white people think blacks are overly emotional, but they really show two emotions strongly: hate and fear, both driven by injustice. He mulls over “the essential bleakness of black life in America… that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it” (Wright 2.37). He realizes later in life, after gaining a greater understanding of race, that he suffers from lost opportunities because of the color of his skin. He understands that he lives in a world but somehow is an alien to the white dominance. Wright’s early experiences with race build up, and he realizes that life would be much easier not living in fear of white people. When 11 years old, Richard joins a black gang that feuds with a local white gang. Again, the racial inequality leads to Richard suffering, this time physically and developmentally. Richard’s childhood, and consequently the rest of his life, is damaged by unequal treatment compared to whites.
In summation, Richard Wright suffers from not getting proper food and shelter, not having a loving family, and facing a racially unequal environment. His father abandons him at a young age, leaving the family broke and starving. Richard, from his parents and extended family alike, is not loved and properly nurtured. Also, being a black boy in the Jim Crow South, Wright suffers from unequal treatment and a lack of opportunities. All of the above make Richard’s childhood far from ideal, which hinders his development and leads to problems later in life, such as becoming a Communist.