In a close reading of Richard Wright’s Black Boy we can see direct textual correlations between fear and hunger. There are correlations between fear regarding family roles as well as racism correlated with physical hunger, as well as fear regarding conduct and position within the Jim Crow South correlated with the hunger for knowledge. As these correlations move us from physical hunger to the intellectual hunger we notice that Richard begins to overcome his fears, which leads him to stop living passively and start questioning his surroundings, thus propelling him on his journey to discover his identity.
The killing of the kitten scene is the first instance in which we see the correlation between the fear regarding family roles and physical hunger. Richard sees killing the kitten as a means to overcome his father’s authority, and simply to keep from getting beaten. “I had made him know I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me” (12). It also partially reveals the role of the father, in this household at least, as the disciplinarian, and in a moment we will see the primary role of father as the supplier of food, leading Richard to correlate his hunger with hatred for his father.
“Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I had known before this had been no grim hostile, stranger; it had been a normal hunger that had made me beg constantly for bread, and when I ate a crust or two I was satisfied. But this new hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent…I would feel hunger nudging my ribs, twisting my empty guys until they ached. I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life had to pause and think of what was happening to me (14-15).”
Interesting enough this hunger causes him “for the first time…to pause and think”. So for the first time he begins questioning his surroundings, and why he is so hungry. This questioning leads him to discover that his father has left him and his mother, and thus, “…the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness” (16)
A new hunger, a hunger for knowledge is awakened in Richard, after he overcomes a small fear in an encounter with Ella, the schoolteacher who was the boarder at his grandmother’s house, we are told that he was “…as much afraid of her as he was attracted to her (38)”. This attraction allows him to overcome his fear and ask her about her books, which awaken the hunger for knowledge.
“I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murder…Ella’s whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway” (40).”
Here, we have another “first experience” which seems to spark up a determination. “I would have more of it, somehow, someway”. His first experience of physical hunger made him “pause and think”. This new intellectual hunger seems to give him a push into action. This push is exactly what Richard needs in order to break free from the boundaries that his family, as well as, the society of the Jim Crow South has given him.
Our final correlation is one between fear regarding race and physical hunger, but what is interesting to note is that he is no longer passive about his hunger; instead he tries to take action. After his “uncle” and Aunt Maggie run away, Richard’s hunger leads him to try and sell his poodle; however this causes him to face his fears regarding race, which he clearly isn’t ready for.
“…I remembered that these houses were the homes in which lived those white people who made Negroes leave their homes and flee into the night. I grew tense. Would someone say that I was a bad nigger and try to kill me here? …My mounting anxieties drowned out my hunger. I wanted to rush back to the safety of the black faces I knew. The door opened and the woman came out, smiling, still hugging Betsy in her arms. But I could not see her smile now; my eyes were full of the fears I had conjured up (69).”
Even though this was one of the first instances that force Richard to acknowledge a difference between races, it leads him to an emotional response that allows him to not only question his surroundings, but also question himself, leading him to discover the strength of his personality.
“Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning…I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rumor regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites…It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear, and I asked ceaseless questions (73).”
Thus, his fear and hunger serve to no longer hold him back, but propel him forward. It leads him to write his short story, and even to publish it, further separating himself from his family, and other black people.
As he continues to realize his apartness from his peers, family, and other black people, and after butting heads with society in the Jim Crow south, he truly begins to establish his identity.
“Had I been conscious of the full extent to which I was pushing against the current of my environment. I would have been frightened altogether out of my attempts at writing…I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive. I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle…In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed (169).
The overcoming of his fears, and his strength to push “against the current of (his) environment” allows him to discover his identity. He discovers that he has a specific place in the world; he is not just simply a black boy to be pushed around by whites or even other blacks. He discovers that he has a voice, and he would use it to fight, to fight against racism, against hunger, against the stifling of black people. He would fight like Mencken fought, with words. Finally, his life meant something, and maybe he could use his life and his identity to change the lives of others living his time and after it.
