Black Boy: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The memoir begins as a four-year-old boy named Richard Wright—the book’s author and narrator—and his unnamed brother sit quietly in their house in Mississippi. Their mother informs them that they must stay quiet, because their grandmother (their father’s mother) is dying. Richard is bored, and, not knowing what to do to occupy himself, he sets fire to a few straws pulled from a broom. He then places the flame near the room’s window curtains, not realizing it will cause them to blaze suddenly. Richard’s brother is startled by the fire, and Richard, frightened, runs out of the house and crawls into its foundation, hiding underneath its chimney.

Richard hears screams in the house, and continues to hide, hoping his family won’t realize he is responsible for setting the house ablaze. Richard then feels his father tugging at him, and his father pulls Richard from out of his hiding place. Richard’s mother and father at first seem relieved that Richard is okay, and they tell Richard that their grandmother and all other family members survived the fire, although half the house has been destroyed. But days after the fire, realizing that Richard was at fault for it, his parents beat him so heavily that he nearly dies. Lying in bed after his beating (with a switch), he hallucinates in a fever for days, but ultimately survives.

Richard the narrator then recounts a number of different memories and sensory experiences from his childhood, in no particular order, including: the beauty of the natural world around Natchez, Mississippi (the town of his birth and earliest years), the plants and animals he sees, and the sky in the evening. Richard then recounts his first move, with his family, to Memphis, where his parents have presumably gone to find work. The family lives in a small, decrepit tenement in Memphis, and his father works as an overnight security guard at a drugstore. Because he works at night, Richard’s father is often tired and hard on the children, and he asks that they be quiet around the house when he sleeps during the day.

Richard recounts a story in which he and his brother, playing with a cat, wake his father. Richard’s father then tells Richard to kill the cat, or “do anything” to keep the cat from making noise. Although Richard and his brother know that his father does not mean to actually murder the cat, Richard pretends that he has understood his father’s command literally, and he kills the cat by hanging it in a tree.

Richard’s brother is horrified by Richard’s actions, and Richard’s mother chastises him, saying that it was a sin to kill the cat, and that Richard knew his father was not being serious with his “command” to do so. Richard’s father realizes he cannot beat Richard for following his order—Richard has therefore gotten the upper hand on his father on this occasion—but Richard’s mother punishes Richard by forcing him to untie the cat, bury it, and say a few words at its “funeral.” This causes Richard to feel terrible for his act of brutality, and he states that, after this episode, he never wanted to see a kitten again.

Richard reports that he begins feeling hungry, and that there is no food in the house. At first, when he tells this to his mother, she laughs and says he should catch a “kungry” if he’s hungry—an imaginary beast that hungry boys can eat. But, after Richard complains more about his hunger pains, his mother tells him that his father has left the family, and that she will have to get a job to put food on the table. Richard and his brother periodically ask why their father is no longer living with them, but their mother refuses to explain why he’s gone.

His mother begins sending Richard out to buy groceries, and a pack of young boys in the neighborhood continually beat him up, stealing his food basket and money. Richard complains to his mother, who tells him he won’t be allowed back in the house if he doesn’t purchase the food. She gives him more money and a stick to beat off the bullies, which Richard eventually uses on them, scaring them away. At this point, Richard reports that he feels more comfortable walking the streets of Memphis, though he is only a young boy.

Richard’s mother begins working as a cook for a white family, and Richard—who is forced to watch the white family eat sumptuous meals, prepared by his mother—walks hungrily around town while his mother is on the job. One day, he wanders near a bar filled with drunks, and they invite him inside, saying that if he is going to “peep around” there in the daytime, he might as well have a drink. The drunks tell Richard inappropriate phrases to repeat to one another and to women in the bar in exchange for sips of alcohol, and Richard finds himself more or less constantly drunk for days at a time, though he is only six years old. His mother beats him with a switch to correct his behavior, and finally, after his mother hires a babysitter to look after Richard and his brother, the “taste of alcohol” leaves Richard, and he does not drink again until he is much older.

One day, Richard’s mother orders coal for the house and tells Richard to wait for the delivery man to bring it. The man realizes that Richard is poor, hungry, and uneducated—that Richard does not even know how to count—and so the coal-man teaches Richard how to recite the numbers. Richard also begins picking his way through children’s books left on the street by schoolchildren.

At this age—around six—Richard also learns of the hatred between “white” and “black” people from his mother. Richard is at first confused, since his Granny (his mother’s mother) has very light skin but is considered black. His mother begins explaining to him that whites and blacks in Memphis are separate groups that do not mix, and that whites occasionally become violently angry at blacks. Richard “wonders to himself” what white people are “really like” when he sees them on the street.

Richard’s mother scrapes together money to send Richard to school—she must buy him a uniform so he can be admitted—and on the first day, Richard learns many slang words, mostly dirty, from his fellow students. On his way back from school, Richard soaps these words onto the windows of neighborhood houses, but when his mother finds out, she sends Richard back to erase his work. Wright remarks that he “kept those words to himself” from this point on.

Richard’s mother becomes more observantly religious after his father leaves, and she invites the preacher from the local church over for dinner. Richard cries out when the preacher takes nearly all the chicken from the dinner table, and Richard begins to sense, even at a young age, that preachers and religious men can have the same failings as non-religious people.

Richard goes to court with his brother and mother as his mother attempts to argue before a judge that Richard’s father should pay child support. The father says he is doing all he can, that he has no more money, and the judge accepts his argument. Richard and the family continue living in near-total poverty. They are hungry much of the time, especially after his mother becomes sick with an undisclosed illness, and can no longer work. She places Richard and his brother in a local orphanage, in the care of Miss Simon, because she cannot afford to feed, clothe, and house the boys.

At the orphanage, Richard continues to be hungry—they are mostly fed a kind of gruel—and the boys spend their days with the other children, pulling grass out of the orphanage lawn, because the facility is too poor to afford lawn mowers. Miss Simon takes a liking to Richard and asks if he would like to be adopted by her, but Richard says that, at this point, he has “learned to distrust everyone,” and rebuffs Miss Simon’s advances. Miss Simon wishes for Richard to be her “secretary,” and she asks him to blot letters for her, but he freezes and cannot complete the task. Miss Simon asks what’s wrong with Richard, and he leaves the room.

Later that day, Richard decides to leave the orphanage, and he runs away into the streets of Memphis, where he is soon picked up by a white police officer. The officer takes Richard back to the orphanage, where he is lashed by Miss Simon. When his mother next visits, she tells Richard that he must remain in the orphanage and be a “good boy,” or else he will only cause her pain and suffering.

His mother agrees to take Richard out of the orphanage if he will go to his father and ask for money to feed the family. Richard, understanding that he must make difficult choices like this if he wants to survive, agrees to do so, and goes with his mother to his father’s new house, where he lives with a “strange woman,” his girlfriend. His father tells Richard that Richard can live with him—he would then have “all the food he wants”—but Richard tells his father that he hates him and the strange woman. His father offers a nickel to feed the family, but his mother tells him not to take it, out of principle, and Richard refuses.

Wright then closes the chapter with a vision of his father 25 years later, when he next sees him. Richard has returned on a visit from the North, and finds that his father is now a sharecropper, or farm-servant, on a plantation outside Memphis. His father has been hobbled by years of hard work in the fields, and though Richard understands that they are related, he feels he has nothing in common with this man. Richard says that his father “tried to make it in the city, but failed,” and returned to the countryside, where he, a black peasant, felt more comfortable, and where the work required only physical strength and constant toil.