Black Boy: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Richard’s mother comes back to Richard—who has not yet left the orphanage, since his mother still cannot afford to care for him—and says that she, Richard, and his brother will be moving to her sister’s house in Elaine, Arkansas, after stopping to see Granny in Jackson, Mississippi. Richard is so overjoyed at this news that he quickly packs and leaves the orphanage, not even stopping to say goodbye to the other children. Richard remarks that later on, he came to believe that black people were often unkind to one another in this way, not out of any deep-seated inhospitality, but because the degradations and difficulties of their lives made warmth and politeness more difficult within the black community.

Richard’s mother and the two boys stop in Jackson to see Granny, who lives in a relatively large house. Granny is a deeply religious woman, who is black but has very light skin. She has a young girl board with her, a teacher named Ella. Ella reads novels frequently, and tells Richard the plot of the novel Bluebeard after Richard repeatedly asks what it’s about. When Granny discovers that Ella has told Richard about this novel, she declares it the “devil’s work” and slaps Richard, warning him not to read such “filth” in the house. But Richard realizes that novels and stories strike a deep chord in him, and he hungers to read more.

Richard’s mother falls ill again and remains in her bed. One night, when Granny is bathing Richard and his brother, Richard asks Granny, without thinking, to “kiss” his backside—a playful jest, he thinks. But Granny slaps him hard on the face, and calls to his mother and to Grandpa, her husband—a veteran of Union forces in the Civil War—who threatens to shoot Richard if he does not come into the main room for his beating. Richard is beaten savagely with a switch by his mother, but cannot tell his family where he learned such “dirty” language. Granny assumes Ella taught it to him and sends her away—she weeps as she leaves, knowing that she has been wrongly accused of encouraging this “filth” in Richard.

In another brief section, Richard recounts the natural beauty of Jackson, and some of the more peaceful moments he and his brother enjoy with Grandpa and Granny. But Richard’s mother soon takes Richard and his brother aboard a train to Arkansas, where they will live with her sister. On the train, Richard asks if he can speak to the white passengers, though he knows this is not allowed. He asks, too, if Granny is white, because of her light skin. His mother replies that Granny and Grandpa were both slaves, that their last names were given to them by white owners, and that some African Americans have lighter skin than others, but whites consider people with even distant African ancestry to be “black.”

Richard asks if he is black, and his mother says that society will view him as “colored,” but that Richard’s ancestry is really a mix of white, African, and Native American. Richard’s mother is uncomfortable with the conversation, but Richard resolves, internally, that he will live as a “colored” man, and that if anyone challenges him, or if whites want to fight him, he will learn to fight them back.

Richard, his brother, and his mother move in with his Aunt Maggie—his mother’s sister—and her husband, Uncle Hoskins. The house in Elaine provides Richard, for the first time, with ample food, and he cannot believe that eating so well is possible. He puts biscuits in his pockets during meals in case there is no food the next day, although he slowly realizes that Hoskins and Maggie simply have enough to feed everyone.

Hoskins owns a bar in Elaine, and though Richard wants to visit him at work, his mother and Maggie tell Richard it’s dangerous. Richard grows close to Hoskins. One day Hoskins, on his horse cart, offers to show Richard the river nearby, but Richard is so afraid of water that he forces Hoskins to take the horses back.

A few days later, Hoskins goes to the bar and does not return that evening, and the family fears that something has happened to him. Finally, a messenger comes to the house late at night and says that Hoskins has been shot by an angry white man in Elaine—someone who coveted his lucrative liquor business. Although Maggie wishes to go down to the bar to find out what happened, Richard’s mother urges her to stay home. Because Hoskins was killed extra-legally, and because the white authorities in Elaine will do nothing to help Maggie’s case, Maggie and Richard’s mother fear for their lives, and Richard’s mother decides to move the family again, this time back to Granny’s house in Jackson.

In Jackson, Richard observes two different groups of men walking by when he is playing in the fields: the first is a line of soldiers, training for battle in World War I, which is raging in Europe at this time; the second is a line of black prisoners, working on a chain-gang and observed by white wardens. When Richard asks why the prisoners are all black and the guards are all white, his mother replies that “the law is harder on black people.” Richard asks why the black people don’t fight the wardens, and his mother says that only the wardens have weapons to fight with.

After some time, Richard’s mother decides that Granny’s strict religious rules in the house are too much to bear, and so she moves Richard and his brother back to Arkansas, to the town of West Helena, near Elaine. There, Richard and his brother become friends with the some of the black boys in the neighborhood. The boys all play together in the local garbage dump or in the streets, and Richard joins with the others in singing lewd and anti-Semitic songs about a Jewish grocery-story owner. Wright acknowledges at the time of his writing that this prejudice was loathsome, especially in children experiencing their own prejudice, but he says also that mistrust of Jewish people was ingrained in African American communities at the time.

Richard discovers that, on Saturdays, a great many men enter the house next-door to his own. A girl on the street tells Richard, who does not know what “business” goes on there, that the neighboring house is a brothel. Richard sneaks in and observes a man and woman engaged in a sex act, but the landlady running the brothel finds him and carries him back home, then launches into a tirade when Aunt Maggie and Richard’s mother return from their jobs (they are once again cooking for white families in the area). The madam of the brothel, who also owns the apartment Richard’s family rents, forces the family to leave, and they take up lodgings down the street.

At the new house, Richard becomes aware of another intrigue: namely, that his Aunt Maggie has begun seeing a new man, named “Uncle” Matthews, who appears to be a kind of preacher or social leader, and who dresses formally, in a “high white collar.” Matthews appears to be in hiding, as he only visits Richard’s house at night, and when Richard asks his aunt and mother about this, they reply that Matthews is on the run from white people who wish to kill him.

One night, Matthews enters the house in a hurry and tells Maggie and Richard’s mother, with Richard overhearing from his bedroom, that he (Matthews) has set fire to a house with a woman inside, as a means of destroying evidence and keeping the white family from finding out what has happened. Matthews and Aunt Maggie decide to leave in the middle of the night. Before they do so, Maggie says a tearful goodbye to Richard and his brother. The next morning, Richard asks his mother what has taken place, and she says only that if Richard speaks about these events to anyone, he and other members of the family could be killed. Richard never brings up the event again, but he also notes that he never learns the exact nature of the crime Matthews committed, and why he did it.

The family once again needs money, as Aunt Maggie is no longer living with them and bringing home her income from cooking. Richard goes door-to-door in the white neighborhood of town, a few days later, to try to sell his dog, Betsy, a white poodle given him by Matthews before he left town. Richard finds a young white girl who wishes to buy the dog for a dollar, but when she returns to the door with only 97 cents, Richard refuses the money out of principle and takes his dog home. The dog is later crushed by a car, and his mother calls Richard a “fool” for not taking the money—as now the family has no money to use for food, and no dog to sell.

Wright notes that, at about this age (around eight years old), he began to live more and more in fear of white violence. The World War is winding down, and the return of black and white soldiers to the South has inflamed racial tensions. Richard hears stories of lynchings of black men, and of a black woman who gets vengeance on the white murderers of her husband by shooting them with a concealed weapon at her husband’s own burial. Richard says to himself that, like the black woman just described, he, too, will fight tooth-and-nail to defend himself if white men ever try to beat him up or harm him. But Richard also lives in fear of white anger on a daily basis.

Richard’s mother finds a new job as an assistant to a white doctor, and her wages are sufficient to place the two children back in school. Richard goes to the first day of class and is asked to write his name on the board, but he freezes in public, as he has done before, and though he knows his name and can write, he is unable to perform this task in front of the room. Then, many weeks later, the entire school is dismissed in the middle of the day—the World War is officially over. In a crowd in the middle of the street, Richard sees a plane in the sky for the first time, celebrating the end of the conflict. For Christmas that year (1918), Richard remembers receiving just one orange, which he saves and eats slowly over the course of Christmas Day.