Black Boy: Metaphors 5 key examples

Richard, now a well-educated grown man, meets his father again. Richard's father "tried to make it in the city, but failed," and came back to the country to work as a sharecropper on a plantation. The description of what remains of the relationship between Richard and his father is described in metaphor. Richard sees some similarities between himself and his father: their voices and their faces are similar. These are concrete, physical attributes which they share, like the "red clay" upon which the father stands. But they differ on more abstract things like "language." Richard thinks that the inciting problem in his father's life was his lack of education. Richard, who works throughout the novel to improve his "language," sees this as a fundamental difference between himself and his father. As a result they are "living on vastly different planes of reality." This statement is true literally, as Richard and his father live far apart by this point in the future. It is also true metaphorically, as Richard understands that his education, which so influenced his worldview and disposition, causes him to live in a different world than his father.

First, there is a metaphor: "a long and heavy anxiety lifted from me." Richard imagines his anxiety as something physically large and onerous. But then there is a simile that reconsiders the anxiety: "leaving days that had been dark and lonely as death." The simile and metaphor describe two different things, Richard's anxiety and then his home life. Both are certainly unpleasant and depressing, but one is heavy and physical and one is ethereal and abstract. In other words, the figurative language in this passage helps to clarify the specific nature of Richard's emotions. Also, the variety of figuration helps to show just how much Richard feels out of place in his family, in that the dislocation manifests in both abstract and material ways.

Richard describes himself and his friends as soil into which "hate and hostility," like some noxious fluid, can "seep." Now that the boys have grown, all that hate "came now to the surface to guide our actions," described again using this metaphor of soil in fluid. Richard uses the metaphor to describe how he and his friends saw racism all around them, and it affected them subconsciously. Only once they got older did they start reacting to those racist structures. This metaphor also plays off the fact that enslaved people were often thought to be indelibly connected to their land; in 1919, metaphorically characterizing Black men as a sort of "land" certainly contains undertones of the history of enslavement. Perhaps most strikingly, Richard indicates that, as usual, he was precociously observant at a young age, enough to understand his and his friends' worldview and to describe it in specific metaphor.

Richard describes how put-off he is by Bess's affection using metaphors of light and darkness. Richard uses similar metaphors commonly in the book to describe emotional purity and knowledge. Here, Richard uses darkness to describe his young life: in his childhood, when no one could share their emotions freely without fear of retribution, everyone was "locked in his own dark world." The lack of light represents a lack of emotional vulnerability and expression. Bess's light, in contrast, shines out of her "child's heart." She, seemingly, feels big emotions fully in a way that Richard was never allowed to do. As such, the light "blinds" him, just as Richard is overwhelmed by Bess's affection. Note how, shortly before this, when Richard was forced to leave the optometrist job and was again overwhelmed with emotion, he described that he walked into the sun "like a blind man." Generally in the memoir, Richard describes intense emotion as uncomfortable light which "blinds" him due to his "dark" upbringing.

Richard lays out three separate metaphors that describe his feelings about this situation. First, Richard characterizes his life as a physical thing he could "hold" in his mind and try to keep safe. But he understands that his life is fragile and can break if he loses focus, ascribing more physical characteristics to his "life." This correlates to the real physical danger that Richard constantly battles in the novel. He is literally correct in saying that if he loses focus, his life could indeed come into physical peril, as if someone had stumbled and dropped it.

In the second metaphor, Richard describes how his new knowledge results in "a vast sense of distance between me and the world." Here he is considering a separate issue—not his physical life per se, but what he has learned from reading. But like the first metaphor, this one too relates to Richard's real life, in which he has moved around constantly, creating a similar kind of distance.

Then, the third metaphor characterizes his life as a "dream," a far less physical concept than the first sentence. These metaphors clarify an important distinction: Richard sees his life as a physical object that he has to protect, but sees the structures of racism that control his life as an ethereal object (which is still full of "terror, tension, and anxiety"). Despite all these metaphors, the passage ends with the practical question that Richard has had to consider throughout the memoir: "I wondered how long I could bear it."