Black Boy blues

Richard Wright’s maternal grandfather Richard Wilson was a slave who ran away from the fields near Natchez, Miss.— which had more wealth than any American city other than New York in those days—to join the Union Navy in 1865.

For the rest of his life he kept a loaded rifle leaning in the corner of his parlor in case the War Between the States resumed.

By the time young Richard knew him he was an old man, blind in one eye, illiterate and bitter from years of fighting with the War Department over a disability pension. They claimed the name on their rolls was Vincent, not Wilson, and that even if he could somehow prove he was the same man, he didn’t serve the requisite 90 days anyway.

Richard would later remember reading the bureaucrats’ letters to the old man and taking his grandfather’s angry dictation in response. “I never heard him speak of white people,” he would later write. “I think he hated them too much to talk of them.”

Wright’s paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Wright, had been a slave as well. When the Rucker Plantation was occupied by Union troops in 1863, he and his brothers were freed so they could sign up to join the 58th Colored Infantry. Conditions in their camp were atrocious, far worse than what they had endured on the plantation. Disease was rampant. After a couple of weeks Nathaniel’s brothers deserted. But Nathaniel stayed on through the war.

After it was over, the Rucker Plantation welcomed Nathaniel and his brothers back as sharecroppers. That’s where Wright was born, in an unpainted wood shack 21 miles from Natchez in 1908.

In 1910, after Richard’s brother Leon was born, his father and mother Ella moved in with her folks in Natchez, into a small wood house on Woodlawn Street eight blocks from the Mississippi River. When he was 4 years old, Richard would accidentally set this house on fire, which caused him to be sent away to an orphanage. Not long after that, his father left the family.

In 1916, his mother took Leon and Richard with her to live with her sister Maggie and her husband Silas in Elaine, Ark. They had a nice white bungalow with a fence and a saloon that catered to the black sawmill workers.

They had plenty of food, more than 8-year-old Richard could at first believe. He pocketed a few biscuits before his mother caught him and scolded him for being a petty thief. There would be enough biscuits from here on out. Silas Hoskins was a substantial man, with interests. He had things to protect, things he’d worked for.

He’d stay all night at the saloon and come home to sleep through the day. Sometimes Richard would peek in on him, to look at the revolver he kept near his head.

Richard liked his Uncle Hoskins, though the man teased him some. He drove a wagon into the river, knowing Richard couldn’t swim. He ran it along in the shallows for about half a mile on the way to Helena. Scared Richard, who was a jittery sort anyways.

Then Uncle Hoskins vanished. That happened sometimes in those days. (Not just in Arkansas and Mississippi; in July 1919, a 17-year-old black boy named Eugene Williams drowned in Chicago’s Lake Michigan after being stoned by a group of white men who objected to him coming ashore on the white side of

a segregated beach. All anyone seems to know about Eugene Williams is that he was a good student who worked as a porter for a grocery store.)

A young man showed up on the porch, saying something about a white man shooting him. He told them not to go to the saloon.

Richard’s mother and aunt started packing right then. They left that night, carrying the kids and a few things down to West Helena. They stayed there about a month before slipping back into Mississippi. (A little later they came back to West Helena, where they shared a house with a brothel. That’s probably where they were in September 1919, when the Elaine massacre occurred.)

There was no funeral for Silas Hoskins. There was no probate; his survivors made no claim on his estate.

“There was only silence, quiet weeping, whispers and fears,” Richard would later write in a book called Black Boy that we should have read in school. “Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst … we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.”

It was in 1945 that a man named Fred Hoskins read that sentence. He was sitting in bed with his wife in Brooklyn, N.Y., and it made him put the book down and write a letter to Wright, then living in Chicago. Fred was five years older than Richard; he was Silas Hoskins’ son from an earlier marriage and had been in Natchez with his mother when he heard about the death of his father. He told Wright that his grandmother, Silas’ mother, had made a trip to Elaine to investigate.

“As you said, no one knew where he was buried,” Fred wrote. “If I remember right she was told that my Father was killed because he was biggity and lived too well for a Nigger and was killed by a Deputy Sheriff.”

Fred wrote to Richard that this father liked to drink and gamble, and that the story Richard told in

Black Boy of driving the wagon into the Mississippi reminded him of a similar incident when, while drunk, his father drove his wagon into a pond and scared Fred half to death.

Richard, who had no idea that Fred existed, wrote back to him:

“The reason I cannot tell you more about Uncle Hoskins’ death is that I was never able to learn any more about it than is contained in Black Boy. I asked Aunt Maggie about it time and again and she would never talk … She never wanted to be known among whites or blacks as the widow of a man whom the whites killed. I recall hearing that the whites told her never to say anything about it.

“My job as a writer is to try to make known to the people of this country … the lives that negroes live. We negroes live through things which even we want to forget or deny. I feel that we can never really help ourselves unless we admit what our lives are.”

We can never help ourselves unless we admit what our lives are. And the way we were. And the dark capacities we still harbor in the shallows of our hearts.