!*WHO IS AFRAID OF RICHARD WRIGHT ?

[Marpessa Kupendua]

)From: Susa...@aol.com
)Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 09:02:29 -0400 (EDT)
)
)WHO IS AFRAID OF RICHARD WRIGHT ?
)
) by Julia Wright
)
)Statement to the Duval County Committee reviewing Black Boy under the
)guidance of Ms Carolyn Kantor.
)
)February 1987. A thin drizzle is falling. A group of Richard Wright
)scholars from Ole Miss have driven me down to visit, for my first time
)ever, my father's birth place, near Roxie, Mississippi. It is twilight.
)Our van parks in front of a church. There is an atmosphere of supressed
)excitement around me: I know something has been planned for my benefit -
)but what ? I step inside, find myself in a room full of people and am told
)that here are over fifty members of the Wright family.
)My father, Richard Wright, died and was buried in exile in France. The
)famous author of Black Boy and Native Son had left the United States in
)1947 never to return. He had never seen his family again and yet here they
)were facing me a quarter of a century after his death. I shake hands,
)receive bear hugs and at last, overwhelmed, sit down. And then,
)unforgettably, a line of children forms and files bashfully in front of me:
)each one of my very young newly-met relatives greets me in turn and shows
)me his/her grades - all A's and B's - in honor of the ancestor of the
)Wright tribe, Richard Nathaniel Wright, their role model, the anchor of
)their hope, the revealer of their secret dreams. Their Big Boy who finally
)left home for the honors of the North and the whole wide world beyond. The
)elder who was befriended in turn by Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr Eric Williams and
)President Kwame N'krumah...
)
)>From that day on, I realized that if minors in America are old enough not
)to be spared the death penalty, then they should be considered adult enough
)to chose their own reading matter, and through the books they read elect
)different heroes from those imposed upon them by trash television and
)tasteless videos. From that day on, I paid particular attention to
)juvenile and young adult reactions to Native Son and Black Boy wherever
)these books are taught throughout the world. Consistently, I found a
)similarity of patterns of reaction which gave me pause for thought: "the
)child in black boy is naughty and mischievous like we are but in the end he
)grows up to become Richard Wright. If he did it maybe we can do it too".
)
)Maybe we can do it too... Again and again, I encountered the same note of
)childish hope and emulation and have now reached the conclusion that our
)youngsters - if only we would listen to them - can teach us a thing or two
)about that rite of passage between the tight-fisted Biggers still lurking
)in each one of them - and the slow, painful voyage towards becoming Richard
)Wright.
)
)Significantly, Native Son has also been the target of censorship in Duval
)County, and thus are banned the two warring twins - Bigger and Black Boy -
)and thus is condemned the bridge, the exemplary rite of passage from the
)one to the other. The turning point between going the way of Bigger and
)dying on the electric chair - or going the way of Richard Wright and living
)in literary history. And I contend that it is the no-child's-land which
)separates the angry despair of Native Son from the creativity of Black Boy
)which speaks to our children. Our youngsters may not find the words to say
)it, to speak about their own inner Biggers but when they read about the
)fictional Bigger out there, when they read about the auto-biographical
)Black Boy, they know they've been there and they learn that there is a way
)out. They know Bigger is trapped unto the death, they know Black Boy gets
)out. It is the area between the two that each and every of our children
)must learn to negotiate, alone. Every rite of passage is achieved, in the
)end, in aloneness.
)
)I would like to suggest to the Duval County committee reviewing Black Boy
)that Richard Wright was in a very real sense an EDUCATOR. The best
)testimony I can give to illustrate this is to offer some memories of how I
)negotiated my own rite of passage from childhood to adulthood in my
)father's house. Having suffered so acutely from racially induced
)book-hunger in his childhood, Wright vowed his own children would live in
)the midst of intellectual plenty. He gave me a rhyming dictionary at the
)age of 8, even before I knew the meaning of the word 'rhyme'. He allowed
)us, his daughters, to free-range in our search for the book food which
)would make us grow. He left us to read whole meal. We made up our own
)intellectual diets on demand, rather than by strict, imposed schedule.
)
)I would wish to draw the reviewing committee's attention to the very
)"uncanniness" of the controversy currently surrounding Black Boy in Duval
)County, Florida. Don't you - who have read Black Boy - have that same
)feeling of uncanniness when you stop to think that a school teacher has
)been threatened with dismissal for assigning Black Boy to her students ?
)Don't you feel you've seen a ghost or, better still, two ghosts ? Olivia
)Zilahy's dismissal demanded by Reverend Dale Shaw has a precedent and that
)precedent is STRAIGHT OUT OF BLACK BOY. In Black Boy, the school teacher's
)name is not Olivia but Ella. The forbidden tale castigated as "the work of
)the devil" is not Black Boy but Blue Beard. Grandma Wilson's verbal
)violence against Richard's aesthetic curiosity and craving matches Reverend
)Shaw's. Her denial of Richard's book-hunger turned reading literature into
)a forbidden, exciting quest which would make him capable of stealing,
)capable of forgery to gain access to white-controlled libraries rather than
)forego coming to turns with Mencken, Dostoievsky and Flaubert - and trying
)to equal them. Intellectual prohibition works much as the other one.
)
)Do we want to turn the clocks back to the rural, near-feudal South of the
)early part of our century when black children were not supposed to sink
)their teeth into any type of food - real or intellectual ? Where Richard
)Wrights were not supposed to happen ?
)
)Freud has written that uncanniness is "something familiar that has been
)repressed or surmounted". Might it be that Reverend Shaw is upset by Black
)Boy not because he feels it is "obscene" but rather because he fears it is
)"uncanny". And what if Black Boy's uncanniness stems from its depiction of
)a South we have repressed or think we have surmounted but which has come
)back to haunt us ? The South of the Church burnings ? Uncanny. The
)reinstatement of the chain gangs ? Uncanny. 'Old Sparky' hailing back to
)the twenties when it was brand new and executions possibly less
)excruciating ? Uncanny. Granny Wilson burning the young Richard Wright's
)books in the stove - and today because of one lone complaint, Black Boy is
)on the point of going to a metaphorical electrical chair tuned to
)Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper burns ? Uncanny. And what
)about the State-endorsed use of obscenity and pornography in our America ?
)Black Boy banned as obscene ? But on execution nights, on many death rows
)throughout our land pornographic videos are shown to death row inmates -
)innocent or guilty - to take their minds off "it". Uncanny.
)
)Before Richard Wright was cremated, my mother placed a copy of Black Boy
)between his hands. How many times must Black Boy burn for the truth it
)contains to come home, South, to roost ?
)
)Julia Wright
)May 28th, Paris, France.
)
)+++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal
)+++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig
)+++ see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm
)
)-
)