Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard

Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography

The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where antediluvian pseudo-science had deemed them to be mere animals. Taken together, the narratives of former black slaves in the Antebellum South provide us with one of the largest bodies of literature written by former slaves in history.

Although these narratives remain but a perspective of slavery, it is important to note that their reception upon publication was divided and, prior to emancipation, extremely partisan. Without exception, former slaves had their accuracy and their intelligence called into question by a southern establishment that had vested social and economic interests in preserving slavery. On the other hand, they enjoyed among the firebrand press of the abolitionist movement a revered status as sentient casualties of an illiberal, anti-humanitarian system of exploitation. These narratives not only sold to polemically inclined readers in the Northeast but also in Europe, which had abandoned slavery in its colonies in 1830. As these stories often revolved around an escape, they served to infuriate the slave masters of Southern states even more.

These works, although they provide us a keen insight into the nature of the period, all but disappeared following emancipation and the end of the Civil War. As black liberty was thought to be a vindicated cause, the accounts of former slaves lost their general appeal and were party only to a cultural heritage attended to only by other freed black slaves. Many black writers of both fiction and non-fiction in the 20th century came to see these narratives as stylistically dated and sought to distance themselves from the narratives. However, this divorce was incomplete and many later works resonated with a uniquely African-American perspective that was characteristic of styles that were first established in the narratives. This style was in turn derived either from the white establishment of the day or from the earlier oral communication styles of tribal Africa. These styles, reflected in the myriad micro-dialects of blacks that still live on in remote corners of the American southeast, reflect many aspects of African tribal life, from the way that blacks convey meaning through music to the way that they see the world. It is to this tribal culture that we must first turn in order to discover the nature of black literature.

African Culture and its Influence on the Mind of the American Slave.

The culture of the regions of west Africa from where slaves were first gathered and traded to the Europeans was marked by the communication employed by the various tribes of the area. Because Africans lacked a written language, their approach to storytelling was both marked by the universality of the oral tradition and dominant animist cultures. Early slave narratives, often oral presentations dictated to European-Americans, embody the traditional metaphors used by tribes in Western Africa such as the Yoruba tribe described in "The Signifying Monkey" by Henry Louis Gates. The stories told in this tradition came to reflect the enslavement of the black people, as can be noted in the nature of creation stories that note the cultural differences between blacks and whites. However, written language registered in the consciousness of enslaved Africans soon after they arrived. Gates presents us with an example of this:

Olorun was the eldest of the deities, and the first child of the King of the Air (Oba Orufi). Some forty years afterward the King of the Air had a second son, Ela, who was the father of the diviners. In the morning all the Whitemen used to come to Ela to learn how to read and write, and in the evening his African children, the babalawo, gathered around him to memorize the Ifa verses and learn divination. Ifa taught them to write on their divining trays, which the Muslims copied as their wooden writing boards (wala), and the Christians copied as the slates used by school children and as books. (emphasis added) Olorun was the eldest of the deities, and the first child of the King of the Air (Oba Orufi). Some forty years afterward the King of the Air had a second son, Ela, who was the father of the diviners. In the morning all the Whitemen used to come to Ela to learn how to read and write, and in the evening his African children, the babalawo, gathered around him to memorize the Ifa verses and learn divination. Ifa taught them to write on their divining trays, which the Muslims copied as their wooden writing boards (wala), and the Christians copied as the slates used by school children and as books. (Gates, 13)

These creation myths reflect the effect on the self-identification of blacks of their enslavement by whites, whose literate culture intrigued the blacks who had gained stature in a tribe through the mastery of oral histories. Many of the memes cited by Saussure as being common to tribal cultures throughout the world are common in black literature. For instance, the image of the trickster-deity (Esu) as one that undermines main characters in stories for the sake of teaching them valuable lessons is a poignant feature in the African-American oral tradition, as it is in Navajo literature where it is represented by the Coyote.

On the other hand, traditional semiotic constraints found in traditional American narratives were avoided altogether in the richly allegorical Animist oral tradition of the earlier African-Americans. For instance, the static nature of the first voice found in American folklore is avoided in the tribal setting, where the speaker often takes on the tone and character of several different people or animals who come to signify a wide array of conceptual wisdom. The semiotic aspects of the spoken language developed in the 1960's by French structuralists, linguists, and semmioticians (signifier, signification, signified) are said by Gates to be nearly duplicated in the verbiage of the slave. Gates notes that signifying "here meaning, in the unwritten dictionary of American Negro usage, "rhetorical understatements." Gates goes on to note the modern connotations of words that are used as English-language alternatives to other words and believes these terms, considered by most to be mere slang, to be richly dressed in semiotic differentiation from what we would consider formal English. Gates excoriates what he considers English-language 'authorities,' claiming that:

By an act of will, some historically nameless community of remarkably self-conscious speakers of English defined their ontological status as one of profound difference vis-a-vis the rest of society. What's more, they undertook this act of self-definition, implicit in a (re)naming ritual, within the process of signification that the English language had inscribed for itself. Contrary to an assertion that Saussure makes in his Course, "the masses" did indeed "have [a] voice in the matter" and replaced the sign "chosen by language." (Gates, 91)

The linguistic stylings of the early black writers and narratives reflected a vernacular interpretation of the English language. This style was parodied by whites who, among other reasons, wished to detract from the merit of black writers by pointing out grammatical inaccuracies, which they thought to be unintentional and the result of feeblemindedness. Blacks responded by describing the nature of and reason for the use of an alternate method of speaking. It must be remembered that such paraodies were not the exclusive dominion of those wishing to insult the freed blacks. Mark Twain used many such dialects for all of his characters, both black and white, to give the reader a glance at the nature of society along the Mississippi river. In 1846, one Black became prominent because of his attempt to describe this uniquely African manner of speaking.

Me tend to dress my scorce to you dis nite on de all imported subject of Language, an de warious tongues ob differn nations and *****rs, libbin and dead, known and unknown: an in so doing me shant stan shilly shally bout preface to de subject, but run bang at him at once like mad bull at "dam haystack."

Gates, 92)

It is interesting to note that Black authors also parodied the English/American style and its grammatical usage. The rigid structure of white American speech continued to be seen as foreign to black slaves even after other aspects of black culture, such as animist religions, began to disappear and be replaced by the modes of religious worship that we have come to think of as archetypically African-American. Although the black firebrand preacher common to the early 20th century and later resembled his white Pentecostal counterpart, it is important to note that such preachers employed much of the rhetorical style we think of as being typical of tribal leaders in Africa. Before segregation was institutionalized in the south, it must be noted that a nascent black intellectual community came to be highly regarded by the North, especially in hotbeds of abolitionism such as Springfield, Massachusetts. Several blacks were even admitted to the Military Academy.

The white intellectual community came to see black literature as somewhat formulaic. The linguist Geneva Smitherman in Talkin and Testifyin. For Smitherman, Signifyin (g) is a black "mode of discourse" that is a synonym of "dropping lugs; joanin; capping; [and] sounding." She believed the slave narrative to be characterized by eight common features:

indirection, circumlocution metaphorical-imagistic (but images rooted in the everyday, real world) humorous, ironic rhythmic fluency and sound teachy but not preachy directed at person or persons usually present in the situational context punning, play on words introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected. (Gates, 94)

It is interesting to note that many of these characteristics are to be found in the Rhythm and Blues genre and that the indirect cadence of the black narrative-writer is to be found in jazz music. R&B is noted for its lyrical styling, its fluency, its puns and metaphors, and the introduction of new gimmicks. Gates notes that there are elements of this in Jazz as well: Another kind of formal parody suggests a given structure precisely by failing to coincide with it-that is, suggests it by dissemblance. Repetition of a form and then inversion of the same through a process of variation is central to jazz. One of the gimmicks that slave narratives (which often take the form of a detective story) use often is a ritual trade-off of expressions that play off one another. These will often repeat a word again and again and have some sort of sexual entendre.

III. Early Literature of the Former Slaves.

The existence of black literature was a threat to the establishment. As Gates puts it, At least since 1600, Europeans had wondered aloud whether or not the African "species of men," as they most commonly put it, could ever create formal literature, could ever master the arts and sciences. If they could, then, the argument ran, the African variety of humanity and the European variety were fundamentally related. If not, then it seemed clear that the African was destined by nature to be a slave. (Gardner, 129) Although the written word was a challenge to most black writers, who were kept from learning how to read by their masters in even the most favorable of circumstances, blacks were never again to find the kind of motivation involved in establishing a literary presence in order to gain there freedom.

Black slave narratives, if written and not dictated, were put to paper by thoughtful former slaves whose intent was to intersperse their own personal experiences with slavery with outright moral castigation. Whereas white literature took many forms and related to every aspect of American live enjoyed by literate people, black literature was primarily developed for a white market. As the ability of blacks to write literature remained a matter of question, this also made every work a political act.

The first slave narrative to be printed was Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man, published in 1760. However, the first widely available example of this genre was the biography of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, published in 1774. It is not known whether or not Gronniosaw wrote the narrative himself or dictated it, but it was very popular both in the United States and in the United Kingdom and was re-printed seven times by 1811. In his work, Gronniosaw clames to be a black Prince. It was not uncommon for blacks to go to Europe following their liberation from slavery; they were seen as exotic and were romanticized in the works of Rousseau and others as noble savages. According to Gates, He states that he was born "in the city of Bournou," which is the "chief city" of the Kingdom of Zaara...Gronniosaw, by representing himself as a prince, implicitly tied his narrative to the literary tradition of the "Noble Savage" and to its subgenre, the "Noble Negro."(Gardner, pg. 133)

By the late 18th century, Europe lacked the institutional slavery commonly found in the United States, but slavery persisted in the colonial dominions of countries such as France and Great Britain until the early 19th century, when they were eliminated. As such, slavery remained a focus of enlightenment philosophers both in continental Europe and in Great Britain, who opposed it and yet saw its abolition as an unrealistic objective that would result in further colonial secession. From a contemporary perspective, the popularity of Gronniosaw's story can be seen as one of Levi-Strauss's memes or as one of the common mythological themes of Joseph Campbell: that of a nobleman that has fallen, through no fault of his own, from a position of high station and who through perseverance and actions that are grounded in 'nobleness' is able to overcome adversity and regain his station. It is through the facility of this perspective that we are able to se how an enlightenment-inspired European readership could at once sympathize with one subjugated to the illiberal institution of slavery and at the same time accept the magnification of this transgression by the fact that the protagonist "deserves better" in accordance with the illiberal institution of nobility. This thematic style was unique to the author; in the case of Fredrick Douglass and others the author vindicates his humanity through sheer force of reason rather than by self-identifying as members of a noble elite. This is not to say, however, that Gronniosaw was not a man of sufficient intellectual merit or that he lacked enlightenment or liberal sympathies. By 60, he had mastered both Dutch and English and spoke passable French. He became something an expert on the tenants of the Calvinist faith, which he discussed at length with a number of Dutch Reformed theologians. (Gardner, pg. 134)

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano or John Stewart was a man from Ghana taken captive who later, at the age of 30 in 1787, was freed by his master in England and wrote a 147-page piece excoriating the institution of slavery. In this work, Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano reviews other written literature about slavery and presents his case for abolition. He reasons his intent to write the book by saying:

After coming to England, and seeing others write and read, I had a strong desire to learn, and getting what assistance I could, I applied myself to learn reading and writing, which soon became my recreation, pleasure, and delight; and when my master perceived that I could write some, he sent me to a proper school for that purpose to learn. Since, I have endeavoured to improve my mind in reading, and have sought to gel all the intelligence I could, in my situation in life, towards the state of my brethen and countrymen in complexion, and of the miserable situation of those who are barbarously sold into captivity, and unlawfully held in slavery. (Gardner, pg. 147)

Despite his hatred of slavery, he credits it with his introduction to Christianity, which reflects his belief in monotheism that was common to the tribes of the coast (incidentally, western African countries are to this day predominantly Christian in coastal areas with Islam and animist religions predominating further inland.) The association of Christianity with white Europeans was common to the early slave narrators, who were often born free in Africa as was the case with Cugoano and Gronniosaw. Cugoano was a careful student of the treatment of indigenous populations at the hands of European colonial expansionists and dogmatic missionaries. One incident that he criticizes is that where Pizarro first encounters Atahualpa, emperor of the Incas. Atahualpa was said to have taken the Bible from the explorers and attempt to listen to it with hopes of it saying something to his ear, something that Gronniosaw also tried to do when he first encountered the Bible. Apparently, the Bible did not fulfill its assumed function of whispering in the emperor's ear, whereupon he threw it on the ground and provoked the Spaniards to start slaughtering the Incas. In his criticism of Spanish treatment of the native populations of the Americas, Cugoano's reasoning resembled that of Montaigne, who sought to apologize for the natives' lack of a functional understanding of European customs and morality.

A contemporary and close friend of Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, published a book two years after Cugoana did: The Interesting Nature of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. This work exemplified the literary structure of the new genre and became a template for future novels written by former slaves, including the works of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. According to Gardner,

From his subtitle, "Written by Himself" and a signed engraving of the black author holding an open text (the Bible) in his lap, to more subtle rhetorical strategies such as the overlapping of the slave's arduous journey to freedom and his simultaneous journey from orality to literacy, Equiano's strategies of self-presentation and rhetorical representation heavily informed, if not determined, the shape of black narrative before 1865." (Gardner, pg. 151)

In many ways, Equiano's two-volume work is a bridge between 18th century British slave narratives and 19th century American ones. As was said, many of the literary devises used by Equiano were later employed by American slave authors. These included two rhetorical strategies: "the trope of chiasmus, and the use of two distinct voices to distinguish, through rhetorical strategies, the simple wonder with which the young Equiano approached the New World of his captors and a more eloquently articulated voice that he employs to describe the author's narrative present."

His narrative, which was published in eight editions between its initial publication and 1837, differs from its literary heirs in that the author reveals his transition from free man in Africa, to slave, to free man and in that the evolution of the author's perspective of white European society is markedly different from that of the American authors in that he sees the whites first as "spirits" and later merely as "superior men." Equiano notably says of his captors, "I was astonished at the wisdom of the white people in all things I saw." (Gardner, pg. 155) This can be sharply contrasted with Douglass's perspective of whites as being that of well-intentioned men and women who are corrupted by the institution of slavery. Equiano was an Igbo of Nigeria; this is the Nigerian ethnic group which would later come to dominate politics due to its early exposure to Europeans, trade, and commerce. Equiano, like his aforementioned contemporaries, sought to become a respected man of letters. His adventures included service under General Wolfe in the seven years war, several voyages to the arctic with a scientific expedition, a grand tour of the Mediterranean, and six months with an Indian tribe in Central America.

IV. 19th Century American Slave Narratives before 1865.

Perhaps the best known of all slave narrators is Frederick Douglass, who is so widely known that many believe him to be the only exemplar of the genre. At the age of twenty, Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 to New York and later Massachusetts, which was then considered the bastion of abolitionist sentiment. Douglass's autobiography, which both documented his personal experiences as a small child with the brutality of slavery and the institution's ability to corrupt his former masters, was one of the most controversial of his day. Douglass was as well respected as an orator as he was as a writer, and his style went on to inspire Civil Rights leaders of the twentieth century, including James Baldwin and Jesse Jackson. Douglass, who lacked the disdain for other blacks and reverence for white Americans exemplified by earlier slave narrators, never employed the most commonly used atavistic tactic commonly used by slave narrators; that of seeking acceptance from the white intellectual community by illustrating differences between himself and the common black man.

From 1841 through 1845, Douglass traveled through New England and as far away as Indiana and Ohio campaigning against the institution of slavery and vocalizing his support for local anti-slavery societies. He took a 'grass-roots' approach, speaking to audiences in public parks, town squares, churches, schoolhouses, abandoned buildings, and lecture halls. He traveled by foot, horseback, railroad, stagecoach, and steamboat, and became known throughout the country for his work to end slavery. Abolitionists everywhere were amazed by his sheer rhetorical brilliance. A correspondent for the abolitionist Salem Register who heard Douglass speak in November 1842 typified the publics response:

The most wonderful performance of the evening was the address of Frederick Douglass, himself a slave only four years ago! His remarks and his manner created the most indescribable sensations in the minds of those unaccustomed to hear freemen of his color speak in public, much more to regard a slave as capable of such an effort. He was a living, speaking, startling proof of the folly, absurdity and inconsistency...of slavery. Fluent, graceful, eloquent, shrewd, sarcastic, he was without making any allowances, a fine specimen of an orator. He seemed to move the audience at his will, and they at times would hang upon his lips with staring eyes and open mouths, as eager to catch every word, as any "sea of upturned faces" that ever rolled at the feet of Everett or Webster to revel in their classic eloquence. (Lampe, viii)

Douglass developed his oratory skills as a slave in Maryland, where he enjoyed a limited degree of freedom as a child where his masters, who had previously not owned a slave, treated him at times like a normal child for several years. During these years he developed an understanding of rhetoric, which was enhanced by his careful observation of the style of ministers in giving sermons. He was also exposed to secular storytellers and slave songs and spirituals, as rhetoric-related activities were more common in that day and age before the development of modern forms of children's entertainment. Much of his oratory ability can be attributed to Caleb Bingham's Columbian Orator, which enhanced his vocabulary and provided him with arguments to foil pro-slavery speakers. Like many later civil rights activists, Douglass gained valuable experience preaching to other blacks and teaching Sunday school. Although Douglass developed a faith in Christianity as was the case with many of his predecessors, he remained singularly committed to the cause of individual liberty. Much of the religious foundation for his rhetorical ability he developed immediately following his escape from slavery in New Bedford, Massachusetts between 1838 and 1841. There he joined New Bedford's A.M.E. Zion Church, where he advanced his public speaking skills as an exhorter, class leader, and became a licensed lay preacher. He preached to the New Bedford A.M.E. Zion congregation on a regular basis. And played a significant part in New Bedford's black abolitionist community.

William Wells Brown became the first African-American to write a novel in 1853. Clotel is a work of fiction whose heroine is the illegitimate black daughter of President Thomas Jefferson. It shares the distinction of being about one who could be considered a fallen person of nobility. The novel is a tragedy, where the heroine has a white lover which later abandons her, is sold into slavery, escapes, and kills herself as the slave-hunters are closing in on her. Although the novel was never as popular as Uncle Tom's Cabin (which at the time was the only book in print out-selling the Bible) it was still immensely popular and went through four editions over the course of ten years. Although in some ways Clotel resembles Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is differentiated in several key ways. Principally, it is about women of color and is the first work in American literature to concentrate almost exclusively on the lives of slave women. In addition to the protagonist, Brown focuses on the experiences of Currer (Jefferson's black lover) Althesa (the other daughter,) and Jefferson's three grand-daughters: Mary, Ellen, and Jane.

Clotel is not only notable for its treatment of racial themes, but also for its treatment of gender. According to Joan Cashin,

Brown's portrayal of the mutability of racial identity forms a marked contrast with his ideas about gender, especially the nature of women. His ideas on the malleability of race as a component of personal identity, on race as a decoy, have obvious roots in his biography. He could "pass" for white, although he chose not to do so when he was a free man. In his labor on the slave ship on the Mississippi River, he had to prepare aging bondsmen for sale and conceal their infirmities. As a free man he helped fugitives create disguises when they fled through Ohio. Naturally he was very much taken with the story of his friends William and Ellen Craft, who escaped bondage by posing as servant and master. Many of the people he encountered had several selves that they presented to the world at different times, putting on and taking off the masks of race as necessary. (Cashin, xi)

Richard Wright's Black Boy

In Black Boy, Richard Wright's fictionalized autobiography, many of the traditional slave narrative themes are presented in the context of the protagonist's boyhood in Mississippi and life following migration to Chicago. This book met with more controversy upon its initial release in 1945 than had any novel following the slave narrative format since the end of the Civil War, due to the inherent theme of violence in the novel and the protagonist's decision to join the Communist Party (which he later denounces for the limits it places on individual freedom.) In The Slave's Narrative, Charles Davis notes that this book exemplifies the post-emancipation slave narrative:

Thematically, Black Boy reenacts both the general, objective portrayal of the realities of slavery as an institution (transmuted to what Wright calls "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" in the little piece that lies behind Black Boy) and also the particular, individual complex of literacy-identity-freedom that we find at the thematic center of all of the most important slave narratives. (Davis, 168)

The novel is underscored with several main themes which are noted by Robert Felgar in "Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy"; in addition to violence and emotional abuse, the dominant ideas include defiance of authority, escapism and disillusionment, the power of the written word and logical arguments, race, and religion. As in Frederick Douglass's autobiography and other works, we find a sharp contrast between a precocious child's intuitive notion of reason and the bigotry of his society. Unlike Douglass's work, however, the protagonist is a rebel who engages in blatantly anti-social behavior such as killing a kitten and burning down his house. Events such as this shock the reader, to whom the 'black boy' is a singular embodiment of the elements of society that most deserve to be expunged; to an American living in 1945, a communist who kills kittens would seen as similar in social merit to someone today that would molest children and join Al Quaida. For someone of demonstrated literary merit, these revelations were infuriating to the reader but sensational enough to lend weight to their rationalization.

Wright portrays his alter-ego from the beginning as an experimenter who at once demands recognition of his individuality and unwillingness to accept the yoke of an illogical authority. This is first demonstrated as the book opens, when Wright intentionally sets fire to his house. In this he shows that he does not merely question authority, but is openly defiant. This theme is repeated throughout the novel, especially in the context of Wright's re-occurring conflict with his grandmother over matters of religion. Although all of the characters in the protagonist's immediate family have to deal with near-crippling adversity, we are presented with a contrast between his intuitive approach and his family's formulaic one. Wright debunks the idea that religion provides an appropriate template for social conduct; however, his actions lead us to believe that he doubts whether or not a comprehensive system for social conduct exists.

Although the young Wright alter-ego's defiance of authority is typical of a child, it develops into a more literate criticism of society as he develops the idea that violence is an inarticulate way of presenting an argument. Despite this, we see many accounts of how adults and other peers continue to use violence to intimidate an opponent even when that opponent's ideas are rationally bankrupt. Like other aspects of Wright's childhood, he portrays his defiance as a process of experimentation: even as a four-year-old, he is intrigued with the nature of authority and refuses its categorical acceptance. This is borne out when Wright deliberately mis-interprets a message from his father and kills a kitten. Because repeated beatings caused the alter-ego to believe that he couldn't challenge his father directly, Wright's character instead seeks to defy authority through passive-aggressive means. Further on, when Wright's alter-ego delivers the graduation speech at his junior high school, he refuses to comply with the mandates of the school's principal in reciting a white-friendly graduation speech. Instead, Wright recites his own speech. This reflects Wright's belief in the power of the written word. Wright later becomes enamored with the wit of classical liberal newspaper editor H.L. Mencken, whose apt criticisms of religion, society, and human nature reflect those of the then-radical left-wing alter-ego, who has become upset with the stifling top-down organization of the Communist Party and once again distances himself from a group of people that lack rationally defensible ideas.

Wright's early environment is one that seems beset by violence and strife. His mother, grandparents, Aunt Addie, and other relatives routinely beat him, threaten him and verbally abuse him. When he sets his house on fire, Wright is beaten until he passes out. This violence seems endemic in Wright's community: the Klu Klux Klan maintains a strong presence in Wright's town, who routinely punish examples of black entrepreneurship or defiance of the social order. A wealthy uncle of his, Uncle Hoskins, is murdered by these men for the sole crime of owning a popular and profitable saloon. Seldom do we see arguments won due to rationality; society in Wright's world is predicated on the baseless subjugation of the blacks by the whites. In a citation of the Jim Crow laws of Missippi provided by Felgar, anyone found guilty of inter-racial marriage is subject to life imprisonment. At the time, eugenics policies were gaining acceptance in ostensibly more progressive states such as Virginia and California: young black women were readily sterilized in accordance with these practices; usually without their consent. Where violence is not explicit, it is implicit: Wright conveys to us that during the time covered, KKK membership was at its peak and blacks that did not comply were routinely lynched. Wright consistently seeks to explode implied threats and regularly engages in physical combat with his relatives. We see the protagonist wielding knives and razor blades when his relatives seek to beat him.

Wright's alter-ego is also consistently materially needy because his relatives are too poor to obtain food. The last third of the original manuscript was considered too controversial to publish in 1945 and was only later published, in 1977, under the title American Hunger. His father, an illiterate share-cropper, runs out on his mother while he is still very young and his mother, a schoolteacher, is ill and unable to work for several years. Even when his mother recovers and gets a job as a cook for a white family, he is unable to gain anything other than table scraps, as the white family refuses him any food. This need dominates his thoughts, and at one point he even tries to sell his dog for money to buy food. He is often too weak to complete simple tasks.

Wright is deprived of any intellectual friends or social groups, driving him to start attending church merely in order to meet people. Wright also has an insatiable hunger for books and stories. These offer both an escape from Mississippi black poverty and an exercise for his mind. Unfortunately, church was not up to the task of providing intellectual stimulation. Although churchgoers were concerned with matters other than those that reflected the day-to-day, he soon came to realize that religious matters relied on dogma rather than debate. This caused him to associate all religion with the maintenance of poorly rationalized values and principles. The barriers to entry that Wright faced in obtaining the books that allowed him to grow intellectually were predicated on the racist values of his community, where most blacks only reached a ninth-grade level of education. Things like libraries were not accessible to blacks in Mississippi as they were thought to be intellectually inferior. In addition, the size of Wright's community precluded the existence of any kind of intellectual presence. In many respects, these are the same problems that faced any young atheist growing up in the rural south before the wide-scale adoption of internet and computer technology, but in another way they were unique in that societies that embodied different principles (usually thought of as the North) existed for Wright only in ideological abstraction.

The third major theme in Black Boy was that of religion. Wright's take on religion is novel in the context of the slave narrative; most, if not all of the slave narrators spent considerable time not only describing how they attained personal salvation, but how the church as an organizational structure provided them with a context in which to hone their rhetorical skills. Some of the early narratives of slaves that made the transition from freedom in Africa to slavery in the west and then again to freedom were noted as claiming that their tribulations were worth the agony of bondage because they were introduced to Christianity. Indeed, Christianity particularly resonated with the monotheistic blacks of the African coast. Although vestiges of the old animist religions came to exist in remote pockets in places like Haiti and Cat Island in the Bahamas, their presence was muted except in terms of a stylistic influence on the Christianity of the Southern blacks. Many non-believers, such as James Baldwin, came to reflect favorably on the effect that religion played in their lives as many of them based their ability to speak on the experience they gained in the pulpit. The ministry was seen by black orators as a place to gain experience much as aspiring politicians of the 19th century who wished to gain experience debating became lawyers. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin suggests that the pulpit was for him one of the only ways to avoid the streets, acknowledging the utility of religion without endorsing it as an ideology.

Wright, however, could not reconcile the authoritarianism of religion with logic and failed to compromise his integrity by playing the part of a devout Christian. Like Mencken, Wright contested that there are not more than one plane of existence, claiming that the existence of heaven and hell was a matter of fanciful speculation and that the threat of hell was just another way that the black man was being kept in line by argument through intimidation. After he killed the kitten, his mother instructed him to pray for the Lord's forgiveness so that he would not be handed the same fate. To Wright, even at that point a rational skeptic, the threat of hell found in the Bible was no more a plausible argument for God's existence than the threat of lynching was an argument in favor of the institution of slavery. He cites this as an example of how the Bible attempts to gain acceptance by threatening people. The ideas not directly associated with the religion that the church supports are ones he sees as merely ones that the community finds acceptable. This community, that of black protestants, he sees as one that is all too willing to accept the subordinate position that the white population deemed appropriate for it. Religious guilt was ascribed to different parties somewhat capriciously: his mother's ill health was blamed on his faithlessness. This concept; that of misfortune befalling a family because of one's transgressions, was common to Pentecostal fundamentalists in the South. In that others were said to quick to take what they considered miracles at face value, he was skeptical enough to doubt even these:. He felt the emotional appeal of religion, but, as he puts it, he had enough sense to see a doctor if he saw an angel. (Felgar, 98) Despite the brashness of his rejection of religion and contempt for anything irrational or illogical, we see a closeness between him and his grandmother. At one point she appeals to him by saying that if he loves her that he will repent and become a Christian. However, it is not in his nature to accept a social convention merely in order to garnish respect.

The fourth theme Felgar claims is central to Black Boy is Racism. As a boy, Wright calls into question the established concept of "whiteness" that governs social interaction and class barriers in early-20th century Mississippi. His grandmother, Wright posits, was just as light-skinned as any "white" woman, but she still manages to win the "black" moniker because of her African heritage. Wright sees the black man in his society as being one who has been denied his humanity, which he seeks to establish through writing; a common theme in slave narratives. He claims that the race bias was a convention that never enjoyed the benefit of substantiation. Again, this is a deviation from some of the earlier slave narratives, where the author distinguishes himself from the "other" blacks. Wright claims that blacks act inferior in order to pander to the social and emotional needs of white people, who harbor an emotional need for a non-merit-based method of distinguishing themselves as superior to blacks. A lot of what Wright notes about racism calls into question its flawed logic, building a strong case that any society that popularizes racism will eventually fail.

The fifth theme of the book is Wright's emergence first as a prolific reader, and then as a writer. As someone who was considerably superior in intellectual ability to the majority of his community and as someone always given to questioning its anti-meritocratic values, Wright is driven to the written word. As someone forbidden from entering libraries and the like because of the color of his skin, Wright is even more turned on by literature as it represents the forbidden fruit of the white majority. Wright's interest in literature is first piqued as a child when his mother reads him a book about Bluebeard the Pirate. He became aware of the power of words through the use of swear words, which he would write on windows to the consternation of his parents. Literacy assumed an almost talismanic significance for Wright, as the contrast is made between Wright's ability to rely on rationality and clarity of thought rather than dogma and the instigation of violence. We see Wright eventually use his literary capabilities in a way that thwarts the established norms of his community, although where other writers such as Douglass appeal to the consistency of social practice with Christian virtue, Douglass uses logic and verbal provocation to denounce a society where the blacks self-identify as inferior. This is bourn out in the speech he gives at his Junior High School graduation ceremony, where the principal has a vested interest in appeasing the white majority in the crowd. Although the principal wants him to give a pre-written speech that endorses the status quo for political reasons, Wright instead gives one that excoriates the white community for their institutional oppression.

It is for these reasons that Wright later joins the Communist party. It is interesting to note that the part of the novel dealing with Wright's membership in this organization was censored from the 1945 release as the United States government, following the death of Roosevelt, discovered the extent to which Communists had infiltrated various organizations within the United States. Although a comprehensive system of extricating communist influences from American society was not to be developed until the fall of the nationalist Chinese Government to Maoist extremists in 1949 and the development of the first Soviet nuclear weapon with the help of U.S.-based Soviet espionage, the opinion held by the federal government of communists was still one of justified fear and opprobrium.

Wright's communism, described in American Hunger, was initially inspired by the party's ostensible endorsement of racial equality. At the time, the party sought to adopt the coalition-approach to criticizing the classical liberal establishment that was successfully implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the same time, communists wished to infiltrate the civil service professions. Roosevelt had instigated the largest shift to the left and to federal control of industry in United States history, which included a withholding tax with top tax rates of over 96%, and the near-universal confiscation of privately owned gold which was required the first-ever issued executive order: the suspension of the United States Constitution under the War Powers Act. These actions were suggested to Roosevelt by a "Brain Trust" of intelligentsia, whose influence lasted through the late 1940's as Alger Hiss, a communist subversive, was one of the main architects of the United Nations. The party would operate through the agency of hundreds of smaller grass-roots movements, who were thought by the general public to operate independently but were in fact coordinated by the national organization. (Members of these organizations were later banned from a wide array of professions including teaching and civil service; one of the reasons for Wright's exile in France was the crack-down on communists in the media.) These groups would take the form of organizations that engaged in a wide array of seemingly non-political civic activities, focusing on anything from city beautification to writing newspapers for the low-ranking employees of major industrial concerns and neighborhood associations. It is in this last role that Wright found himself.

In the 1920's and 1930's, one of the most popular professions among Communist Party members was that of the Book Reviewer, as it was believed by Communist subversives that by influencing the reading habits of the literate middle class that they could either gain approval for Communist social changes, weaken the vigilance of the population that was inspired by anti-Communist writers and thinkers (such as Garet Garett, Friedrich A. Hayek, and H.L. Mencken, who Wright later comes to admire for his perspectives on society and religion.) Although the influence of communists on the review of literature was later to result in a rift between public tastes and those of reviewers and inspire Congress to expunge Communist influences in the media in the early 1950's, the predominance of these early Communists lead to the development of critical theory, which was later to spawn Black Critical Theory. Wright may be seen as a writer that is juxtaposed between the slave narrators that were born under slavery and the black critical theorists and social critics of the 1960's, exemplified by James Baldwin, who lived in self-exile in France at the same time as Wright and was inspired to author his first book by Wright's works. Wright's work is an apt description of the rift between the socialist/communist left and black leaders; the socialists and communists were always quick to co-opt the desire of black leaders for a comprehensive re-assessment of American values.

James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Although The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, published in 1912, was later to establish James Weldon Johnson as one of the leading slave narrators, he decided to make this work completely anonymous. None of the fictionalized characters in the book have names, an interesting gambit which reflects the author's lack of certainty in his identity. The 1912 reader was also left without a hint of whether the book was truth or fiction. Such literary techniques were uncommon in turn-of-the-century American literature although similar approaches to biographies had been tried in fictionalized biographies. One of the earliest examples is that of Don Quixote, who's tale is relayed by a non-existent Arab biographer. As a presumed white, Johnson enjoyed a level of distinction that would be unavailable to him if it was known that he was of partial African ancestry. One might guess that this would have also affected the socialization of his children and even possibly their ability to attend prestigious schools.

In this novel, the protagonist engages in a process called "passing," whereby a light-skinned black man decides to live as a white man. Although several things seemed to vindicate the author's young life (such as his gift for playing the piano) one gets the impression that Johnson's way of becoming a human being (the most common theme in slave narratives) was not to master literature, but to merely become a white man. In An American Dilemma, sociologist Gunnar Myrdal defines this process: "For all practical purposes 'passing' means that a Negro becomes a white man, that is, moves from the lower to the higher caste. In the American caste order, this can be accomplished only by the deception of the white people with whom the passer comes to associate and by a conspiracy of silence on the part of other Negroes who might know about it" (683). Johnson makes clear that he can introduce the reader to the inner-world of black America and that although he is living as a presumably 'white' man, that he will never understand this world as he does that of the blacks as an insider; in the white world, he is an admitted imposter even though his wife is white and the professional circles that he travels in are all white.

In the 1920's, Carl Van Vechten, wrote in the preface to the second edition that "The work was hailed on every side, for the most part, as an individual's true story." The book was only to draw the attention of the reading public after the author was known in the 1920's. Vechten, a patron of African-American writers, was well respected in the black community and the re-release of the book during the Harlem Renaissance was incredibly timely. Vechten's introduction pinpointed the work's appeal:

The Autobiography, of course, in the matter of specific incident, has little enough to do with Mr. Johnson's own life, but it is imbued with his own personality and feeling, his views of the subjects discussed, so that to a person who has no previous knowledge of the author's own history, it reads like real autobiography. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that it reads like a composite autobiography of the Negro race in the United States in modern times."

The false autobiography is convincing enough that the reader not familiar with the author's personal history believes it to be true. Like the blackness of the author, the veracity of his tale is something subjective. Subjectivity is one of the main themes presented in the novel. This subjectivity is discussed in Elaine Ginsburg's work "Passing and the Fictions of Identity": This passing plays not on shifting identities but on shifting perceptions, what the world takes the narrative, or the protagonist, to be. In effect, the passing narrative in The Autobiography is itself the subject of another passing narrative, this one to do with literary genre, fiction, and fact. Interestingly, the author later published a truthful autobiography, Along the Way, allowiing the reader to revise his perspective of the author accordingly. This allows the reader to re-assess the novel, reconciling the real life of Johnson with the fiction. The release of this biography was prompted by the curiosity surrounding the novel. A contemporary critic, Joseph Skerrett Jr. remarked that "while some of the events related there were used in the novel, the personality and much of the life experience of the young James Weldon Johnson have little or no critic Joseph Skerrett Jr. remarks, that "while some of the events related there were used in the novel, the personality and much of the life experience of the young James Weldon Johnson have little or no resemblance to the narrator's."

However, much of the real and fictionalized autobiographies co-insides precisely, and phrases that are simply re-worded from the prior source are common to the second book. One can assume that the primary motivation for the issuance of the second book was merely because there was a market for it. Because the reasons for the fictionalization of the novel were mostly social, it should not surprise the reader that the second work, which the author was compelled to write by the reading public, would be extremely similar; Johnson hadn't any reason to dissemble information about his past other than that an open autobiography would scandalize him. However, certain small differences do exist that set the novel aside as a truly fictional account.