Richard Wright’s Black Boy is one of the finest books written by an American. It’s the story of his early years in the Jim Crow South.
It has many wonders. One of the great moments, for me, is a story about a public library.
At 19, Wright was living in a rooming house on Beale Street in Memphis. He started by washing dishes and then found a job making deliveries for an optical company, starting at $8 a week. He paid $2.50 a week for the room and saved every dime, planning to escape, with his mother and brother, to Chicago.
One day, Wright saw an editorial in The Commercial Appeal castigating H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury and a critic of the South.
All his life Wright had heard white people express hatred for Black people. He wondered what a white man could have written to prompt that kind of hatred.
On his errands, Wright passed the public library and sometimes picked up books for white workers at the optical company. The library, in 1927, was off limits to Black people.
Some of the men in the shop were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Others were sympathizers. Wright approached one of the workers, a man named Falk, an Irish Catholic who was himself hated by the Klansmen. Wright asked Falk if he could use his library card.
Wright forged a note from Falk — using a racial slur so the librarian wouldn’t suspect him — and was given two books: Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces and Prejudices.
Wright said: “That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read.”
Mencken opened the door to other writers — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Flaubert — and Wright kept reading. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was his first serious novel.
This was my first serious book.
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