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Rating: Richard has a long way to go. He is four years old and sets the house on fire. Not a bad start for a life that will be full of uncertainty, fear, pain, and consequent hope.
Richard Wright is a Black boy fully intent on surviving the white jungle of Southern United States society. Dick is committed to navigating and surviving, and he incidentally grows up. Autobiography, picaresque novel, coming-of-age novel: all of these combined, even if Richard's growth is not the focus, more important than moral and spiritual growth is the development of adaptability, because page by page, year by year, the subject that will increasingly take precedence in the book and in the author's life is that of racism in its legal and therefore even more hateful form of segregationism.
What emerges is the psychological aspect of segregation, the acceptance by Black people of their alleged inferiority. And, very rarely, rebellion. A rebellion mostly mental, precisely psychological, just as psychological as well as physical is the violence perpetrated by whites. With an almost elementary style, the author shares with us the first phase of his life, before emigrating to the Promised Land, the land of true opportunities and equality: the North, Chicago, Illinois. Whether or not it is like that doesn't matter, because in the mind of a Black boy from near Natchez, Mississippi, the North is more than a physical place; it is a mental condition, an idealized frontier of hope. And indeed, the few whites who have a positive attitude towards Richard are all Yankees, men from the North, sharpening in the boy the idea of this land of opportunities, where he can lick his wounds in peace and start anew.
"Black Boy" is a very simple book, it is Richard Wright's autobiography, the autobiography of an African American like many others, of an ordinary life. There is not necessarily a need for big words when there are big issues.
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