Read Online Black Boy by Richard Wright - Free Book Online Page A

the excitement of fishing in muddy country creeks with my grandpa on cloudy days.
    There was the fear and awe I felt when Grandpa took me to a sawmill to watch the giant whirring steel blades whine and scream as they bit into wet green logs.
    There was the puckery taste that almost made me cry when I ate my first half-ripe persimmon.
    There was the greedy joy in the tangy taste of wild hickory nuts.
    There was the dry hot summer morning when I scratched my bare arms on briers while picking blackberries and came home with my fingers and lips stained black with sweet berry juice.
    There was the relish of eating my first fried fish sandwich, nibbling at it slowly and hoping that I would never eat it up.
    There was the all-night ache in my stomach after I had climbed a neighbor’s tree and eaten stolen, unripe peaches.
    There was the morning when I thought I would fall dead from fear after I had stepped with my bare feet upon a bright little green garden snake.
    And there were the long, slow, drowsy days and nights of drizzling rain…
     
    At last we were at the railroad station with our bags, waiting for the train that would take us to Arkansas; and for the first time I noticed that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a “white” line and a “black” line. During my visit at Granny’s a sense of the two races had been born in me with a sharp concreteness that would never die until I died. When I boarded the train I was aware that we Negroes were in one part of the train and that the whites were in another. Naïvely I wanted to go and see how the whites looked while sitting in their part of the train.
    “Can I go and peep at the white folks?” I asked my mother.
    “You keep quiet,” she said.
    “But that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?”
    “Will you keep still?”
    “But why can’t I?”
    “Quit talking foolishness!”
    I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it. I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched, it seemed, except in violence. Now, there was my grandmother…Was she white? Just how white was she? What did the whites think of her whiteness?
    “Mama, is Granny white?” I asked as the train rolled through the darkness.
    “If you’ve got eyes, you can see what color she is,” my mother said.
    “I mean, do the white folks think she’s white?”
    “Why don’t you ask the white folks that?” she countered.
    “But you know,” I insisted.
    “Why should I know?” she asked. “I’m not white.”
    “Granny looks white,” I said, hoping to establish one fact, at least. “Then why is she living with us colored folks?”
    “Don’t you want Granny to live with us?” she asked, blunting my question.
    “Yes.”
    “Then why are you asking?”
    “I want to know .”
    “Doesn’t Granny live with us?”
    “Yes.”
    “Isn’t that enough?”
    “But does she want to live with us?”
    “Why didn’t you ask Granny that?” my mother evaded me again in a taunting voice.
    “Did Granny become colored when she married Grandpa?”
    “Will you stop asking silly questions!”
    “But did she?”
    “Granny didn’t become colored,” my mother said angrily. “She was born the color she is now.”
    Again I was being shut out of the secret, the thing, the reality I felt somewhere beneath all the words and silences.
    “Why didn’t Granny marry a white man?” I asked.
    “Because she didn’t want to,” my mother said peevishly.
    “Why don’t you want to talk to me?” I asked.
    She slapped me and I cried. Later, grudgingly, she told me that Granny came of Irish, Scotch, and French stock in which Negro blood had somewhere and somehow been infused. She explained it all in a matter-of-fact, offhand, neutral way; her emotions were not involved at all.
    “What was Granny’s name before she married Grandpa?”
    “Bolden.”
    “Who gave her that