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

name?”
    “The white man who owned her.”
    “She was a slave?”
    “Yes.”
    “And Bolden was the name of Granny’s father?”
    “Granny doesn’t know who her father was.”
    “So they just gave her any name?”
    “They gave her a name; that’s all I know.”
    “Couldn’t Granny find out who her father was?”
    “For what, silly?”
    “So she could know.”
    “Know for what?”
    “Just to know.”
    “But for what ?”
    I could not say. I could not get anywhere.
    “Mama, where did Father get his name?”
    “From his father.”
    “And where did the father of my father get his name?”
    “Like Granny got hers. From a white man.”
    “Do they know who he is?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Why don’t they find out?”
    “For what?” my mother demanded harshly.
    And I could think of no rational or practical reason why my father should try to find out who his father’s father was.
    “What has Papa got in him?” I asked.
    “Some white and some red and some black,” she said.
    “Indian, white, and Negro?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then what am I?”
    “They’ll call you a colored man when you grow up,” she said. Then she turned to me and smiled mockingly and asked: “Do you mind, Mr. Wright?”
    I was angry and I did not answer. I did not object to being called colored, but I knew that there was something my mother was holding back. She was not concealing facts, but feelings, attitudes, convictions which she did not want me to know; and she became angry when I prodded her. All right, I would find out someday. Just wait. All right, I was colored. It was fine. I did not know enough to be afraid or to anticipate in a concrete manner. True, I had heard that colored people were killed and beaten, but so far it all had seemed remote. There was, of course, a vague uneasiness about it all, but I would be able to handle that when I came to it. It would be simple. If anybody tried to kill me, then I would kill them first.
    When we arrived in Elaine I saw that Aunt Maggie lived in a bungalow that had a fence around it. It looked like home and I was glad. I had no suspicion that I was to live here for but a short time and that the manner of my leaving would be my first baptism of racial emotion.
    A wide dusty road ran past the house and on each side of the road wild flowers grew. It was summer and the smell of clay dust was everywhere, day and night. I would get up early every morning to wade with my bare feet through the dust of the road, reveling in the strange mixture of the cold dew-wet crust on top of the road and the warm, sun-baked dust beneath.
    After sunrise the bees would come out and I discovered that by slapping my two palms together smartly I could kill a bee. My mother warned me to stop, telling me that bees made honey, that it was not good to kill things that made food, that I would eventually be stung. But I felt confident of outwitting any bee. One morning I slapped an enormous bee between my hands just as it had lit upon a flower and it stung me in the tender center of my left palm. I ran home screaming.
    “Good enough for you,” my mother commented dryly.
    I never crushed any more bees.
    Aunt Maggie’s husband, Uncle Hoskins, owned a saloon that catered to the hundreds of Negroes who worked in the surrounding sawmills. Remembering the saloon of my Memphis days, I begged Uncle Hoskins to take me to see it and he promised; but my mother said no; she was afraid that I would grow up to be a drunkard if I went inside of a saloon again while still a child. Well, if I could not see the saloon, at least I could eat. And at mealtime Aunt Maggie’s table was so loaded with food that I could scarcely believe it was real. It took me some time to get used to the idea of there being enough to eat; I felt that if I ate enough there would not be anything left for another time. When I first sat down at Aunt Maggie’s table, I could not eat until I had asked:
    “Can I eat all I want?”
    “Eat as much as you