Life Writing and Space by Eveline Kilian Hope Wolf

Author:Eveline Kilian,Hope Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317105213
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The title of the second part of Black Boy (American Hunger) illustrates this ambivalence between initial hopes and actual experiences: ‘The Horror and the Glory’.

As an African American having grown up in the South, Wright is highly influenced by the places and living conditions of this environment. The narrated spaces in the text and his figurative language reflect their influence and illustrate the nexus between space, mobility and crisis in this autobiographical text. In the South, Wright is in a constant state of liminality between different homes, schools and jobs. Until he is about 15 years old, he never remains in one school for longer than a year. Living in the house of his devout grandmother and aunt, he is even forbidden to read books and write. In his jobs as a paper boy, as a help in the house of a white family and in an optician’s shop, he experiences the living conditions of an African American in early twentieth century segregated America. He can, for example, only use a library under the pretence of borrowing books for his white boss at the optician’s shop. As an African American, some spaces are simply closed to him.

When he is finally able to move out of his grandmother’s house and away from her influence over him, he feels free: ‘No longer set apart for being sinful, I felt that I could breathe again, live again, that I had been released from a prison’ (122). The text’s dominant spatial metaphor, however, is the ‘American Hunger’ of his original title. Among many other things, through American Hunger Wright wishes to understand the ‘meaning of [his] environment’ (301). Writing his memoir and thus remembering the many places and spaces of his upbringing serve Wright as a means for achieving a sense of place and thus a sense of his identity. After having arrived in Chicago, he realises what being a ‘Black Boy’ means:

A dim notion of what life meant to a Negro in America was coming to consciousness within me, not in terms of external events, lynchings, Jim Crowism, and the endless brutalities, but in terms of crossed-up feelings, of psyche pain. I sensed that Negro life was a sprawling land of unconscious suffering, and there were but few Negroes who knew the meaning of their lives, who could tell their story. (267)

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