Republic of Detours by Scott Borchert

Author:Scott Borchert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Reading was the one thing that consistently brought Wright joy. As a child he would pick up the schoolbooks that other kids left on the sidewalk and peer at the confounding symbols. Soon his mother was helping him read the newspaper. When he lived with his grandmother, he spied a boarder reading novels, and she told him the story of Bluebeard, the serial wife-murderer. Wright later called it “the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response.” Eventually, he eased his way into all manner of pulp writing, westerns and detective stories, Zane Gray, Horatio Alger. (His grandmother burned the magazines when she found them and taught Wright a lesson: that fiction was inherently transgressive, a rebellious instrument.) Around the time he was sixteen, he wrote a story called “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre” and carried it over to a small, local Black newspaper; the editor published it in installments, much to the surprise of Wright’s friends and the consternation of his family, who were shocked, beginning with the title. By the time of the library episode, he had discovered H. L. Mencken and was reading The American Mercury and other magazines like it; in fact, the note he passed to the librarian asked for two books by Mencken: Prejudices (a title that gave him pause, thinking of racial hate) and A Book of Prefaces (a title he couldn’t fully pronounce). Wright devoured them, but not merely as an escapist indulgence. Instead, the essay implies—and proves—that Wright had found, in the accumulating influence of dime novels and Mencken, Dreiser and Russian literature, a means of combating the system that oppressed him.

Wright’s essay was harrowing enough, even without mentioning two incidents that affected him deeply and permanently. When he was eight, his uncle Silas Hoskins, a successful saloonkeeper, was murdered by jealous whites. Someone brought the news in the middle of the night; Wright’s family gathered their things and left town. His aunt Maggie couldn’t even claim the body. His uncle’s murder stripped the world bare and revealed what lurked beneath its mundane surface. Wright later called it “my first baptism of racial emotion.” A less violent but equally significant revelation came when Wright graduated from middle school. He was the class valedictorian. When the principal tried to give Wright a prewritten speech—knowing that visiting whites would be in the audience—Wright balked. He refused to replace his speech or alter it. In the principal’s behavior, and in the reactions of his family and many other students, he saw the face of Jim Crow, and the deference and bargaining it demanded. He was hurt and shocked. He gave his own speech and walked out of the ceremony. He took a stand but, in a sense, it didn’t matter. Most of the other students went on to the new Black high school but Wright dropped out because he needed to work. That ended the only period of formal study he would know.

The essay says nothing, either, about

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