Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet C
Here are three excerpts from a book I recently read, "Black Boy" by Richard Wright:
Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella’s whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway. I realized that they could not understand what I was feeling and I kept quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella’s room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land.
My mother pulled Aunt Maggie back to the house. Fear drowned out
grief and that night we packed clothes and dishes and loaded them into a
farmer’s wagon. Before dawn we were rolling away, fleeing for our lives. I
learned afterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who had long
coveted his flourishing liquor business. He had been threatened with death and
warned many times to leave, but he had wanted to hold on a while longer to
amass more money. We got rooms in West Helena, and Aunt Maggie and my mother
kept huddled in the house all day and night, afraid to be seen on the streets.
Finally Aunt Maggie defied her fear and made frequent trips back to Elaine, but
she went in secret and at night and would tell no one save my mother when she
was going.
There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of
mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping,
whispers, and fear. I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins was buried. Aunt
Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she able to claim any of
his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we,
figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face
of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white
terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I
asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.
If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in
all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious
workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no
longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the
real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth
through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence,
for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the
system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not
dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they
may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to
translate itself into a new and strange way of life.
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