Comment : Out of ‘Blind Anger, Insight’

Thank you for being so alive and sensitive to my father’s book that, almost 60 years after it was written, you are heatedly and passionately able to debate its perceived message. Your ability to throw yourselves into the controversy with such gut feelings says as much about the staying power of “Black Boy” as about the state of the society to which this story of childhood and youth has been transmitted through the years.

What strikes me--as the author’s daughter but also as a parent and former teacher--is that some of us should choose to be morally horrified and sanctimoniously censorious of the desperate, isolated, bravado killing of a kitten by a hungry, illiterate “black boy” in the rural South early in our century. It strikes me that these attitudes exist today, when minorities are still trying to survive in underprivileged communities, where the temptation to own a gun, to deal and consume crack, to belong to an armed “gang” has solicited our youngest children.

There is one significant difference between today’s apparently senseless boomeranging of our children’s murderous violence against themselves and my father’s deliberate autobiographical rendering of his own childish animal slaying: Today’s violence goes largely unexplained and unredeemed, whereas Richard Wright lucidly used the kitten episode to communicate his childhood despair, his unrelieved physical hunger, his rebellion against a drunken father who could communicate better through the violence of beatings than through words.

The very act of writing honestly about the acting out of one’s own murderous impulse toward a creature perceived as weaker than oneself replaces bravado with bravery, senselessness with a search for meaning, blind anger with insight. It is less the act than the account of the act that commands our fascination: The child-who-has-become-the-writer offers up this chilling and brutally realistic autobiographical episode as a symbol of the attitude adopted by oppressed youth toward those they perceive as more vulnerable than themselves.

Children can identify with the kitten’s weakness but try to hold that feeling at bay; hence their ambivalence toward a hapless, inarticulate act in which there lies an appeal to be rescued from helplessness and hopelessness. It was one thing to have killed a kitten once upon a time, and another thing to write maturely and acutely about one’s own self-perception of this childish act. The kitten is a dark disturbing mirror held up to the child’s own weakness, dependence, hunger, disobedience and inarticulateness--all negative values that prevent survival in the racial jungle. “Cats can’t talk,” Wright wryly comments in his book “Native Son.” If, unlike the kitten, the child had been able to find the words to say his rage he might not have killed. Instead, he would have cried out: “Daddy, I want to do to the kitten what you are doing to me. And what you are doing to me is being done to you by cruel giants out there.” The writer that child grew up to be was finally able to say these things.

Richard Wright confesses against the grain. He writes with the sincerity of rebellion about the misery of a mutilated childhood--choked like the kitten. He wanted the world to know that as a barefooted kid in the racial maze of the Deep South, he was an alcoholic even before he knew what the word meant because his mother worked in white folks’ kitchens and he was left to roam a violent, segregated world without a meaningful compass.

An infant learns how to walk and talk--it is his birthright. But learning the oppressor’s language with one’s mother’s milk is a double-bind in itself. The child who was to grow up to be Richard Wright began very early to appropriate the forbidden, hidden meanings of language and the taboo immensity of space. In the first pages of “Black Boy,” we see little Richard lifting the veils of hypocrisy from adult words.

In the same spirit of healthy exploration of an unhealthy environment, the child sets fire to the curtains that are placed between him and the world beyond his segregated cage: He needs to test the arbitrary bars of that cage and his growing, normal intellectual curiosity is abnormally inflamed by surrounding racial taboos, illiteracy and bigotry. Perhaps it was in the very killing of a kitten he was initially moved to protect and feed that the writer was born in the child. For the first time, the son was able to throw the ugly reality behind his father’s brutal words in the face of his law-giver, in the face of the man who had ordered: “Kill that damn thing.”

Today our children are no longer killing kittens, they are being given access to guns to kill themselves. I believe that the more educational space our children can be given to ponder and discuss the messages of writers who were able to X-ray their own violence, the less these children will act out their rage in kitten-like mindlessness.