Richard Wright's Power of Observation and Recording Vivid Details of Setting in Black Boy

Richard Wright's biography Black Boy is a vivid example of his use of naturalistic fiction in representing the real world with all its harshness, violence, treachery, deprivation in the rapacious cities of slums, squalor, prostitution, dispossession and un-employment whilst at the same time creating the balancing picture from the promise of the natural environment.Wright is always particular at bringing to reality in the reader's mind the landscape as well as other cultural background. Witness his detailed and graphic descriptions of the various households that Richard lived in and their surrounding salutary or insalubrious environment.o We witness Wright's particularly evocative use of language in the opening paragraphs of the book. He first of all carefully sets up the time, the weather and the freshness of his memory. He first of all establishes that it was on a winter morning. Though it happened a long time before his narration and when he was only four years of age, he w
as still very keen for details and as such very observant. He could for instance remember such mundane details as his finding himself standing before a fireplace warming his hands over a mound of glowing coals. Adding much to the vivacity of his description was the succinctly effective way in which he exploits the beauty and special feel of nature as he recalls listening then to the wind whistling past the house outside. These were his relief from the stifling air of parental over-control and an air of oppressiveness stifling his quest for freedom and self expression. The oppressive and stifling air he wants to be free from includes his mother's scolding him, her telling him to keep still and warning him not to make noise. Richard thus becomes: angry, fretful and impatient.o But then his urge for freedom of expression and movement is also curbed by the atmosphere in the house where his granny lay all day and night in the next room under doctor's care. But then Richard forced
to bottle up his excess energy and his urge for freedom walked restlessly to the window and pushed back the long fluffy white curtains which he had been forbidden to touch and looked yearningly out into the empty street dreaming of running, playing and shouting. But the vivid image of his granny's white, wrinkled, grim face framed by a halo of tumbling black hair lying upon a huge feather pillow made him become afraid, though he didn't say of what.o In Memphis Richard revealed that they lived in a one-story brick tenement. The stone buildings and the concrete pavements looked bleak and hostile to him. The city, according to Richard, seemed dead and bleak principally because of the absence of the luxuriance of green growing things. The house was congested with four of them cramming into a kitchen and a bedroom.o The next house that was to provide habitation for Richard was the home where he had been admitted because of his mother's illness. He is more particularly detailed a
bout the orphanage's surroundings and the atmosphere of distrust and deceit characterizing life there. The most we are told of the structure itself is that like the many other structures mentioned in the book, it is a frame building, though it is a two storey structure. It is also set amid trees in a wide green field. The house itself is said to be always full of children as well as a storm of noise almost suggestive of its being peopled by an especially rowdy and unruly set of children. Daily routine there, he said was blurred, a further suggestion of chaos and confusion which was complemented by an abiding feeling of perpetual hunger and fear. The children there bear towards each other a silent hostility and vindictiveness, as they continuously complain of hunger as they suffer deprivation of food and dwell in a general atmosphere of nervousness, intrigues and betrayals as one keeps lying on the other. But then the unchecked growth of wide stretches of grass in the compoun
d could only be controlled by the authorities harnessing their energies as they would be led to pull them by handso Another two storey frame house is the home of Richard's granny in Jackson which Richard described as an enchanting place to explore. It had seven rooms. He and his brother used to play hide and seek in the long narrow hallways as well as on and under the stairs. Its white plastered walls, its front and back porches, its round columns and banisters made him feel no house in the world would compare to that one in splendor. Richard and his brother thus enjoyed roaming, playing and shouting in such huge space and in wide green fields.o In Elaine, Arkansas, Richard's aunt, Aunt Maggie, lived in a bungalow with a fence enclosing it. There in the house Richard was open to much food for the first time in his life. The sheltered look of the house gladdened his heart that at last he was living in something that looked like home. A wide dusty road ran past the house, on e
ach side of which grew green wild flowers. Being summer, the smell of clay dust was everywhere. The place was so inviting that Richard would get up early every morning just to wade with his 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 Richard soon discovered that by slapping his two palms together smartly he could hit a box.o Next Richard revealed that they rented one half of a double corner house in front of which ran a stagnant ditch carrying sewage. Its neighborhood swarmed with rats, cats, dogs, fortune-tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen and collectors and children. A huge roundhouse where locomotives were cleaned and repaired lay in front of their flat. Bareheaded and barefooted, Richard and other black children used to stand and watch the men crawl in, out, over, and under the huge black metal engines.o Richar
d was now living in a double frame house of one storey. The building had originally been a one duty unit and had been converted into two flats, with doors in the flat leading into the adjoining flat. These doors had been locked, bolted and nailed securely.o Richard arrived in Memphis in a cold November Sunday morning in 1925 and lugged his suitcase down in a quiet empty sidewalk through winter sunshine. He found Beale street the street that he had been told was filled with danger, pickpockets, prostitutes, cut-throats and black confidence men. After walking several blocks, he saw a big frame house with a sign ROOMS in the window. He slowed down wondering whether it was a rooming house or a whorehouse. Having heard of the foolish blunders small town boys made when they went to big cities he wanted to be cautious.

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