Title: Black Boy
Author: Richard Wright
Published by: Longman
Publication year: 1970

It would have been so good if Anne Moody waited for Richard before she got her book published two years before Richard published this title of his. Well, just a joke by the way. But then, I’ve only come to notice the close similarities between Richard’s Black Boy and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi.

The Black boy sets in the black populated city of Mississippi where killing and lynching was just the order of the day. The beautiful thing about this autobiographical account of Richard Wright’s life is the fact that, it holds close similarities with Anne Moody’s ‘Coming of age in Mississippi’. It is so much of an American story with imagery mostly related to America, (partly Africa, where the theme of suffering might just be concerned) Americans and might be so hard for one outside the United States to come to its full understanding.

In treating this book, lots of comparisons will be done relating Black boy by Richard Wright with Coming of age in Mississippi by Anne Moody. The initial chapters of this book preface on a ground of horror, pain, future uncertainty and feelings of sufferings where a black boy was made to know hardship at a time when he could hardly differentiate from his right to his left. The turns and consistent emotional torture meted on the black folks wherein he lives alongside abuse by the white bosses sets in young Richard a sense of coercion (even on real-life events and his thought) showing superiority to whites only, while the blacks remain at their (whites) mercy. The seed of coercion planted in Richard by several racial prejudicial happenings in his environment also becomes part of Richard. I ever wonder in the course of this autobiographical account, how a young teenage boy can put up courage and attempt stabbing or threatening an adult with knives.

Oppression and hostility on the black minority seem to be the order of the day hereby leading little Richard to learn to curse before he could read. Just as Anne Moody also had her own account, one can quite agree that severe hardship alongside ill-treatment was predominantly constant amongst the black folks in the early American days so much that the whites were treated with much reverence, while words from the black folks were meticulously selected when addressing them and even their young ones. The effect of several cases of ill-treatment on blacks soon becomes part of Richard’s subconscious when he naively thought; P.19 the white folks have got the right to beat Black kids, thus thinking that the right black parents have is only the parental.

See more- https://niftyreview./2016/09/06/black-boy-by-richard-wright/