drmstream[writing]

I would hurl words into this dark­ness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no mat­ter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to cre­ate a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

Imag­ine you’d been given a voice that you couldn’t con­trol, that chan­neled a clear vision of the here and now, that struck one note again and again with confidence.

What would your life be like?

In Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote a book that told an intensely per­sonal story that con­nected with a pas­sion­ate moment of moral ref­er­en­dum for a cul­ture. What does it mean to be a black boy? Not in the abstract, but in the real seething minute-by-minute experience.

When I read the book as a white boy, a teenager on the north­east coast, I was breath­less. The inten­sity drew me, the alien­ation spoke to me, but even in my ado­les­cent fog I was con­scious enough to know that I had an escape, that I wasn’t cap­tured by the color of my skin, that I could learn how to hide my otherness.

Wright never had that choice.

There’s a web site called Find-a-Grave where peo­ple leave memo­r­ial com­ments to the dead. Richard Wright, who died 50 years ago, has a cou­ple of pages of heart­felt com­ments. That’s a pow­er­ful legacy.

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