BOOKS
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- one might say generically - concludes with escape to the North. I
don't mean to say that Wright was familiar with the body of published
slave narratives. Indeed, I doubt that he could have been when he was
writing
Black Boy.
But he knew that this is the way the story was told,
and he had himself already worked a variation on it in "Big Boy Leaves
Home" from
Uncle Tom's Children.
Ralph Ellison made much the same response as Wright could have
made when asked if he had been consciously influenced by the form of
slave narratives in writing
Invisible Man:
he didn't need to read the slave
narratives, Ellison said, he knew how the story went. The story itself de–
mands this shape and will not adapt itself successfully to any other form
(as we can see, for example, in the case of Frederick Douglass, whose
Narrative oj the Life oj Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by
Himself
is both one of the earliest and the greatest of the slave narratives,
but whose
My Bondage and My Freedom
and, even more,
The Life and
Times oj Frederick DOl/glass
are merely diffuse, meandering, and relatively
pointless books).
It does not seem to me to make any difference that it was the read–
ers at the Book-of-the-Month Club who suggested that the book
should stop, though Wright's own story went on, when he left the
South. The structural point remains the same: both the
Bildungsroman
and the
KUnstlerroman
conclude when "Richard" departs Memphis for
Chicago. Moreover, I think there is evidence that Wright himself came
to agree that this was the proper structure when he decided, before ac–
ceptance by the Book-of-the-Month Club, that
Black Boy
and not
American HUl1ger
was the right title for the book.
Black Boy
is precisely
right for the Southern part of what was first submitted as
American
Hl/nger,
but it does not properly describe the latter part of the
manuscript. Furthermore, there is no contrary evidence that I am aware
of to suggest that Wright was ever unhappy with the book as published.
Of course there is nothing wrong with having available the new
text, but it should not replace what we have known until now as
Black
Boy.
It must be said, however, that there is nothing new here, for the
Chicago continuation of the story was published under the title
American Hunger
in 1977. The Library of America version essentially is no
more than the yoking together of those two disparate parts. What I
predict will happen, and in the nature of the case should happen, is that
Black Boy (American Hunger)
will become what the series title suggests,
truly a "library" edition, to remain for consultation on library shelves,
while we go on reading and teaching that greater achievement that is
