632
PARTISAN REVIEW
(Harper
&
Brothers assured him they would publish the Chicago section
later. In fact, it was not published in book form until 1977, seventeen years
after Wright's death.) Wright had great difficulty thinking up another title
he liked as much, but eventually he came up with
Black Boy.
Ed Aswell
took the precaution of asking the Book-of-the-Month judges whether they
approved. Then there was the question of the new ending. Dorothy Canfield
Fisher wrote several letters to Wright about this. Couldn't he, she asked him,
use the word "hope" to describe what he surely must have felt when he left
the South for the North?
Richard Wright, who once made the remark, "I am willing to die for
my country, but I refuse to be forced to lie for it," approached truth-telling
with In.issionary zeal. He used the word "hope" in his new ending, but not
in the way Canfield Fisher had in lnind. "In the main," he wrote, "my
hope was merely a kind of self-defense, a conviction that if I did not leave
I would perish."
Canfield Fisher asked Wright to explore the question: "What was it
that made me conscious of possibilities?" Wright's answer was books.
Canfield Fisher insisted: weren't they, at least partly,
American
books?
"Could it be," she wrote to him, "that even from inside the prison of injus–
tice, through the barred windows of that Bastille of racial oppression,
Richard Wright had caught a glimpse of the American flag?"
She hoped Wright would listen to "an elderly woman writing to a
young man" about a "troublingly delicate matter." Too embarrassed to
spell out clearly what she wanted from him, she told him that some white
Americans "have done what they could to lighten the dark stain of racial
discriln.ination in our nation."
To receive in the closing pages of your book, one word of recognition
for this aspiration, if it were possible for YOll to give sllch recognition
honestly, would hearten all who believe in American ideals. We would
never dream of asking it-we were told by our parents and have told
our children never to ask for it.
Wright could not bring himself to express gratitude to white
Americans. Nor did he share Dorothy Canfield Fisher's patriotic fervor. He
toyed with some sentences and sent the revised ending back to her. She
wrote again. "I gather than you cannot bring yourself to use, even once, the
word 'American' in speaking of 'the tinge of warmth which came from an
unseen light'." She finished: ''I'm dictating this letter in rather a hurry, try–
ing to catch the one mail out from our tiny village and may not be saying
