The horror and the glory

My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie. Flashes of steam showed intermittently on the wide horizon, gleaming translucently in the winter sun.

The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come. The year was 1927.

   

What would happen to me here? Would I survive? My expectations were modest. I wanted only a job. Hunger had long been my daily companion. Diversion and recreation, with the exception of reading, were unknown.

In all my life—though surrounded by many people—I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with “another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others.

The train rolled into the depot. Aunt Maggie and I got off and walked slowly through the crowds into the station. I looked about to see if there were signs saying: FOR WHITE—FOR COLORED.

I saw none. Black people and white people moved about, each seemingly intent upon his private mission. There was no racial fear. Indeed, each “person acted as though no one existed but himself. It was strange to pause before a crowded newsstand and buy a newspaper without having to wait until a white man was served.

And yet, because everything was so new, I began to grow tense again, although it was a different sort of tension than I had known before. I knew that this machine-city was governed by strange laws and I wondered if I would ever learn them.

As we waited for a streetcar to take us to Aunt Cleo’s home for temporary lodging, I looked northward at towering buildings of steel and stone. There were no curves here, no trees; only angles, lines, squares, bricks and copper wires. Occasionally the ground beneath my feet shook from some faraway pounding and I felt that this world, despite its massiveness, was somehow dangerously fragile. Streetcars “screeched past over steel tracks.

Cars honked their horns. Clipped speech sounded about me. As I stood in the icy wind, I wanted to talk to Aunt Maggie, to ask her questions, but her tight face made me hold my tongue.

I was learning already from the frantic light in her eyes the strain that the city imposed upon its people.

I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.

The streetcar came. Aunt Maggie motioned for me to get on and pushed me toward a seat in which a white man sat looking blankly out the window. I sat down beside the man and looked straight ahead of me.

After a moment I stole a glance at the white man out of the “corners of my eyes; he was still staring out the window, his mind fastened upon some inward thought.

I did not exist for him; I was as far from his mind as the stone buildings that swept past in the street. It would have been illegal for me to sit beside him in the part of the South that I had come from.

The car swept past soot-blackened buildings, stopping at each block,jerking again into motion. The conductor called street names in a tone that Icould not understand. People got on and off the car, but they never glanced atone another. Each person seemed to regard the other as a part of the citylandscape. The white man who sat beside me rose and I turned my knees aside tolet him pass, and another white man sat beside me and buried his face in anewspaper. How could that possibly be? Was he conscious of my blackness?

Excerpt From: Richard Wright. “Black Boy.”

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