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Richard Wright Moving north to Chicago, away from the segregation of the South

Richard now struggles to survive on his own, refusing to follow in the footsteps of others by becoming a slave, subservient, or complacent to southern attitudes. Rather, he tries to flee to the North to escape the prejudices of the South and discover for himself a new world beyond. His transfer to the North, by train, was thus the beginning of a new life for him.

In doing so, Richard fled, along with masses of other blacks, the racism, poverty, and lynching laws of the rural South, bound for Chicago, hoping to find a better life there. His aunt Maggie, who had come to visit, accompanied Richard on the train ride to Chicago while his mother and brother returned to Jackson.

Upon first arriving in Chicago, Richard is shocked by city life and its new social codes. In the tram, he observed in surprise a white man sitting next to him without caring about his color.

Richard is finally relieved of the brutal atmosphere created by the South. To the North it seemed like one that represented opportunity and freedom for him. Wright sees interesting juxtapositions between the events in Chicago and the events of his childhood in the South. In Chicago, Richard must learn to adjust to a new environment, where “color hatred” is less prominent and racial lines no longer control him.

Richard soon finds Chicago uplifting and less racially oppressive. Richard is finally able to see cases where people aren’t blinded by race. But he is presented with other problems. Richard must learn that prejudices are easily adopted. He is subject to mistreatment due to his upbringing, his intellect, his socioeconomic background, as well as his political stance.

Richard soon finds a job as a porter at a deli owned by a Jewish couple: Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman. Richard, attuned to the conditions of life in the South, cannot play it cool with the Hoffmans, as he continues to lie to them. He still feels that he must abide by the southern social rules that apply to blacks. He lies to cover up his own insecurity. Because he is incapable of understanding any social interaction with whites beyond the brutal and hateful relationships he has witnessed in the South.

After working there for a short time, Richard learns of an opening for a postal worker that required him to take an exam the following Monday. Unsure how to approach his bosses to ask for a day off, he simply skips a day and lies to them on his return that his mother had died in Memphis.

After a week, Richard gets a job as a dishwasher at a North Side cafe that has just opened. There, he often accidentally bumps into white girls who sometimes even ask him to tie their aprons. He thus realizes that they are free of racial consciousness.

Richard then works as a postal clerk and meets an Irishman who he can relate to. He eventually enters a literary circle with connections to the Communist Party. Richard thus joins the John Reed Club, a communist organization for the arts, hoping to learn to write and publish.

Even in Chicago, Richard’s actions are conditioned by the social lessons he has learned in the South. after reading a magazine american mercury, the boss enters the kitchen and asks him where he found it and if he understood it. Richard lies saying that she “found” it instead of saying that she bought it. From then on, he keeps his books and magazines wrapped in newspapers so that no one questions him.

Passing by the kitchen stove in the cafe one day, Richard notices that Tillie, the Finnish cook, spat into a pot of boiling soup. Afraid that her boss won’t believe him if he reports her, he instead tells another black girl who works at the cafe. At first, the girl couldn’t believe, but she herself spies on the cook to verify her report. Having verified it, they both now fear that the boss will not believe them. Upon being informed, at first, the boss tells the girl that she is crazy. But after she spies on Tillie, who proceeds to spit in her food once more, he sends her away.

In June, Richard is called up for a temporary job at the post office as a postal clerk, at the time the only place where educated blacks could find work. But securing a standing appointment requires you to pass a physical where the weight requirement is 125 pounds. So Richard strove to increase his weight by any means available. But no matter how much he eats, he can’t gain weight. Richard is forced to find another job. Meanwhile, his mother and his brother have gone to live in Aunt Maggie’s apartment. Aunt Maggie constantly criticizes Richard’s reading and studying, and after she loses his postal job, she considers him a failure. So Richard decides to invite his aunt Cleo to share an apartment with him, his mother and his brother. At night, he reads books and tries to satisfy his hunger for a lot of information about his life and the lives around him.

Richard is finally able to get a permanent night job as a postal worker after forcing himself to eat. The resulting pay increase allowed them to move to a bigger apartment and start buying better groceries. Having moved into four rooms on Vincennes Avenue, he could now read and write regularly in relative comfort. Although he doesn’t like the bureaucracy of the post office, he befriends many co-workers, both white and black, some of his schoolmates from the South.

During the day, she attends meetings of local black literary groups, experiments with stream-of-consciousness writing, and attempts to understand the “many modes of black behavior” through her writing. He also befriends a young Irish man with whom she has a lot in common, both sharing each other’s cynicism and beliefs.

Richard also begins to examine various black groups. This includes a black literary group on Chicago’s South Side that he finds almost bohemian and too sex-absorbed for comfort. Richard therefore feels distant from members of his middle class. Richard also meets a group called the “Garveyites”, an organization of black men and women seeking to return to Africa. He notes her passionate “rejection of America,” an emotion he shares. But despite their similar emotional dynamics, Richard sympathizes with them for his inability to realize that Africa isn’t really his home. He sees the Garveyites as naive for not realizing that Africa is under European imperialism and that they have already become too fused with the West to return to their native Africa. So he didn’t join him.

Meanwhile, Richard begins to find out about the activities of the Communist Party, but he also pays no attention to it. When the stock crash of 1929 occurs and mail volumes drop, his work hours decrease. His salary also decreases with no open positions for a regular employee. He eventually loses his job at the post office, but he is rehired the following summer for a temporary job. The Southside sinks into economic depression.

Aunt Cleo suffers from a heart condition, her mother falls ill, and her brother develops stomach ulcers. A distant cousin offers Richard a job selling insurance, which he accepts. During the year, Richard works for burial and insurance companies that serve blacks. His work allows him, for the first time, to explore black life in Chicago. But Richard seems to be constantly put off by the black culture that exists around him. He sells insurance policies to poor illiterate black families, men and women. Like the families on the plantations of the South, the people he meets in Chicago seem simple to him. Women who can’t make regular insurance payments could easily negotiate their way out of him by giving him sexual favors. Through it, Richard has a long affair with a young woman obsessed with watching the circus. She is portrayed as childish and almost stupid, for the only relationships she seemed capable of maintaining were sexual ones, and as Richard observes, her intelligence is simple and limited. Insurance agents not only viewed women as property, but also ripped them off by changing the deeds to the policies. Wright writes: “She was in and out of many black homes every day and knew that blacks were lost, ignorant, sick in mind and body.”

Richard now reads books recommended by a friend William Harper (who will later own a bookstore on the South Side). Among the numerous writers, Dreiser and Joseph Conrad particularly impress Wright and encourage him to continue writing. Richard Wright’s short story “Superstition” is published in April Abbott Monthly Magazinea black journal

After collecting his bonuses for the afternoon, Richard visits Washington Park, where many unemployed blacks gather to listen to communist speakers. He is puzzled and angered by the black communist movement, and realizes that his speech and gestures are apparently trying to copy the white communists. Richard criticizes the fact that the speakers adopt the styles of black preachers and tend to over-dramatize the militancy of the masses. Wright questions the understanding of communists, as well as the abilities of black men and women to solve their social problems.

Serving as an assistant to a black Republican precinct captain during the mayoral election on Election Day, Richard stands in the polling booth and realizes the corruption of the entire political process. Right there, on the front of his bundle, he writes: “I protest this fraud.”

Meanwhile, the depression has worsened and Richard is forced to move his family into a small, dingy rented apartment. There, one morning, his mother tells him that there is no food for breakfast and that he must go to the Cook County Office of Public Welfare to ask for bread.

Richard begins to assess his social isolation. His isolation follows him into adulthood; just as he did not find camaraderie among other black children as a child, Richard cannot fit into any black political or social group. Throughout black boy, Wright questions whether the black community is educated and strong enough to unify and overcome racial barriers and oppression. Here he conveys a tone of disappointment because he doubts that the majority of the black community possess sufficient knowledge about their social situation. To him, the Garveyites are naive in their desire to return to Africa. To him, black literary groups are dispassionate and twisted, and even immature. But when Wright writes that he “saw the potential strength of the American Negro,” he shows that he has not yet given up all hope.

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