“But for a long time I was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me.”

A formative memory for Wright’s is of setting the house on fire, hiding under the burning house out of fear, and then his mother delivering such a brutal beating to him that he blacked out. Wright’s decision to open the work with this story sets the tone and theme of the suffering Wright experiences at the hands of even his closest relatives.

“In the immediate neighborhood there were many school children who, in the afternoons, would stop and play en route to their homes; they would leave their books upon the sidewalk and I would thumb through the pages and question them about the baffling black print. When I had learned to recognize certain words, I told my mother that I wanted to learn to read and she encouraged me. Soon I was able to pick my way through most of the children’s books I ran across. There grew in me a consuming curiosity about what was happening around me and, when my mother came home from a hard day’s work, I would question her so relentlessly about what I had heard in the streets that she refused to talk to me.”

Wright has little formal, continuous education for most of his early life, but this passage shows that even without early education, Wright manages to secure his literacy using what he could pick up on the streets and through incessant questioning of adults. The focus on early literacy is a frequent theme of Black autobiography, especially literacy achieved outside of formal education contexts.

“I forgave him and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted wooden shack. From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed-of shores of knowing.”

Wright’s alienation from the rural South and his family is encapsulated in this passage. The reference to his father as a “black peasant” shows the influence of Marxist class analysis and naturalism on his understanding of the painful content of his life. By labeling his father as a part of an underclass and as a product of his environment on the former plantation, Wright is able to apply an objective lens that allows him to see his father sympathetically.