Richard Wright's Struggles with Racism Answers

Read the passage from Black Boy.“It’s not for me,” my mother was saying. “It’s for your children that I’m asking you for money.”“I ain’t got nothing,” my father said, laughing.“Come here, boy,” the strange woman called to me.I looked at her and did not move.“Give him a nickel,” the woman said. “He’s cute.”Wright most likely included this anecdote in order to

Read the excerpt from Black Boy.Again I was faced with choices I did not like, but I finally agreed. After all, my hate for my father was not so great and urgent as my hate for the orphan home. My mother held to her idea and one night a week or so later I found myself standing in a room in a frame house. My father and a strange woman were sitting before a bright fire that blazed in a grate. My mother and I were standing about six feet away, as though we were afraid to approach them any closer.Wright explains his difficult choice in this excerpt in order to show that he was

Read the excerpt from Black Boy.Then my father was called; he came forward jauntily, smiling. He tried to kiss my mother, but she turned away from him. I only heard one sentence of what he said.“I’m doing all I can, Your Honor,” he mumbled, grinning.It had been painful to sit and watch my mother crying and my father laughing and I was glad when we were outside in the sunny streets. Back at home my mother wept again and talked complainingly about the unfairness of the judge who had accepted my father’s word.What societal norm of the early twentieth century does this excerpt reflect?

Read the excerpt from Black Boy.We left. I had the feeling that I had had to do with something unclean. Many times in the years after that the image of my father and the strange woman, their faces lit by the dancing flames, would surge up in my imagination so vivid and strong that I felt I could reach out and touch it; I would stare at it, feeling that it possessed some vital meaning which always eluded me.Based on this excerpt, how did Wright feel about his final boyhood encounter with his father?

Which excerpt from Black Boy best demonstrates the idea that Wright’s family feels frustrated and trapped in their financial situation?

Read the excerpt from Black Boy.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.Which best describes Wright’s realization in this excerpt?

Read the passage from Black Boy.From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition. Joy was as unknown to him as was despair. As a creature of the earth, he endured, hearty, whole, seemingly indestructible, with no regrets and no hope. He asked easy, drawling questions about me, his other son, his wife, and he laughed, amused, when I informed him of their destinies. I forgave him, and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted wooden shack.What does this excerpt suggest?

Read the passage from Black Boy.I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality.Which best describes Wright’s attitude toward his father in this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Black Boy.A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands—a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality. Which best explains Wright’s assertion that he and his father “were forever strangers”?

Read the excerpt from Black Boy.From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition. Joy was as unknown to him as was despair. As a creature of the earth, he endured, hearty, whole, seemingly indestructible, with no regrets and no hope. He asked easy, drawling questions about me, his other son, his wife, and he laughed, amused, when I informed him of their destinies. I forgave him, and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted wooden shack.Based on this excerpt, which best describes how being a sharecropper impacts Wright’s father?