Black Boy Summary

At the tender age of four, a quiet and bored young boy accidentally sets his family home aflame in Natchez, Mississippi. Rescued from under the burning house by his father, Nathan, the boy is harshly punished by his mother, Ella, to the point of unconsciousness and illness. Soon after this incident, Nathan abandons the family for another woman, leaving Ella to grapple with raising their sons in poverty and persistent hunger. Their situation worsens as Ella's health declines, leaving the boy, Richard, to take on any odd jobs he could to support the family despite his tender age.

Life briefly improves for the family when they move to Arkansas to live with Ella's sister, Maggie, and her husband, Hoskins, who runs a prosperous saloon. However, racial tensions rise, leading to Hoskins's murder and the family's flight to West Helena. When Maggie escapes to Detroit with her lover, the responsibility of caring for the family falls solely on Ella again. The family's situation worsens when Ella suffers a serious stroke, leading Richard's grandmother to take the family in. Richard finds himself in a strict religious household that shuns his love for reading and writing, leading to constant friction. When his defiance earns him regular beatings from his aunt Addie, he learns to defend himself using a knife.

As Richard grows older, he excels in school despite his challenging home life and frequently clashes with the deeply entrenched racism he encounters upon entering the adult working world. After enduring a particularly demoralizing incident at an optical shop, Richard decides to move to the North, stealing and swindling to raise the money for his journey. In Memphis, he finds a generous landlady and a job in another optical shop, where he faces mind games from a seemingly benevolent coworker aimed at inciting violence between him and another black coworker. Determined to write, Richard reads obsessively with the help of a kindly coworker who lends him his library card. His family joins him in Memphis and they plan to move to Chicago, where Richard continues to grapple with poverty, racism, and his own moral compromises. Drawn to communism and its promise to protect the oppressed, Richard joins the party, but soon becomes disillusioned by its inner politics and leaves, vowing to continue to write as his link to the world.