(parenthesis)

Blog – Even more so than in Part I, Wright the author – not Wright the person in the text – is speaking to us through these passages in parenthesis. Pick such a passage from this chapter and comment.

On page 265, Wright writes, "(It was not until I had left the delicatessen job that I saw how grossly I had misread the motives and attitudes of Mr. Hoffman and his wife. I had not yet learned anything that would have helped me to thread my way through these perplexing racial relations. Accepting my environment at its face value, trapped by my own emotions, I kept asking myself what had black people done to bring this crazy world upon them?

In this passage, Wright offers a reflection upon his first job in Chicago. He shares that he did not trust the Hoffmans, a fact that seems to burden yet reason with him. As he points out in this passage, and many others, he did not know who to trust. He was fresh out of Memphis, where no black man would ever trust a white person. Wright barely even trusted any blacks in Memphis. So it is not surprising that even though he hoped Chicago would free him from the racial tensions of the south, he was overly cautious. At the end of this passage he poses a rhetorical question that not only applies to the specific scenario of his mistrust, but to the whole book and his life. In the book, Wright is a character who cannot get past his own questions about unfairness. One would assume that this is not unlike the author Wright. This question further shows his unsettled, unique disturbance at racial injustice. His disturbance is not rare, for it was no doubt felt by many other blacks, and even some whites, but it is unique because he does not accept it, eve though most blacks did. One can tell that the author Wright, sometime in the future, still has not accepted it.