Wright's Response

Blog – Explain Wright’s response to his mother’s paralysis.

Wright's response to his mother's paralysis is a period of fear and self-realization. The experience was his introduction to the real world. When his mother fell ill, he first got a job at the roundhouse and then a café. Then they moved three times, and one morning his mother was paralyzed. And then his mother's family came to help support them. Wright became conscious of how much money they did not have, and he quit eating. Then he moved, with his mother, back to Granny's house, and at first his mother got better, but then she got worse. The biggest realization Wright came across was that he was helpless. He was helpless against the whites and fearful of the world without his mother, who was his sole protector against a society that hated him and his kind. Without his mother, a woman who played both a motherly and fatherly role to him, he realized that even though he was a young man, he was just a boy. Eventually, he adapts, and as we see when he fights the other classmates when he lives with his uncle, he understood how his race and his peers were going to judge him. But we also see that he is still very much afraid - he won't sleep in the bed that somebody had died in. Wright’s response to his mother’s paralysis is a period in which he tries (and needs) to grow up faster than normal, but his dependence on his mother causes him to not be able to.

Black Boy and Tension

I think that the main reason Wright felt it was in his cultural heritage to hate Jews was that they were more white than they were black. Jewish people were hated by both the whites and the blacks. The blacks hated them because most Jews have lighter skin while the whites hated them because they were different in culture and, although not as much as the blacks, they did have physical differences. Wright, however, cannot understand why his culture hates Jews, only that they do. In this way he is sort of brainwashed into hating Jews. Later on in life, though, he realized that Jews were just as hated by whites as blacks were.

Hungry Wright

Why is Wright really hungry?

Wright's hunger comes from his lack of understanding. He does not understand why whites are different. He does not understand why his mother has to struggle and his father is not around. He does not understand why he cannot do what he wants. He wants to understand, and this motivates him. In addition, the pain of being in an orphanage drives him further. In fact, he would so much rather talk to his father than be in the orphanage. The pain of the visit further makes him hungry because his father makes him mad. His harbored resentment for his father over the next quarter century will no doubt play a major role in determining how hungry he really is.