The Right to the Streets of Memphis

The right to the Streets of Memphis

”The Right to the Streets of Memphis” is an excerpt from Richard Wright’s autobiography ”Black Boy” from 1945.

The story is about a boy, his mother and his younger brother. The event is taking place around the 1914’s in the streets of Memphis, and they live in a flat. That is basically everything we’re told about the setting. His dad has left them a while ago so now they have nothing to eat.

It has always been his father who is making the money and bringing food on the table. So for the first time it accurse to him that when his father is gone, there is no food. This makes him angry and now, when he’s hungry he thinks about his father with bitterness. Which basically means all the time. He remembers the hunger he had known before his dad left. And it was a normal hunger, where it didn’t take much food to make him satisfied again. But this hunger was different. It made him lazy and hostile.

His mom finally gets a job as a cook and makes a little money. She wants him to take the responsibility for buying all the food now, so that he learns to take care of himself. And he’s only 6 years old. But when he goes to the grocery shop, a gang of boys grabs him and knocks him down, steals his money and basket and run away with it.

The same thing happens again but his mom just keep forcing him to try again and again.

 “What’s the matter?” my mom asked.

“It’s those same boys,” I said. “They’ll beat me.”

“You’ve got to get over that,” she said. “Now, go on.”  Pp. 2 l.70-72

He fails a couple of times, but at last he manage to overcome his fear and he beats up the gang once for all and wins the right to the streets of Memphis.

His mother is a strong woman. She lived in a time when it was the men who made all the money and the wives just took care of the children, cooking and cleaning.

“Where is your father?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Who brings food into the house?” my mother asked me.

“Papa,” I said. “He always brought food”. Pp. 1 l.33-40

She’s obviously very stressed out, mostly because she can’t feed her children, and because she has no job or education. And when she does get a cooking job she’s still afraid what’s going to happen with her kids and that’s probably why she is so hard on her oldest son. She needs to know that he learns to take care of himself and his brother, if she’s not able to.

Of course she also misses her husband, and she probably feels lonely not being able to talk to anyone about it, because she thinks the kids are too young to understand it.